Yvonne Rainer’s intricate, pedestrian choreographies all pose a similar question, one that was keenly in evidence at her recent Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) performance: after the curtain’s down, before the rehearsal starts, at the very edge of the canvas, how do we make our decisions about how to move? The title of the work, The Concept of Dust: How to Look When There’s Nothing Left to Move, adapts Ad Reinhardt’s dictum but substitutes “move” for “see.” As she explained to art critic Douglas Crimp in the question and answer session, “What do you do when you aren’t dancing? Obviously, you can’t do nothing, since people are watching you.”
Perched on a director’s chair to stage right as the performance began, Rainer intoned a wide-ranging monologue from a print-out in hand, covering fossils from the last major warming, the breakfast of a Nazi officer, and museum labels describing Islamic history; all these banal phrases she’s derived sensitive secrets from. This pastiche of passages reflected the structure of the performance: though each of the movements were set, the grammar and flow between the elements was determined by the dancers’ improvisation.
The steps impressed: a bevy of Jackson-style hip snaps, frantic scampers, and hydraulic leaps conveyed them from corner to corner. My body felt bound to respond, and even mirror the dancers from my seat. The five dancers, each of whom she’s worked closely with before, all shone with Rainer: together with Pat Catterson’s sensitive, almost frail, leadership, Patricia Hoffbauer’s directness and David Thomson’s structured steps were moving. Keith Sabado’s tired elegance and Emmanuele Phuon’s sway complemented each other. None of the bodies were fresh out of the academy, like Rainer herself. At one point, a dancer even intoned, “I can’t do a hitch kick—not anymore.”
This performance—which has been seen on the West Coast before—included as a seventh dancer Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, which was gradually wheeled from left to right in the background, as if a moon . A queer painting, where the woman seems to float right off the surface, The Concept of Dust incorporated pillows as props, as dancers caught each other in elegant, slow falls. Sleep—pace Tilda Swinton’s ambitions—is the most minimal performance, since it’s an action without a decision.
How, then, to decide? As Rainer puts it, “The shock of the new is… an everpresent political charge if you are a teacher, a student, a baby or peculiarly receptive to opportunities for derangement.” The erotic and fraught relationship of the teacher and the student informs the entire setpiece: not only would Rainer invite dancers to read and then correct their pronunciation, she also settled on all fours to carry dancers around on her back. The uneasy charge of the lion’s gaze on the sleeping dancer seemed to resonate not only with viewers, but also with her pupils.
The virtuosity on view inspired a gossipy neighbor in the bleachers to whisper: “You know the “No Manifesto” that she published in the sixties, where she wrote, ‘No to spectacle. No to virtuosity?’ I heard she’s back-tracked on it a bit.”
