Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:00:29.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Minimalist” Dance, Social Critique: Revisiting Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 Word Words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2018

Meredith Morse
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this essay, I reexamine Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 dance Word Words, arguing that this apparently “minimalist” work in fact deployed “underground” strategies, those of female (and male) impersonation. Camp performance, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were not possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A. Word Words did not simply “overwrite” Rainer's (female) gender, as has been suggested alongside similar discussions of Trio A and gender, but destabilized the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances using camp.

Keywords

genderkingingfemale impersonationmale impersonationminimalist danceYvonne RainerSteve PaxtonJudson Dance TheaterTrio AWord Words
Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 55 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Dance Studies Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Allen, Robert C. 1991. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally. 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally. 1993. Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. First published by UMI Research Press, 1980 and 1983.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally and Manning, Susan. 1989. “Terpsichore in Combat Boots.” TDR/The Drama Review 33 (1): 13–16.Google Scholar
Brannigan, Erin. 2015. “Dance and the Gallery: Curation as Revision.” Dance Research Journal 47 (1): 3–25.Google Scholar
Brannigan, Erin. 2016. “Yvonne Rainer's Lives of Performers: An ‘Undisciplined’ Encounter with the Avant-Garde.” In The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, edited by Rosenberg, Douglas, 517–36. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brennan, Marcia. 2004. Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 1999. “Robert Watts: Animate Objects—Inanimate Subjects.” In Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts— Events, Objects, Documents, by Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. and Rodenbeck, Judith F., 7–26. New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York. Exhibition catalogue.Google Scholar
Buchloh, Benjamin, and Krauss, Rosalind, de Duve, Thierry, Bois, Yve-Alain, Buskirk, Martha, and Alberro, Alexander. 1994. “Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp.” October 70: 126–46.Google Scholar
Burt, Ramsay. 2004. “Genealogy and Dance History: Foucault, Rainer, Bausch, and de Keersmaeker.” In Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, edited by Lepecki, André, 29–44. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Alexis. 2014. “Re-Vamping History: Neo-Burlesque and Historical Tradition.” Canadian Theatre Review 158: 44–47. doi: 10.1353/ctr.2014.0025Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1993. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michèle Aina, and Halperin, David M., 307–20. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2007. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge Classics. First published 1990.Google Scholar
Coleman, Bud. 1997. “The Jewel Box Revue: America's Longest-Running, Touring Drag Show.” Theatre History Studies 17: 79–92.Google Scholar
Copeland, Roger. 1982. “Towards a Sexual Politics of Contemporary Dance.” Contact Quarterly 7 (3–4): 45–50.Google Scholar
Crow, Thomas. 1996. The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent 1955–69. London: George Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, Orion Publishing.Google Scholar
Davy, Kate. 1989. “Reading Past the Heterosexual Imperative: Dress Suits to Hire.” TDR/The Drama Review 33 (1): 153–70.Google Scholar
Davy, Kate. 2007. “Fe/male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp.” In Critical Theory and Performance, rev. ed., edited by Reinelt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R., 355–71. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Dempster, Elizabeth. 1995. “Women Writing the Body: Let's Watch a Little How She Dances.” In Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, edited by Goellner, Ellen W. and Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, 21–38. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Dodds, Sherril. 2011. Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance. Basingstoke, Hampshire UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Franko, Mark. 1997. “Some Notes on Yvonne Rainer, Modernism, Politics, Emotion, Performance, and the Aftermath.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Desmond, Jane C., 289–303. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael. 1968. “Art and Objecthood.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Battcock, Gregory, 116–47. New York: E.P. Dutton. First published in Artforum 5 (10) (Summer 1967).Google Scholar
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2012. “Female Masculinity and Phallic Women—Unruly Concepts.” Feminist Studies 38 (3): 597–624. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23720196Google Scholar
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2013. “Masculinity's Interior: Men, Transmen, and Theories of Masculinity.” The Journal of Men's Studies 21 (2): 112–126.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1989. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin Australia.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. 2000. “The Butch Anthropologist Out in the Field.” Foreword to Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas, by Newton, Esther, ix–xviii. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith (as Jack). 2012. “On Pronouns.” Last modified September 3. Accessed September 21, 2016. http://www.jackhalberstam.com/on-pronouns/Google Scholar
Hansen, Al. 1965. A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art. New York: Something Else Press.Google Scholar
