ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Yvonne Rainer’s 1967 piece Convalescent Dance in the context of the aging body in dance. A perhaps unforeseen side effect of the aesthetic revolution brought about in the 1960s by members of Judson Dance Theater has been an expansion of the performance options for older dancers. When I was teaching in New York in 1999 I was lucky enough to see Yvonne Rainer return to Judson Memorial Church to perform Trio A Pressured, a new programme of works based on her best-known piece, Trio A. Rainer was then 65 years old. Steve Paxton, who danced with her in this, was 60. In 2008, Trisha Brown presented an exhibition of her drawings at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis titled So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, during which she performed some of her hybrid drawing dances. At the time she was 72. Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer – all of whom were associated with Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s – have all gone on dancing into their sixties or seventies. My aim in this chapter is to explain how the aesthetic revolution of minimalism in dance, which these dancers largely initiated, has resulted in changes to ideas about dance and aging. Dancing Trio A in 1999 at Judson Memorial Church, Rainer was a gaunt, slightly frail figure, having survived breast cancer in the 1990s. Back in 1967, while recovering from major surgery, she had danced Trio A as Convalescent Dance during a dance concert arranged as a protest against the Vietnam War. I shall argue that Convalescent Dance exemplifies the revolution in ideas about aesthetics and the performeraudience relationship that has contributed to opening up new options for theatre dance that enable us today to look differently at older dancers.
