This canonical footage of Yvonne Rainer performing the solo Trio A was produced by the dance historian Sally Banes as a research document, and it is the earliest moving-image recording of the dance. While it often represents Trio A in exhibitions and multimedia publications such as this one, Rainer has critiqued her own performance here as being imprecise and unideal. She once wrote: “When I hear rumors of people learning Trio A from the video, I know that they have achieved only a faint approximation of the dance with little understanding of its subtleties” (Rainer, “Trio A: Genealogy, Documentation, Notation,” Dance Research Journal 41, no. 2 [Winter 2009]: 16). Still, the film’s early date confers a special status on this recording that has led to its reception as being particularly authentic. To understand Trio A it may be better to take a comparative approach, in which we perceive the dance as existing between the numerous artist-authorized iterations—from historical to more contemporary—that are available to us.
Video copyright of the artist. Used courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Used with Permission. © Yvonne Rainer.
