The dance critic Deborah Jowitt’s review of Yvonne Rainer’s The Mind Is a Muscle (1966–68) attends to the quality of the dancers’ movements even as they perform non-dancerly gestures, such as walking up and down a set of stairs or kicking their sneakered feet. She notes their rather unselfconscious focus on their activities, likening their behavior to that of athletes in training who are immersed in mastering a physical skill and unconcerned with being watched. In that sense, for Jowitt, the appearance of juggler Harry De Dio in the subsection Act becomes emblematic for the work as a whole. She distills Rainer’s project as consisting of movement exercises whose success emerges directly from their satisfactory execution, with little investment in theatrical expressionism. Of note, cultural critic Jill Johnston’s take on The Mind Is a Muscle, also included in the Archive section of chapter 8, appeared in the same issue of The Village Voice as Jowitt’s review.
460
| Title | “Expanded Muscle,” The Village Voice |
| Maker | Deborah Jowitt (American, b. 1934) |
| Date | 18 April 1968 |
| Type | press clipping |
| Location | Getty Research Institute, Yvonne Rainer Papers, 2006.M.24, box 22, folder 4 |
Cite
Jowitt, Deborah. “Expanded Muscle,”
The Village Voice, 18 April 1968. 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://