Yvonne Rainer: Feelings Are Facts: A Life (2006)

“In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer’s one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America.

Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances—including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan—and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
Writing Art series
ISBN 9780262182515, 0262182513
xvi+473 pages

Reviews: John Rockwell (NYT, 2006), Ian White (Afterall, 2007), Daniel Ross (Screening the Past, 2007), Deborah Jowitt (Dance Research, 2008).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (62 MB, no OCR)

Footnotes: Six Choreographers Inscribe the Page (1998)

“This collection of essays aims to present a translation from the medium of chroeography to written text. They investigate the possibilities of the written language as invention, and use text as a means to illustrate specific tenets or describe choreographic projects.”

Essays by Douglas Dunn, Marjorie Gamso, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Kenneth King, Yvonne Meier, and Sarah Skaggs.

Text and commentary by Elena Alexander
Foreword by Jill Johnston
Publisher G+B Arts International, Amsterdam, 1998
Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture series
ISBN 9057010429, 9789057010422
xiii+169 pages

WorldCat

PDF

Scores (2010–)

“With its own publication – Scores – the Tanzquartier Wien is continuing its artistic-theoretical program in another, independent medium. Scores takes artistic research one step further and opens a performative space within the discursive one – in order to facilitate the sustainability of the discourse practised in the house and to serve as an invitation to dialogue.”

Editors (Issue 4): Arno Böhler, Walter Heun, Krassimira Kruschkova, Lejla Mehanović, Sandra Noeth
Publisher Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna
Open access

Publisher

Issue 0, The Skin of Movement: PDF, PDF (2010)
Issue 1, Touché: PDF, PDF (2011)
Issue 2, What Escapes: PDF, PDF (2012)
Issue 3, Uneasy Going: PDF, PDF (2013)
Issue 4, On Addressing: PDF, PDF (2014)
Issue 5, Intact Bodies / Under Protest: PDF, PDF (2016, added on 2017-3-22)
Issue 6, No/Things: PDF, PDF (2017, added on 2017-3-22)