Hevesi, Dennis. 2008. “Stripping legend and star of burlesque heyday: Sherry Britton 1918–2008.” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 7. Originally published in The New York Times. Accessed September 20, 2016. http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/stripping-legend-and-star-of-burlesque-heyday/2008/04/06/1207420195906.htmlGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Allen. 1963. “Dancers Explore Wild New Ideas: Crazy or Not, Innovations Have Impact.” The New York Times, February 9, Western Edition.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnston, Jill. 1963. “Judson Concerts #3, #4.” The Village Voice, February 28.Google Scholar
Jones, Caroline A. 1996. Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Joseph, Branden W. 2007. “The Tower and the Line: Toward a Genealogy of Minimalism.” Grey Room 27: 58–81.Google Scholar
Krauss, Rosalind. 1973. “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post ’60s Sculpture.” Artforum 12 (3): 43–53.Google Scholar
Krauss, Rosalind. 1977a. “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture.” In Passages in Modern Sculpture, by Krauss, Rosaline, 243–88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Krauss, Rosalind. 1977b. “Mechanical Ballets: Light, Motion, Theater.” In Passages in Modern Sculpture, by Krauss, Rosalind, 201–42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lambert, Carrie. 2004. “More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Art in the 1960s.” In A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968, edited by Goldstein, Ann, 103–109. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. 2008. Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lee, Pamela M. 2004. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Mattison, Robert S. 2003. Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, James. 2001. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, James. 2009. “The Minimal Unconscious.” October 130: 141–76.Google Scholar
Meyer, Moe. 1994. “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp.” In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, edited by Meyer, Moe, 1–22. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Michelson, Annette. 1974. “Yvonne Rainer, Part One: The Dancer and the Dance.” Artforum 12 (5): 57–63.Google Scholar
Morris, Robert. 1966a. “Notes on Sculpture.” Artforum 4 (6): 42–44.Google Scholar
Morris, Robert. 1966b. “Notes on Sculpture, Part II.” Artforum 5 (2): 20–23.Google Scholar
Morse, Meredith. 2016. Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Newton, Esther. 1979. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published by Prentice-Hall, 1972.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Elly-Jean. 2016. “Lesbian Camp: An Unearthing.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 20 (1): 116–35.Google Scholar
Perron, Wendy, and Rainer, Yvonne. 2014, May 5. “Yvonne Rainer's Tribute to Steve Paxton.” Accessed October 6, 2015. http://wendyperron.com/yvonne-rainers-tribute-to-steve-paxton/Google Scholar
Phelan, Peggy. 1999. “Yvonne Rainer: From Dance to Film.” In A Woman Who … Essays, Interviews, Scripts, edited by Rainer, Yvonne, 3–17. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Platt, Ryan. 2014. “The Ambulatory Aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A.” Dance Research Journal 46 (1): 41–60.Google Scholar
Pollock, Griselda. 1996. “Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman's Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting in the 1950s.” In Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, edited by Orton, Fred and Pollock, Griselda, 219–94. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 1968. “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Qualitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Battcock, Gregory, 263–73. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 1974a. “Flashback.” In Rainer, Work 1961–73, 281–309. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 1974b. “An imperfect reminiscence of my studies and the beginning of a career and contingent events.” In Rainer, Work 1961–73, 1–10. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 1974c. “Some retrospective notes on a dance for 10 people and 12 mattresses called Parts of Some Sextets, performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March, 1965.” In Rainer, Work 1961–73, 45–51. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press. First published in Tulane Drama Review 10 (2) (Winter 1965).Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 1974d. “Terrain,” In Rainer, Work 1961–73, 13–43. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 2003. “Skirting and Aging: An Aging Artist's Memoir.” In Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, edited by Sachs, Sid, 87–97. Philadelphia: University of the Arts. Exhibition catalogue.Google Scholar
Rainer, Yvonne. 2006. Feelings Are Facts: A Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Robertson, Pamela. 1996. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Robinson, Julia. 2005. “In the Event of George Brecht.” In George Brecht Events: A Heterospective, edited by Fischer, Alfred M., 16–174. Cologne: Museum Ludwig. Exhibition catalogue.Google Scholar
Rose, Barbara. 1968. “A B C Art.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Battcock, Gregory, 274–97. New York: E. P. Dutton. First published in Art in America 53 (5) (October–November 1965).Google Scholar
Ross, Andrew. 1989. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ross, Janice. 2000. Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Ross, Janice. 2007. Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Satin, Leslie. 2003. “James Waring and the Judson Dance Theater: Influences, Intersections, and Divergences.” In Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, edited by Banes, Sally, 51–80. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Sayre, Henry M. 1989. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Schacht, Steven P., and Underwood, Lisa. 2004. “The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators.” Journal of Homosexuality 46 (3–4): 1–17. doi: 10.1300/J082v46n03_01Google Scholar
Shteir, Rachel. 2004. Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. 1966. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, by Sontag, Susan, 275–92. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Thomas, Helen. 2013. The Body and Everyday Life. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar