to

In conjunction with the exhibition of the New York artist Rosemarie Castoro at MACBA, Rosemarie Castoro. Focus at Infinity, centred on the first years of her career (1964–79), the Museum presents a dance programme with Yvonne Rainer, one of the key figures in the postmodern dance movement. Castoro participated in Minimalist art circles, which included dancers and choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs and Joan Jonas. In the specific case of Rainer, Castoro performed in her work Carriage Discreteness, with Minimalist props designed by Carl Andre and presented as part of Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering in 1966. The recording of this dance piece is included in the exhibition.

In this combined programme, Rainer presents two of her most recent works: the solo lecture-performance ‘What’s so funny? Laugher and Anger in the Time of the Assassins’ and her latest choreography, The Concept of Dust. Rainer remains a leading figure in contemporary dance. In 1962, she was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater. Inspired by John Cage's notions of indeterminacy, she created her performances according to a series of generic tasks that integrated everyday gestures into a dance vocabulary. In 1966, she premiered Trio A, the first section of her work The Mind is a Muscle. While from the mid-sixties she was already incorporating projected images into her performances, in 1972 Rainer wrote and directed her first medium-length film, Lives of Performers. From 1975, she dedicated herself mainly to medium-length and feature films in which she reinvented narrative conventions. Between 2000 and 2006 she returned to choreography with the creation of two new works: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000), a group performance commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation, and AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M. (2006).

LECTURE-PERFORMANCE BY YVONNE RAINER
Tuesday 19 December, 7 pm
Venue: MACBA Auditorium
Revision: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies. A Rant Dance by Yvonne Rainer

DANCE
Wednesday 20 December, 8 pm
Venue: Mercat de les Flors
The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project – Altered Annually is an ongoing work-in-progress that interweaves formal dance with diverse texts dealing with ageing, mortality, personal histories and material quoted from a variety of sources, e.g., ancient Middle Eastern dynasties (Metropolitan Museum), paleontological findings (New York Times) and literature. These are intermittently read aloud by Rainer and the dancers. The power of language as a trajectory that runs parallel to the music (Gavin Bryars, Giovanni Paisiello) continues to be an important coordinate in Rainer’s work. All three elements – movement, music and texts – occasionally merge to produce a somewhat melancholic ambiance. The performers in Dust have been given the freedom to initiate and/or abort the movement phrases as they wish, making spontaneous decisions and exercising options throughout the 50-minute duration of the piece. The result is a structure that is seemingly random with unpredictable moments of unison, humour and startling convergences.

Choreography: Yvonne Rainer, with a little help from Honi Coles, Jane Dudley (via Sheron Wray), Isadora Duncan (via Carl Van Vechten), Fritz Lang, Michael Douglas Peters (via Michael Jackson), Nina Stroganova, Jacques Tati, Les Twins, et al, and, of course, with much help from the Raindears.
Choreographic Assistant: Pat Catterson
Performers: Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Emmanuèlle Phuon, Yvonne Rainer, Keith Sabado, David Thomson.
Music: Edvard Grieg: Arietta and Gavin Bryars: The Sinking of the Titanic
Lighting Designer: Les Dickert
Costume: Juanita Cardenas
Sound Mix: Quentin Chiappetta

Quoted texts (in indeterminate order): Barack Obama, Maureen McLane, Harold Brodkey, Jean Luc Godard, Fredric Jameson, Alex Ross, Louise Bourgeois, Yvonne Rainer, D.H. Lawrence, wall inscriptions in the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daniel Zalewski, Christa Wolf, Amiri Baracka, Donald Trump, et al.

This programme has been co-commissioned by Performa, New York.

Thanks to RoseLee Goldberg, Esa Nickle and Sasha Okshteyn of Performa, and USA Fellowships for their support.

