Yvonne Rainer

Space, Body, Language

Yvonne Rainer
Trio A, 1973
The Portland Center for Visual Arts
© The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2006.M.24)

Museum Ludwig in cooperation with Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles proudly presents the first European retrospective of the trailblazing choreographer and film
maker Yvonne Rainer. When Yvonne Rainer stepped onto the dance stage in 1960, she radically changed the genre. Her minimalist choreographies dispensed with narrative and overstatement. Instead they used movements and poses from everyday life, combined with texts, films and sound recordings. Already her dance adopted the means of film montage.

Yvonne Rainer - Space, Body, Language

28.4 – 29.7.2012

Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday:
10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Every first Thursday of the month 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Monday

Eintritt und Anreise
Symposium

So it was only logical that in the mid-seventies, Rainer moved on to film, where she once again redefined the form. This first European retrospective traces out Rainer's path, which has influenced several generations of artists. Previously unshown photos, note-books and other material will be augmented by dance performances and a film retrospective. The artist Heimo Zobernig has been invited by Museum Ludwig to create a special spatial constellation in Cologne, which includes his own work ohne titel (2011) and Soundings (1968) by Robert Rauschenberg. The interplay between the exhibits and the exhibition design responds to the question of how to show and film in the setting of an art museum.

Curated by Dr. Barbara Engelbach (Museum Ludwig) and Dr. Yilmaz Dziewior (Kunsthaus Bregenz)

<p>Yvonne Rainer<br /><em>MURDER and Murder</em>, 1996<br />Film still<br />© The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2006.M.24)</p>

Start picture gallery (8 pictures)

Yvonne Rainer: Spiraling Down & Assisted Living: Good Sports 2

May 1, 2012, 20 pm, tanzhaus nrw

Yvonne Rainer took her inspiration for Spiraling Down (2008) from a great variety of media and areas of life: she not only took sequences of movements from football players, but also used old
films, Facebook and anti-military photographs as her sources. The result is a melancholy quartet with unpredictable twists and turns. The choreography for Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2011) was inspired by a series of photos from the sports section of the New York Times. Starting with these shots, seven dancers developed a unique choreographic language that alternates between abstraction and movement sequences connected with sport.

A cooperation with PERFORMA, New York and tanzhaus nrw, Düsseldorf.

Yvonne Rainer: Spiraling Down & Assisted Living: Good Sports 2
Performance May 1st 2012, tanzhaus nrw
Video: Ralph Goertz

Yvonne Rainer
Intermedial Constellations - A Symposium
4 May until 5 May 2012

The conference will be held in English and German

Yvonne Rainer is one of the central figures of US post-modernist dance, and like almost no other woman choreographer become the focus of theoretical reflections. At the same time she is an icon of the 1970s experimental feminist film. As part of the wide-ranging exhibition Yvonne Rainer. Space, Body, Language at Museum Ludwig, a symposium is being held in cooperation with the Zentrum für Zeitgenössischen Tanz in Cologne that aims at thinking across the genres and detecting in what ways intermedial links can be identified in her work and what importance and influence each has had for the realms of dance, art and film. How for instance can the debate about conceptual art be linked to the discussion surrounding ‘conceptual dance'? How does the body which is treated as neutral in Rainer's choreographies relate to the bodyas-material in the visual arts? How can the objective physicality of the Judson Church dancer be regarded in connection with the idea of ‘the private as political' advanced by the feminist video art scene? Which crossovers in perspectives present themselves here between dance studies, art theory and film studies, and what has been the history of the reception given to each of these individual fields? With questions such as these, this interdisciplinary conference wants to address audiences from not only the visual arts, but equally from dance and film, and to create for each standpoint a sensitivity towards the other fields that leads to a greater awareness of the breadth of Rainer's artistic output. Starting out from introductory talks on the history of her reception in the individual disciplines, a deeper discussion should be prompted across all of the genres by a series of talks and lecture performances. For this reason, the conference has not only invited scholars but also contemporary artists for whom Rainer has proved to be an inspiration.

Friday, 4 May 2012

2 p.m.
Welcoming address
Kasper König (Museum Ludwig, Köln)

Rainer's Artistic Reception

2.15 p.m.
Sabeth Buchmann (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien)
Diskrete Verknüpfungen: Zur Bedeutung von
Yvonne Rainers Werk für die Historiografie der
postklassischen und zeitgenössischen Kunst

3.10 p.m.
Barbara Engelbach (Museum Ludwig, Köln)
Radikale Nebeneinanderstellung. Yvonne Rainers Filme
in den Rezeptionssphären von Tanz, Kunst und Kino

4 p.m.
Yvonne Hardt (Zentrum für Zeitgenössischen Tanz/ HfMT, Köln)
Historiografische In(ter)ventionen: Zur Bedeutung
Yvonne Rainers für die Tanzwissenschaft

Coffee break

5.30 p.m.
Karolin Meunier (Berlin)
A Pleasurable Self-Alienation. Lecture Performance

Trio A
A cooperation with the Freunden des Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Museum Ludwig in the series Kunst
Bewusst, presented together with the Fritz Thyssen Foundation

7 p.m.
Eva Schmidt (Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen)
Trio A zwischen Minimalismus und Humor

7.40 p.m.
Sara Wookey (Los Angeles, USA)
Transmitting Trio A. Lecture-Performance

Saturday, 5 May 2012

Dance / Art / Concept

10 a.m.
Ramsey Burt (De Montfort University, Leicester UK)
‘Don't give the game away': Rainer's 1967 reflections
on dance and the visual arts revisited

10.50 a.m.
Kirsten Maar (FU Berlin)
Yvonne Rainer: Produktionsverfahren zwischen
Choreografie und Installation

11.40 a.m.
Heimo Zobernig (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien)
ohne Titel, 2011

12.30 Coffee break

Dance / Film / Body

1.15 p.m.
Paul Chan (New York)
Bodies beyond resemblances

2 p.m.
Anja Zimmermann (Universität Oldenburg und Universität Zürich)
The struggles of others: Yvonne Rainers Film Privilege
(1990) im Kontext ästhetischer und theoretischer
Debatten um Intersektionalität

2.45 p.m.
Marie-Luise Angerer (Kunsthochschule für Medien, Köln)
Der Körper des Tanzens (The Body of Dancing)

Registration recommended
bardenheuer@museum-ludwig.de

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