In this audio recording, likely captured during a dance workshop led by Yvonne Rainer, she describes an exercise in which participants are to split themselves into two groups: performers, who must remain in motion throughout the exercise, and audience, who are instructed to occupy the periphery of the space. These roles are changeable if a participant approaches someone in the opposite role and announces a desire to switch. Rainer designates herself a performer but refuses to model exact movement, instead suggesting that it is her attitude that participants might follow. She explains the dynamics of spatialization between moving bodies, inanimate objects, and audience members. She then instructs performers to move about the space and to move one another as well as objects over the course of the session, which will end when all objects and persons are returned more or less to where they were at the start. Finally, in accordance with her uninflected, task-based approach to dance, she instructs participants not to take her use of words such as “carry” and “pass” as “points of departure for free association or creative improvisation, or interpretation, but rather as directives for very specific behavior and activity.”
Used with Permission. © Yvonne Rainer.
