Linda Austin, Lucy Yim and Jen Hackworth will perform Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, a seminal work of the post-modern dance period. Linda K. Johnson, an official transmitter/custodian of the work, has been teaching these three over the past three months. She will talk about her process and relationship to Trio A and also perform it.
As part of the evening, Linda K. Johnson will screen a video document of the AXIS Dance Company performing Trio A Pressured #X, a specific translation of Trio A created for them by Johnson in 2014. AXIS is one of the most acclaimed physically integrated dance companies in the world, and the first to perform a mixed ability version of Trio A with Rainer’s permission.
Linda Austin will perform MUTT which was created as an homage to Trio A, using similar restrictions: no repetition, even pacing, discrete moments strung together like beads on a string but without pauses, no momentum, avoiding the gaze of the audience. MUTT has a solo, duet and a group version. Linda Austin will perform the solo version.
Wed. July 16, 7pm // $5-10 suggested donation
Trio A was choreographed during the incredible creative vitality and formal radicalism of the Judson Church period in NYC from 1961-70. Created in 1965 over 180 consecutive days in the studio, it is considered to be the seminal work of the post-modern dance period. Its then radical form, movement vocabulary and performance approach forever changed the thinking about what could be defined as a dance, who could be a dancer, and the dancer’s relationship to performance.
Yvonne Rainer, a co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer/dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films — “Lives of Performers” (1972), “Privilege” (1990), “MURDER and murder” (1996), among others — she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project (“After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”). Her dances since then include “AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M.”, “RoS Indexical”, a Performa07 commission, “Spiraling Down”, “Assisted Living: Good Sports 2”, and “Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money?” Her dances and films have been shown world wide, and her work has been rewarded with museum exhibitions, fellowships, and grants, most notably two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller grants, a Wexner Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and retrospective exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2012). A memoir — “Feelings Are Facts: a Life” — was published by MIT Press in 2006. A selection of her poetry was published in 2011 by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited.
Photo Credit: Ren Dodge-AXIS Dance Company