The film of Yvonne Rainer performing Trio A was made in 1978, twelve years after she originally danced it, and roughly forty years before I started imagining what it must have felt like.
Sometimes when I’m writing, when I think an idea is about to appear but the words I have don’t quite reveal it, I get impatient. I get critical, judging both ideas and words and inhibiting their inclination to expand into other ideas. And I understand the necessity of constraint, that wanting is one thing and not getting what you want is a fact of life, but still. I want my life to expand into moments that aren’t just reiterations of what I already know.
Yvonne’s so-called “No Manifesto” was meant to clarify what was obvious to her—that dance should be free to be something it wasn’t before.
Yvonne was thirty years old when Trio A burst out of her. Or really, it evolved out, churning and gestating and eventually solidifying into an experience she was able to embody and express in her dance. And fortunately she made the film, evidence of how a body discovers what being can be. Her choreography shows both an experience, and a way to live inside that experience. I say inside because the choreography is a container. And it seems as if it might be possible—by teaching our bodies to inhabit that container, even if for only a few short minutes—to learn the experience.
In the spring of 2017 I decided to take a class. Along with about fourteen dancers and ex-dancers, at a performance space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in an airless room with a vinyl floor, I enrolled in an introductory workshop called Learning Trio A. It was a class that would, by teaching us the individual moves of the dance, give substance to the video we’d all seen of Yvonne, dancing. I signed a contract stipulating that I wouldn’t teach or perform Trio A in the future.
The first step, they say, if you want to change yourself is to know yourself. And although that’s not absolutely true, by learning the steps of Trio A, I was getting to know what my mind was doing, how it wanted some things, rejected other things, and because the mind is a muscle I kept practicing. In French they call it repetition, and the theory is, by repeating an action over and over, knowledge is absorbed by the body. In English we say rehearse, the hearse being a vehicle that carries the dead to the place where the body is buried, planted like a seed, and it also reminds me of hearing. Not so much re-hearing as hearing for the first time, which requires listening, which requires being empty enough to attend to the part of the dance that’s invisible, therefore difficult to think about.
There were bound to be moments when, in the course of learning the dance, having practiced a certain section over and over, I felt I was getting it. But mostly I didn’t.
On the last day of the workshop we were going to perform our individual versions of the dance. Over the course of two weeks we’d taken in this information, using it to inform our bodies, and now we sat on the floor, our backs to the mirrored wall, and the teacher, who looked Irish or Celtic, sat in her folding chair. The first volunteers were the dancers who’d studied Yvonne, the ones who knew the steps, and although I wanted to postpone my own performance, I didn’t want to postpone too long. I didn’t want to be the final performer, my ineptitude sticking in people’s minds. So about halfway through the examination I volunteered. It wasn’t an examination, but I stood up, walked to the place on the floor where the dance was supposed to begin.
My attempt to learn Trio A was bound to fail, partly because, having imagined a euphoria that Yvonne must have felt, all I saw was possibility. And possibilities are fine, but I demanded them. And because I did, the desire to incarnate myself as a version of Yvonne was impossible. Because I wasn’t Yvonne. And can’t be Yvonne. And I can’t be myself because every time I try to be what I am, whatever that is, something demands I be something else. That’s not right. It’s me doing the demanding. And failing to satisfy my demands only makes me more adamant. Writing this essay, I know, isn’t going to change the person who’s writing it, but still, I keep trying. And it’s not about failing better; it’s just failing differently.
Read the full article by John Haskell / The Yale Review