DANCE INTERPRETERS
Pat Catterson’s parents were a ballroom dancing team and her paternal grandfather a Vaudevillian tap dancer. A NYC-based artist, she has choreographed 109 works, receiving many accolades including a 2011 Solomon R. Guggenheim Choreography Fellowship and multiple Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the CAPS Grants and the Harkness Foundation, as well as a Fulbright Commission. A dedicated educator, she has been on the faculties at Sarah Lawrence College, UCLA, the Juilliard School and the Merce Cunningham Studio, among many others. For twenty years she taught her own tap classes in NYC and has been a guest artist all over the US and in Europe, most recently at the Kalamata Dance Festival in Greece and at Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers France. Her writing has been published in Ballet Review, JOPERD, Attitude Magazine, Dance Magazine Online, Getty’s The Iris, and Dance Research Journal. She earned her BA in psychology and philosophy from Northwestern University and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. Her latest work, NOW, is an installation/performance event that paired her eight NYC dancers with those in nine other countries dancing live together via Skype projection. She first performed Yvonne Rainer’s work in 1969 and since 1999 has worked as her rehearsal assistant, touring nationally and internationally. A custodian of Rainer’s early works, she has staged them for many individual dancers and companies and for exhibits in London at the Raven Row Gallery, Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery, as well as in Brazil, Denmark, Norway, Finland, at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, the Dia Beacon, at the Getty Museum in LA and most recently for the Steven Petronio Company for his Bloodlines Project.

Emily Coates has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp and Yvonne Rainer. Career highlights include dancing three duets with Baryshnikov in works by Mark Morris, Karole Armitage and Erick Hawkins. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented by Danspace Project, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Ballet Memphis and Performa, among others. Her most recent performance project, Incarnations, premiered at Danspace Project in 2017 to critical praise. She is currently co-writing a book with particle physicist Sarah Demers on physics and dance, forthcoming from Yale University Press. She graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English and holds an MA in American Studies from Yale. She directs the Dance Studies curriculum at Yale and holds a secondary appointment in the Directing department at Yale School of Drama. She has danced with Yvonne Rainer since 2000.

Les Dickert (Lighting Designer) designs for a diverse range of live performance, spanning contemporary and Shakespearean theatre, modern dance, classical ballet and international performance art. Since 2000, he has collaborated with Yvonne Rainer on a number of new works including After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, RoS Indexical, AG Indexical, Spiraling Down, Assisted Living Good Sports 2 / Do You Have Any Money, Early Works, and Concept of Dust. Recent projects include Sense and Sensibility (Off-Broadway) and Fancy Free (Miami City Ballet). Dance: White Oak Dance Project, San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, BalletMet. International: Centre Pompidou, La Scala, and the National Ballets of England, Denmark, Australia, Belgium, Canada and Russia. Broadway: Wrong Mountain (Assistant), High Society (Assistant). Off-Broadway: Atlantic Theater, Rattlestick Theater, P73, Theater Row, Ensemble Studio Theater, others. Regional: McCarter Theater, ACT, ART, Shakespeare and Company, Great Lakes Theater Festival, Geva Theater, Perseverance Theater, Syracuse Stage, Triad Stage, Arden Theater. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Emmanuele Phuon is French-Cambodian and lives in Brussels, Belgium. She started her training with the Royal Ballet of Cambodia and graduated from the Conservatoire National de Danse in 1986. In New York, she has performed with the Elisa Monte Dance Company from 1989 till 1994, Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project from 1995 till 2001 and has worked with Martha Clarke, Joachim Schloemer and Meg Stuart, among others. In 2010 she joined the informal company of Yvonne Rainer. She is a 2009 and 2015 Asian Cultural Council grantee for her choreographic work with Amrita Performing Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Her work has been presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Centre and the New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas (2010), the Spoleto Dance Festival in Charleston (2011), the Guggenheim Works and Process (2013), Singapore Da:ns festival, and has toured Hong Kong, Amsterdam and New Delhi.

