This excerpt from video artist Charles Atlas’s longer work Rainer Variations (other excerpts of which are included in chapter 8) shows a bemused Yvonne Rainer attempting to teach Trio A (1966) to famed modern dance artist Martha Graham, who is played by the choreographer Richard Move in drag. This dynamic collaboration between Rainer, Atlas, and Move brings together Rainer’s interest in both dance and the moving image as well as melodrama and humor, queer aesthetics and critique, dance history, and the practice of revisiting and remixing her past works. Describing Atlas’s Rainer Variations as a “faux Rainer portrait,” Rainer has remarked: “At play here is a skepticism about the conventions of the documentary form that purports to reveal the ‘real’ artist who ultimately remains a persona or crafty impersonator of her own idealized self-image” (liner notes to Charles Atlas, Rainer Variations, DVD, Electronic Arts Intermix, New York, 2002, n.p.).
Video copyright of the artist. Used courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Used courtesy of Charles Atlas.
