Adam Pendleton’s Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer is the third in a series of video portraits, following My Education: A Portrait of David Hilliard, the former chief of staff for the Black Panthers, and Lorraine O'Grady: A Portrait.
Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer chronicles the defiant, uncompromising, and highly influential ideas of postmodern choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Over the course of her career, she revolutionized modern dance, generated what later became known as performance art, and changed the basic tenets of experimental filmmaking - all during a time when women were largely ignored in the art world. Today she continues to push forward, creating vibrant, courageous, unpredictable work, inspiring a new generation of artists to question, overthrow, and generate possibilities of their own. Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer is the story of this remarkable artist and the equally remarkable times that shaped her creative practice.
Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.
Salomania reconstructs a dance: the ‘dance of the seven veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé. Also shown and rehearsed are sections from ‘Valda’s Solo,’ which the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer created after having seen Nazimova’s film.
"For me Rainer Variations is a hybrid: a weave of impressionistic portrait, found footage construction, and video sampler. Aside from formal issues, Yvonne Rainer’s knotty process of thinking, her unique brand of humor, and her engaging presence are the things that were foremost in my mind as I worked on the tape. What I hope will emerge from this process is an interrogative portrait of an artist for whom I have great respect and affection." --Charles Atlas
Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 Rainer presented her choreography throughout the U.S. and Europe. In 2000 and 2001 Rainer returned to dance via commissions from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation to choreograph work for the White Oak Dance Project, including a 35-minute piece called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Since 1972, Rainer has completed seven feature-length films, beginning with Lives of Performers (1972) and more recently The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990-95), and a Wexner Prize (1995), as well as four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees. Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73 was published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press in 1974; The Films of Yvonne Rainer, a collection of her film scripts, was published by Indiana University Press in 1989; and A Woman Who...: Essays, Interviews, Scripts was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999. Rainer's latest choreographic work, based on Balanchine's AGON, was presented at Dance Theater Workshop, April 2006, subsequently traveling to the Getty Museum. A memoir, Feelings are Facts: A Life, was published by MIT Press in 2006.
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