Yvonne Rainer | Where’s the Passion? Where’s the Politics?

Where’s the Passion? Where’s the Politics? or How I Became Interested in Impersonating, Approximating, and End Running Around My Selves and Others,’ and Where Do I Look When You’re Looking at Me?

Yvonne Rainer
Dancer, choreographer and filmmaker

Yvonne Rainer’s lecture explores issues around self-expression, spectatorship, and the politics of both. Rainer is a choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker who in 1962 co-founded the Judson Dance Theater group. Following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer and dancer, she made a transition to filmmaking. After making seven experimental feature films including Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996), she returned to dance in 2000 to work on the collaborative project After Many a Summer Dies the Swan with the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation. Her dances and films have been shown worldwide, and her work has been recognized with museum exhibitions, fellowships, and grants, most notably two Guggenheim Fellowships, two Rockefeller grants, a Wexner Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and retrospective exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Her memoir Feelings Are Facts: A Life was published by MIT Press in 2006 and in 2011 Badlands Unlimited published a selection of her poetry under the title Poems.