From Jill Johnston to Sally Banes, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, Ramsay Burt, and, most recently, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, dance historians and theorists have extolled the qualities of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966) and discussed its significance in dance history. My relationship to this dance is unique. I first saw it at the Billy Rose Theatre in New York City in 1969, and in the same year I learned and performed it at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. In November of 1970 I first performed it retrograde, and I first taught it in the summer of 1971. In the forty years since, I have continued to perform and teach it. One of the high points in this odyssey was performing it in a duet with Yvonne at Judson Church in Trio A Pressured, a 1999 piece that marked her return to dance after a twenty-five-year hiatus as a filmmaker.

What is it about this dance, beyond its ideas and groundbreaking methods, that has kept me wanting to perform it and others wanting to see and learn it? And how is the experience of doing it different from that of viewing it? How has it changed for me and across generations over the years? I must go back to that first experience with the dance to begin to answer these questions.

I worked on Trio A alone for six months in 1965. The dance initially consisted of a five-minute sequence of movement that would eventually be presented as The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I at Judson Church (on January 10, 1966). There it was performed by me, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton simultaneously but not in unison. An interim version of an extended, but not complete, The Mind Is a Muscle (Judson Church, May 22, 1966) was performed by William Davis, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton. In the final section of this version, called “Lecture,” Peter Saul executed a balletic solo version—that is, with pirouettes and jumps. In the final version (Anderson Theater, April 11, 1968) Trio A was performed by me in tap shoes (without balletic furbelows) at the end of the evening while Paxton, Gordon, and Davis performed it as a trio at the beginning.

The individual sequences last from four and a half to five minutes, depending on each performer's physical inclination. Two primary characteristics of the dance are its uninflected continuity and its imperative involving the gaze. The eyes are always averted from direct confrontation with the audience via independent movement of the head, closure of the eyes, or simple casting down of the gaze.

Despite Yvonne Rainer's subversive refusal to stage Trio A as a spectacle, to have it represent or narrate social structures, or to engage with the audience in a traditional manner, the landmarks of canonization have all been put upon it. The Banes-produced 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A was recently exhibited while the dance was performed live simultaneously by Pat Catterson, Jimmy Robert, and Ian White at the Museum of Modern Art, the institution that determines what constitutes important modernist and contemporary art in the United States and, indeed, the Western world. In conjunction with Rainer's famous NO Manifesto, Trio A appears in nearly every publication on so-called postmodern dance and art. Moreover, the key documentary on postmodern dance Beyond the Mainstream—containing Trio A—is screened in most dance history courses when postmodern dance is discussed. As a result, the choreography became not only a staple on syllabi in dance departments but also in disciplines such as gender studies, film and art history, or communications. Even Susan Au's Ballet and Modern Dance, a conservative historical text utilized in many dance history classes, defines Trio A as “one of the most influential works in the modern dance repertoire” (Au 2002, 155).

Since the mid-1990s European dancers and audiences have played a significant role in the revival of interest in Yvonne Rainer's dance work. Two key examples of this are the restaging of Rainer's Continuous Project-Altered Daily (CP-AD) in 1996 by the French group Quatuor Albrecht Knust and the more recent creation and trial of the Labanotation score of Trio A in London. In her reminiscences printed above, Pat Catterson suggests that Trio A' s “relaxed natural quality, equality of parts, its tame simplicity, and durational patience may be out of synch with today's Zeitgeist.” During Charles Atlas's documentary, Rainer Variations, Rainer herself suggests today's audiences would no longer be prepared to sit through the long slow works she made during the Judson period. If this is currently the case with audiences in the United States, it is not so on the other side of the Atlantic. European audiences for innovative dance and live art seem prepared to take the time to experience and appreciate slow, demanding, experimental work.

European choreographers and dance artists who have been interested in Trio A often have a keen and sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, interest in dance history. Artists I have spoken to suggest this interest helps them build on what has already been done and makes them aware of a broader range of creative possibilities. Some say they find it useful to discover dance artists in the past who were working in ways that are similar to their own practices. For example, Xavier Le Roy, who took part in the 1996 restaging of Rainer's CP-AD, performed the “chair pillow” section from it during his 1999 performative lecture Product of Circumstances. His discovery of ordinary, task-based, and pedestrian movement in Rainer's work affirmed his own research into similar kinds of movement.

