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  • Trio A:Genealogy, Documentation, Notation
  • Yvonne Rainer (bio)

I worked on Trio A alone for six months in 1965. The dance initially consisted of a five-minute sequence of movement that would eventually be presented as The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I at Judson Church (on January 10, 1966). There it was performed by me, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton simultaneously but not in unison. An interim version of an extended, but not complete, The Mind Is a Muscle (Judson Church, May 22, 1966) was performed by William Davis, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton. In the final section of this version, called "Lecture," Peter Saul executed a balletic solo version—that is, with pirouettes and jumps. In the final version (Anderson Theater, April 11, 1968) Trio A was performed by me in tap shoes (without balletic furbelows) at the end of the evening while Paxton, Gordon, and Davis performed it as a trio at the beginning.

The individual sequences last from four and a half to five minutes, depending on each performer's physical inclination. Two primary characteristics of the dance are its uninflected continuity and its imperative involving the gaze. The eyes are always averted from direct confrontation with the audience via independent movement of the head, closure of the eyes, or simple casting down of the gaze.

Since its completion Trio A has undergone many incarnations. In 1967 I performed it solo as Convalescent Dance (Angry Arts Week, Hunter Playhouse); in 1968 Frances Brooks, the first of many untrained dancers who have learned it, performed it during a lecture-demonstration at the New City Library of Performing Arts; in 1969 it was performed [End Page 12] by a half-dozen dancers to the Chambers Brothers' "In the Midnight Hour" on the stage of the Billy Rose Theatre in New York. At the Connecticut College American Dance Festival of 1969, fifty students who had been taught Trio A by members of the group with whom I was in residence there (Becky Arnold, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, and David Gordon), performed it in relay fashion for over an hour in a large studio for an audience that was free to roam to other events in the same building.


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Figure 1.

Pat Catterson performing Trio A at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 20009. © 2009 Yi-Chun Wu/The Museum of Modern Art.

In 1970 I and some members of the fledgling Grand Union—Lincoln Scott, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Nancy Green, and Barbara Dilley—performed it in the nude at Judson Church with five-foot American flags tied around our necks during the opening of the People's Flag Show. The show was organized by Jon Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, and Jean Toche as a protest against the arrest of various people accused of "desecrating" the American flag, including gallery owner Stephen Radich, who had shown the "flag-defiling" work of sculptor Mark Morrel in 1967; Radich's case traveled all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was thrown out on a technicality.

Around 1970 artist Michael Fajans, who had learned Trio A from Barbara Dilley, taught it to fifty students at Antioch College, who performed it on a large stage to "In the Midnight Hour." In 1971 those members of the Grand Union who knew Trio A performed the nude/ flag version at New York University's Loeb Student Center during the last throes of my [End Page 13] Continuous Project/Altered Daily (the dance that, begun in 1969, gradually "atomized" into improvisatory programs by the collective Grand Union). It was here that Pat Catterson, who had learned Trio A from Becky Arnold and Barbara Dilley, joined us, performing it in reverse. Shortly thereafter she again performed it in reverse (now fully clothed) during her own evening of work at Merce Cunningham's studio; and later that year she and a group of her students performed it on the sidewalk outside my hospital window.

In 1972 Steve Paxton performed Trio A for one hour at L'Attico Gallery in Rome. In 1973 I incorporated it into the narrative of my multimedia work "This is the story of a...

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