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  • Trio A in Europe
  • Ramsay Burt (bio)

Since the mid-1990s European dancers and audiences have played a significant role in the revival of interest in Yvonne Rainer's dance work. Two key examples of this are the restaging of Rainer's Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD) in 1996 by the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust and the more recent creation and trial of the Labanotation score of Trio A in London. In her reminiscences printed above, Pat Catterson suggests that Trio A's "relaxed natural quality, equality of parts, its tame simplicity, and durational patience may be out of synch with today's Zeitgeist." During Charles Atlas's documentary, Rainer Variations, Rainer herself suggests today's audiences would no longer be prepared to sit through the long slow works she made during the Judson period. If this is currently the case with audiences in the United States, it is not so on the other side of the Atlantic.

European audiences for innovative dance and live art seem prepared to take the time to experience and appreciate slow, demanding, experimental work. European choreographers and dance artists who have been interested in Trio A often have a keen and sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, interest in dance history. Artists I have spoken to suggest this interest helps them build on what has already been done and makes them aware of a broader range of creative possibilities. Some say they find it useful to discover dance artists in the past who were working in ways that are similar to their own practices. For example, Xavier Le Roy, who took part in the 1996 restaging of Rainer's CP-AD, performed the "chair pillow" section from it during his 1999 performative lecture Product of Circumstances. His discovery of ordinary, task-based, and pedestrian movement in Rainer's work affirmed his own research into similar kinds of movement. He subsequently created a duet with Rainer in Berlin in 1999, and he quotes on his Web site an email from her about his 1998 piece Self Unfinished. Rainer wrote: "The brightly lit performing area gives no clues to 'how to read' and the mechanical-man beginning is offset with a return to ordinary task-like activity: walk, sit, turn off tape machine. By [End Page 25] the time you're into the contortions with the dress, we're given this extraordinary hybrid creature, which confronts us with a multiplicity of interpretations."1 I quote this at length because it exemplifies the way recent European work has sought to expand, in a democratically inclusive way, its audiences' ideas about the range of activities that can be considered dance. This, I suggest, is what artists like Le Roy value in historical works like Trio A.


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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.

I myself once tried to learn the first few phrases of Trio A when Douglas Dunn taught a workshop on it for my students. I recognize what Rainer herself states above about how demanding and difficult the piece is to dance. For me this was, in part, because I found it particularly difficult to grasp the way one movement follows another—or rather, doesn't logically seem to follow it. But, nevertheless, it is a work that can be danced by anyone with the determination to do so, regardless of their level of technical competence as a dancer. I recently showed my students the filmed version of Trio A in the 1979 PBS documentary Beyond the Mainstream, which alternates between footage of Rainer herself dancing it (from Sally Banes's 1978 film) and performances by Bart Cook, Frank Conversano, and Sarah Rudner. Asked what they thought of the differences in interpretation [End Page 26] between these four dancers, none of my students felt any one version was "better" than any other. Rainer, they felt, danced it like she knew it was hers. They suggested that Bart Cook, who was at the time a member of New York City Ballet, used the shapes of his balletically molded arms and legs to...

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