Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (review)

Attracting impressive awards (2009 de la Torre Bueno Book Prize and Honorable Mention, Music and the Performing Arts category, 2008 PROSE Awards) and with glowing responses from the likes of Peggy Phelan, one wonders what more there is to add in a review of Carrie Lambert-Beatty's Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. The book is the first monograph to critically engage with Rainer's early body of work, and the author does an excellent job of synthesizing critical discourse on Rainer to date and setting out a new thesis that is clearly and persuasively argued.

I have engaged with Lambert-Beatty's earlier work on Rainer in my writing on dance and film because her thinking added much to considerations of the impact of Rainer's work and ideas on the development of cine-choreographies. Since then there has been a flurry of new publications on Rainer, including her own autobiography. ¹ While there is no doubting the need for critical debate around Rainer's role in the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, and the temporal distance seems about right for objective reflection, the question "why now" may be worthwhile asking. With a strong thread of interview-based articles on Rainer going back to the 1970s, Rainer has perhaps been seen as speaking for her own choreographic work with sufficient critical acuity. She was, after all, the most prolific writer within the group of practitioners surrounding the Judson Dance Theater, producing several documents that have come to "speak for" that period in dance history. ²

Lambert-Beatty's success—and Being Watched is clearly an excellent addition to the field of work on this period in dance and art history—is in deftly articulating those aspects of Rainer's aesthetics and ideas that point to her currency in the early twenty-first century, some of which preempt central preoccupations of the most recent creative practice and associated critical theory. Firstly, there is Rainer's identification of the resistance of dance to perception "as an artistic problem" (1) both in terms of form/content and traditional understandings of spectatorship. The book is an extended analysis of how this central enquiry plays out in Rainer's work. Accounting for Rainer's approach to this "problem" through both her writing and her early choreographies and films, Lambert-Beatty's book demonstrates how Rainer's analytical, reflective, and deeply articulate approach in the 1960s is a clear precursor to the recent "conceptual" choreographic work that André Lepecki describes as "any dance that probes and complicates how it comes into presence, and where it establishes its ground of being" (2006, 5). Lepecki is referring here to work of the last fifteen years or so that he believes "deploy[s]" theoretical concepts associated with contemporary deconstructionist and poststructuralist philosophy and their revision of our understanding of both "presence" and "the body." While Lepecki describes a more-or-less one-way flow from philosophy to dance practice, Lambert-Beatty's book recuperates Rainer as an artist who preempted, and possibly informed, philosophies and creative practices emerging around the same time as her choreographic research and performance. This helps establish Rainer's position as the precursor of a new breed of experimental dance artists, including Xavier Le Roy and Jérôme Bel. Rainer's interest in "the gaze" has already prompted suggestions (Phelan 1999, 8-10) that her performance work anticipated the feminist critique within film studies catalyzed by Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), so, in a way, Lambert-Beatty brings dance studies up to date in this regard.

But philosophy or theory per se does not drive this book; performance does. Lambert-Beatty's second major point is that, while Rainer's contributions to the refiguring of the dancing body were monumental, this project was not primarily about the development of a radical new movement vocabulary (this would be played out in the work of her close associates...