Don’t think that you need to be a dance enthusiast, film history buff or Queer culture follower to enjoy FEELINGS ARE FACTS : THE LIFE OF YVONNE RAINER. This is a film that allows a concentration on the subject not the medium. There is nothing tricky here. It’s just traditional documentary storytelling. It’s mostly linear: has talking heads and stills and recreated performances.
The brilliance choice of documentary form is as inspired as the work of this brilliantly non-traditional artist. The form makes itself irrelevant so that the work on display is on display.
And the work is mesmerising and challenging.
Yvonne Rainer, born in 1934, is a dancer and filmmaker who is still working. She is astonishing in her energy and focus as we see her still moving in her signature minimalist, angular, contrapuntal way in the finale of the film. In the first few seconds of the documentary, our introduction to her is by way of people leaving and yelling at dancers in one of her early shows and via Rainer speaking to camera as part of her famous ovular film. Then filmmaker Jack Walsh, has chosen to take us to the beginning of her public creative story.
We see black and white original footage of TRIO A (1966) and hear why it smashed American Dance forms into the shards that would reconnect to generate what we understand as Contemporary Dance. Visually it is what Rainer calls ‘Pedestrian Movement’ that is so enthralling even these long years later. The eyes don’t match the body which steps and turns and walks and the balances only occasionally and accidentally create a form conventionally associated with grace of dance.
TRIO A will return through the film. As TRIO A: WITH FLAGS where the dancers are naked apart from the US flag fluttering in front of them and her return to dance after disenchantment with the economics of film funding, TRIO A: PRESSURE in 1990. Mikhail Baryshnikov, after the latter, has her create work for him and his White Oak Company.
The names of the dance companies in the film are legend. She began with the Martha Graham Company, knowing they would part ways. The Judson Group and Grand Union and the Billy Rose Season are explored through her remembrances and some prestigious guides supporting her articulation of the creative process. Steve Paxton and Emily Coates among others give their view of the work and the woman. But it is when the absorbing Rainer speaks for herself that we comprehend the most. She mentions depression and dope. She calls her 7 year of and on relationship with fellow dance creator, Robert Morris, competitive and complementary. Yet doesn’t really give much away about Martha.
She has done that already through her film MURDER AND MURDER (1996) which parallels her own coming out (and her mastectomy). Previous to this film, during the heady days of 2nd wave Feminism she was criticised for making a film (Kristina Talking Pictures 1976) which did not provide the role model that academics believed women’s work should have. She describes the protagonist as a woman with self-doubt, ambiguity, self-contempt and internal rage at social and gender inequity. A better psychological breakdown of the struggle to accept a Lesbian nature, I have never heard.
Yet artistically she does not accept herself as theorist for dance or film or Queerness. She is though, and the film deftly looks at politics and Marxism, gender, class, race relations through the posters and stills and some extant footage. Also through modern recreations of her work. CHAIR/PILLOW (1969) recreated in 2012 with dancers in shorts and sneakers and tank tops is wonderful.
Deceptively simple filmmaking like this just allows for so much immersion in the art and the work and I am pretty much inspired by everything about this flinty, driven survivor. But what will stay with me for a long time is Rainer’s NO MANIFESTO. It’s vaguely mentioned in the film because there is so much to reveal. But it drew me and I looked it up and I hope you will too … words for any artist to live by and a way into her final statement of the film. “Feelings are Facts”.
FEELINGS ARE FACTS : THE LIFE OF YVONNE RAINER only has one showing at the Mardi Gras Film Festival curated by Queer Screen. Saturday 20th February. 2 pm at Event Cinemas.