ABSTRACT
For audience members, the only way out of a concert of dance at Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s was across the performance space. Yvonne Rainer told Lyn Blumenthal that, in a concert shared with Steve Paxton and David Gordon1 at which she first presented Trio A: ‘People trudged unhappily, disgruntled, disconsolately across the space to get out. You had to be pretty disgusted – pretty unhappy to make a spectacle of yourself in that way’ (Rainer 1999: 65). When Blumenthal asked whether she had taken this as a criticism of her work, Rainer replied: ‘I was awfully excited about Trio A. I felt that I had done something difficult and new’ (ibid.). Rainer had confidence in her work that did not just come from supportive reviews by writers such as Jill Johnston. As I shall demonstrate, it came from a process of thinking through, in a theoretical way and writing about the radical consequences of what she was doing in her polemical statement that begins ‘NO to spectacle’ and in her 1966 essay ‘A quasi survey of some “minimalist” tendencies in the quantitatively minimal dance activity amidst the plethora, or an analysis of Trio A’ (henceforth ‘Quasi survey’).