T.S. Eliot's “Burnt Norton” initially appeared in 1936, but eventually this poem became the first of the Four Quartets (1943), a cycle expressing the poet's most mature meditations on time and the timeless. The Quartets confirmed Eliot's already well-established position as a modernist poet, but they also suggested a new sense of spiritual resolution, in part reflecting his journey from religious doubt to newfound faith through his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. Throughout his work Eliot had described moments of sublime spirituality, but these do not usually endure within the framework of the early poetry. In “Burnt Norton,” however, he embarked on a sustained exploration of time and transcendence. In a striking invocation of this theme, the speaker alludes to dance as representative of the human experience of timelessness:

Eliot's definition of dance seems paradoxical, claiming that it is neither still nor in motion, yet both. Its spatial and temporal locations are indefinable and unfixed; the place to which Eliot refers cannot be named—the still point is simply there—but the speaker cannot say where.

In 1933, the year Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg launched a “new and rather surprising partnership” with a joint recital in Chicago. Page and Kreutzberg were, on the surface, unlikely artistic collaborators: she, an American ballerina and he, an exponent of the German new dance. Nevertheless, their partnership lasted four years—from 1932 through 1936—a fairly long term considering the usual obstacles to collaboration magnified by physical distance. With Chicago as the focal point they toured the Midwest and other regions of the United States, Japan, and Canada. The collaboration offered the two artists a number of advantages. Page had certain difficulties to surmount in achieving her goal of becoming a choreographic entrepreneur in the post-Diaghilev international ballet world: besides being a woman—a decided disadvantage when it came to being taken seriously as a choreographer, artistic director, and impresario in the ballet world—she lived in Chicago, outside the dance mecca of New York. She could parlay her collaboration with Kreutzberg into a cosmopolitan, modernist identity, thus preempting the threat of consignment to Midwestern obscurity. Kreutzberg, for his part, was in need of a continuous and widening stream of performance venues in which to develop his unique gifts as a solo performer; moreover, he had to contend with the rising fascism and homophobic militancy of the Third Reich as a gay man whose identity was antithetical to the nation-state of which he was ultimately to become a pawn.

The sounds that emanate from the dancers as they begin to crumble toward the floor spews from their bodies in loud painful moans; they reach upwards only to fall back to the ground. A unified group gesture—the initial formulaic but also functional gesture of French baroque declamation—disintegrates into disjointed formations and chaotic noise. Sounds echo off the small performance space, amplifying and confusing the tumultuous din. I do not know how or when the moans become words, but the words resist my understanding because they are being uttered in at least six different languages. Breath. Movement. Sound. Every relay between them starts out in a delicate gesture that is then vocalized, as it appears to fragment. I hear whispers and words out of context. Soon all of the dancers are in vocal spasm. I keep waiting for the music to begin to play.

It is the final showing of a voice and movement class in the dance M.A. program at Freie Universiteit, Berlin. Students are working with choreographer Mark Franko and his assistant Alessandro Rumié on the sonic elements of their own bodies to create a sound score in place of music. The fragments of sound found in Relay (2008) are artifacts. The dancers excavated text from various sources and in a variety of languages.

The articles that follow in this section developed out of an improvised dance and papers presented by a panel of scholars based in the United States and the United Kingdom at the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) 2008 conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

For the past several years I have taught an advanced writing seminar at New York University's Gallatin School called Writing About Performance. While dance is not the only focus—we write about various forms of live art—it is indeed a central component.

The majority of students come to us at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom, where I am a dance lecturer, because they want to develop careers as dancers, choreographers, or dance teachers. They are usually attracted by the opportunity to improve their dance technique and/or to be creative rather than to align themselves with the more conventional avenues of academia, and for most writing will never be a career contender.

A few family snapshots:

1. 1. One day, my father and I stood, chatting, in a bank lobby. “I just don't get it,” he said. “You've got more brains in your head than you have in your feet.”

2. 2. My husband sings in an a cappella chorus, and for one Mother's Day concert we all wore necklaces emblazoned with words our mothers had never said. “Choreography and dance,” mine proclaimed. “What a wonderful career choice!”

3. 3. After watching me perform some years ago, one of my children offered the following critical précis: “Your bra was sticking out.”

I could go on with tales of familial, as well as fraternal and collegial, disinterest and disappointment, not to mention resentment and the occasional frisson linked to artist children and parents, associated with a career that seemingly joins the extremes of narcissism, the temporal and physical limitations mandated by the life cycle of the human body, and the apparent separation from the left-brain activities supported by other fields and disciplines.