Trio A Canonical

Despite Yvonne Rainer's subversive refusal to stage Trio A as a spectacle, to have it represent or narrate social structures, or to engage with the audience in a traditional manner, the landmarks of canonization have all been put upon it. The Banes-produced 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A was recently exhibited while the dance was performed live simultaneously by Pat Catterson, Jimmy Robert, and Ian White at the Museum of Modern Art, the institution that determines what constitutes important modernist and contemporary art in the United States and, indeed, the Western world. In conjunction with Rainer's famous NO Manifesto, Trio A appears in nearly every publication on so-called postmodern dance and art. Moreover, the key documentary on postmodern dance Beyond the Mainstream—containing Trio A—is screened in most dance history courses when postmodern dance is discussed. As a result, the choreography became not only a staple on syllabi in dance departments but also in disciplines such as gender studies, film and art history, or communications. Even Susan Au's Ballet and Modern Dance, a conservative historical text utilized in many dance history classes, defines Trio A as "one of the most influential works in the modern dance repertoire" (Au 2002, 155).

Having watched and taught about the dance many times, I always ask myself, How could a choreography that questioned everything about dance that preceded it still find its way into the Western dance canon? And more importantly, does this incorporation dilute Trio A's subversive potential? In the following article, I want to think about Trio A's problematic relationship to the dance canon and its unbroken political function.

Sally Banes ensured through her groundbreaking scholarship on—as she called it after Rainer's self-labeling—postmodern dance that Trio A and related works by members of the Judson Dance Theater were established as an important part of U.S. (if not world) dance history (Banes 1987). Although her theoretical analysis of these dances

Figure 1.

Pat Catterson performing Trio A at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2009. © 2009 Yi-Chun Wu/ The Museum of Modern Art.

has been repeatedly criticized, Banes did succeed in incorporating postmodern dance into the dance curriculum and the dance canon (Banes 1987). The canon has typically been applied to literary work, but all forms of artistic production are structured in relation to a canon of influential works that are legitimized foremost through educational institutions but also through galleries, theaters, and museums. Even though it has been repeatedly argued, canons are not based only on aesthetic merits, nor are they divorced from political structures (Bloom 1987, 1994). John Guillory assures us that "canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission, its relation to other works in a collocation of works—the syllabus in its institutional locus, the school" (Guillory 1993, 55). Whereas Guillory sees such institutional dissemination as contingent on various forms of value of the canonical work, or what he calls "cultural capital,"¹ other scholars define the canon decisively as an important tool of domination and a vehicle for the establishing of national cultures and, therefore, national identities. For instance, Lisa Lowe clarifies that impact on the formation of and representation in the canon are not available to everyone equally (Lowe 1996). Identity components—such as gender, race, class, and sexuality—are important influences on the exclusion from recognized canons, which are not only established through traditional standards of the Anglo-European canon but also through subject matter and form. Citing David Lloyd's utopian argument on the death of the canonical distinction between major and minor works with the emergence of minority writing, Lowe states: "the Anglo-European function of canonization is to unify aesthetic cultures as a domain in which material stratifications and differences are reconciled" (Lowe 1996, 43). Major artistic works established in the canon uphold such reconciliation through a universalizing gesture either in the content or the form, whereas noncanonical works can conform to this gesture or challenge the universalizing stance.

Not having been...