8. Yvonne Rainer: We Shall Run (1963)

Throughout the 1960s, the postmodern dance pioneer Yvonne Rainer experimented with diverse scoring techniques, including movement maps, lists, charts, and “people plans,” to capture indeterminate yet rule-based choreography stripped of artifice, expression, and narrative. A series of diagrammatic floor plans sketches out We Shall Run, in which a cluster of “runners” in everyday clothes jog about in unpredictable groupings and patterns. Rainer never believed that a score could faithfully capture the complex dimensions of choreographic space, time, force, and shape; rather, her improvised scores functioned conceptually, as a broad methodology that fueled further innovation. This chapter also includes significant documentation of Rainer’s groundbreaking dance Trio A, part of the evening-length work, The Mind is a Muscle (1966–68).