April 12, 6:00 p.m. | Yvonne Rainer in person!
- Yvonne Rainer, Lives of Performers (1972). Courtesy Zeitgeist Films.
Join us for an evening with filmmaker, choreographer, and poet Yvonne Rainer and a rare screening of her acclaimed first feature, Lives of Performers, shown from a pristine new print. Embodying Rainer’s aesthetic rigor and wit, the film combines fiction and documentary, script readings, dance snippets, still photos, and tableaux vivants to explore issues of power and gender that influence the emotional lives of her performers. 1972, USA, 16mm, 90 minutes + discussion.
Presented in collaboration with the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, which features a lecture by Yvonne Rainier on April 11, 6:00 p.m., The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
YVONNE RAINER’S (b. 1934, San Francisco) work spans dance, choreography, performance, writing, and film. She has exhibited internationally at museums, film festivals, and other venues. Rainer trained as a dancer at the Martha Graham Dance School and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater. Retrospectives of her films have been held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, and 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990–95), and a Wexner Prize (1995). In 2010 Yvonne Rainer: Dance and Film, the first major European survey of Rainer’s work, was presented at the Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland. A premiere collection of Yvonne Rainer’s poetry, Poems, was published by Badlands Unlimited (2011).