ABSTRACT
The first performance of the complete evening-length version of Yvonne Rainer’s The Mind is a Muscle at the Anderson Theater in New York on 11 April 1968, took place only a week after Martin Luther King Jr was shot by a sniper in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April. King had been working on bringing together the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements, and if one looks for dance reviews, listings, and advertisements relating to Rainer and her contemporaries in the pages of the Village Voice newspaper during April, they appear near, and sometimes side by side with announcements of a rally that King had been due to attend, as well as meetings to discuss resistance to the war, help for draft dodgers, and other oppositional, anti-war activities. Towards the end of Chapter 3 I briefly discussed Rainer’s 1968 programme note for The Mind is a Muscle. In this she asserted that ‘Just as ideological issues have no bearing on the nature of the work, neither does the tenor of current political and social conditions have any bearing on its execution’, adding ‘The world disintegrates around me’ (Rainer 1974: 71). This was at the beginning of a long summer of mass political action by students and young people in many parts of the world. In the US, King’s assassination sparked off riots in Washington, DC and there were riots in Chicago in the August during the Democratic Party’s national convention: in Paris, rioting provoked major political crises, while in Prague it brought about an invasion by the combined armies of Warsaw Pact countries. In Chapter 3 I argued that while ideological issues might not therefore have had any bearing on the nature or execution of Rainer’s dance work, they were nevertheless connected. Her feeling of horror at seeing a Vietnamese shot dead on TV confirmed the rightness of protesting against the war in Vietnam. Furthermore, the same feeling confirmed the rightness of creating and performing work that valued the actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality of the minimal dancing body, leading to her concluding state-
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This chapter examines the complex and sometimes problematic relationship between avant-garde art and social and political events during the 1960s. It argues that, by breaking down, blurring, or transgressing artistic conventions and disciplinary boundaries, artists associated with Judson Dance Theater opened up new spaces in which to place dancing bodies side by side with events and thereby generated new social and political meanings. In her 1968 programme statement, Rainer was claiming the freedom to call things into question, a freedom that was central to the turbulent events of 1968. As Julia Kristeva observes:
There was no nihilism in the contestation that burned up that month of May 1968; instead it was a violent desire to take over the norms that govern the private as well as the public, the intimate as well as the social, a desire to come up with the new, perpetually contestable configurations.