Patricia Hoffbauer has been making performance work in NYC since the late 1980s. A Brazilian-born artist, she has collaborated with several NYC-based artists including a two-decade creative relationship with writer/performer George Emilio Sanchez. Highlights: her series Who Killed Carmen? presented by the Whitney Museum; Para-Dice, presented by Danspace Project; and Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People presented by Gibney Dance Center. Her work has been supported by NYSCA, NYFA, NEA, Map Fund, Princeton University’s Lewis Arts Center Research Grants and Gibney Dance Center’s Dance in Process (DiP) residency. She is a NYSCA Movement Research Artist-in-Residence in 2017-18. Her latest piece, Getting Away With Murder, premiered at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater in June 2017. She has been commissioned by New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Barnard College and The New School in autumn 2017. She taught at Hunter College and Princeton University’s Lewis Art Center, among other schools, and is now a full-time assistant professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Open Arts Program. Her writings have appeared in the New Museum book New Visions among other publications and she is a contributor to the upcoming book, Bodies as Archive, published by Wesleyan University Press and is a founding member of Yvonne Rainer’s Raindears, producing the company’s 2007 tour to Brazil. Hoffbauer also curated an evening of the Judson at 50 Platform at Danspace Project.

Yvonne Rainer, one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater (1962), made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer/dancer (1960–75). After making seven experimental feature-length films – Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996), among others – she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan). Since then she has made six dances, including AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., Assisted Living: Do you have any money? and The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project – Altered Annually. Her dances and films have been seen throughout the U.S. and Europe. Museum retrospectives of her work, including drawings, photos, films, notebooks and memorabilia, have been presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2012); the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, École des Beaux Artes, La Ferme du Buisson, Paris; and Raven Row, London (2014). 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. Other writings have been collected in Work: 1961–73 (1974); The Films of Y.R. (1989); and A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts (1999). She is a recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship and a U.S.A Fellowship.

Keith Sabado was a long-time member of both the Mark Morris Dance Group and the White Oak Dance Project, and also danced with the companies of Pauline Koner, Hannah Kahn, Rosalind Newman, Jim Self and Lucinda Childs. He has performed with the group Paradigm and danced in operas staged and directed by Mr. Morris, Peter Sellars and Martha Clarke. He teaches dance, Pilates and movement rehabilitation privately and in workshops, and is on the faculty of the conditioning programme at American Ballet Theater’s JKO School and ABT’s Studio Company.

David Thomson has primarily worked as a collaborative performer/creator in the fields of music, dance, theatre and performance, with such artists as Bebe Miller (1983–86, 2003–06), Marta Renzi, Trisha Brown (1987–93), Susan Rethorst, Remy Charlip, Grisha Coleman|Hot Mouth, Ralph Lemon (1999–2010), Sekou Sundiata, Tracie Morris, Meg Stuart, Dean Moss/Layla Ali, Alain Buffard, Marina Abramović, Yvonne Rainer, Kaneza Schaal Yanira Castro, David Bowie and Maria Hassabi, among many others. His own work exists at the intersections of movement, text, sound and song, and has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, LMCC, The Invisible Dog and Mt Tremper Arts. Thomson is a Bessie award-winning artist for Sustained Achievement (2001), a 2012 USArtist Ford Fellow, a 2013 NYFA Fellow in Choreography, and a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow. He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

With the support of:
Logo Henry Moore
Main sponsor of the activities:
Estrella Damm
Yvonne Rainer, The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project-Altered Annually, 2016. Photo © Paula Court.

Programme

LECTURE-PERFORMANCE BY YVONNE RAINER
Tuesday 19 December, 7 pm
Venue: MACBA Auditorium

DANCE
Wednesday 20 December, 8 pm
Venue: Mercat de les Flors
Fully booked

With the collaboration of Mercat de les Flors.

Programes públics
macba [at] macba [dot] cat
Tel: 93 481 33 68


Exhibition


Related

Audios

Son[i]a #259. Yvonne Rainer
02.05.2018

Publications