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458

Title “Rainer’s ‘Mind Is a Muscle,’” The Village Voice, 13
Maker Jill Johnston (American, 1929–2010)
Date 2 June 1966
Type press clipping
Location Getty Research Institute, Yvonne Rainer Papers, 2006.M.24, box 22, folder 4

In this sympathetic review of Yvonne Rainer’s evolving, multipart work, The Mind is a Muscle (1966–68), Jill Johnston insightfully captures one of the hallmarks of Rainer’s choreography: “Like certain objects, there is no ‘presentational’ concession to the audience. The dance has no eye, doesn’t look at anybody. I got this idea from noticing that the innumerable focal changes are always, with maybe one or two exceptions, up, down, side, diagonal or back, never directly at the audience, as though consciously designed to withdraw that contact which is the performer’s traditional trade-tool of seductive involvement. It is suggested the audience find the eye in the dance, not on the faces of performers.”

Cite

Johnston, Jill. “Rainer’s ‘Mind Is a Muscle,’” The Village Voice, 13, 2 June 1966. Getty Research Institute, Yvonne Rainer Papers, 2006.M.24, box 22, folder 4. In The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025. https://www.getty.edu/publications/scores/object-index/458/.