16 Facts About Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24,1934 and is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental.

Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24,1934, in San Francisco, California.

Yvonne Rainer's mother, a stenographer, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, and her father, a stonemason and house painter, was born in Vallanzengo, northern Italy, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 21.

Yvonne Rainer attended Lowell High School, and after graduation she enrolled in San Francisco Junior College and dropped out after a year.

Yvonne Rainer introduced her to various artists who were natives of New York.

In late 1960, both Forti and Yvonne Rainer attended the choreography workshop that musician-composer Robert Dunn began to conduct in the Cunningham studio based on the theories of John Cage.

Yvonne Rainer is noted for an approach to dance that treats "the body more as the source of an infinite variety of movements" than as the purveyor of plot or drama.

Ordinary Dance was a combination of movement and narrative, and featured the repetition of simple movements while Yvonne Rainer recited an autobiographical monologue containing the names of the streets on which she had lived while in San Francisco.

One of Yvonne Rainer's most famous pieces, Trio A, was initially the first section of an evening-long work entitled The Mind Is a Muscle.

Yvonne Rainer sometimes included filmed sequences in her dances, and in 1972 she began to turn her attention to directing feature-length films.

Yvonne Rainer directed several experimental films about dance and performance, including Lives of Performers, Film About a Woman Who, and Kristina Talking Pictures.

In 2000, Yvonne Rainer returned to dance and choreography to create After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project.

Yvonne Rainer continued to choreograph works based on classical pieces, including RoS Indexical, inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring.

Little did Yvonne Rainer realize that her prior choreography was a direct challenge of the "traditional" dance and ultimately feminist in nature.

Yvonne Rainer is referenced in several places as example of artist, feminist, and lesbian in the second edition of Feminism Art Theory edited by Hilary Robinson.

In 1990, Yvonne Rainer was awarded with a MacArthur Fellows Program award for her contributions to dance.