Performance 3: Trio A by Yvonne Rainer
Performance takes place at 12:30 and 4:30 p.m.
Contemporary Galleries, second floor

NEW YORK, NY:  The Museum of Modern Art presents the second and third installments of its Performance Exhibition Series on March 7 and 8, 2009, with live performances dedicated to early choreographic works by Simone Forti (American, b. Italy 1935) and Yvonne Rainer (American, b. 1934)—two key figures of the 1960s minimalist dance movement who defined a new language of physical movement. Three of Simone Forti’s dance constructions from 1961 will be performed at noon, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00 p.m. on both days in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the second floor of the Museum. Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966) will be performed by dancer Cat Patterson, along with artists and non-dancers Jimmy Robert and Ian White, in front of a projection of a historical recording of Rainer’s performance included in the exhibition Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art in the Contemporary Galleries, second floor. That performance will take place at 12:30 and 4:30 p.m. on both days. The Performance Exhibition Series is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, and Jenny Schlenzka, Assistant Curator for Performance, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art.

Both artists have been deeply influenced by Anna Halprin’s revolutionary technique of improvisation, which freed the dancer’s body from the rigid fragmentation and artificiality of choreographed movement. Their works favor the pedestrian over the virtuosic, the everyday over the dramatic, and welcome chance as a creative factor.

The four performances, enacted live in the Museum’s galleries, grew out of Forti’s and Rainer’s work at the legendary Judson Dance Theatre in New York in the 1960s, which coincided with a historical moment of exchange between visual artists, musicians, poets, and dancers.

Rooted in dance rather than a visual arts tradition, Forti’s and Rainer’s choreographies offer an alternative point of reference on what is widely called performance art. In contrast to an individual artist expressing herself through an idiosyncratic performance, the works are based on specific instructions that can be performed by anyone. Their main focus lies on the movement of the performer’s body in space, and by rendering this body unfamiliar, the viewer is invited to reconsider it in terms of its sculptural existence.

Simone Forti
Simone Forti’s three dance constructions from 1961, which invite improvisation and chance, explore the movement of performers’ bodies in relation to one another and to the surrounding space.  In Huddle, a group of dancers huddles together closely, and one after the other, a dancer climbs over the group (in no preordained fashion) forming a living sculptural formation that moves throughout the gallery.  Platforms is a dance construction and duet. Two performers—preferably a man and a woman—lay under wooden platforms and communicate to each other by whistling.  Sound is an essential element in Accompaniments for La Monte’s “2 sounds” and La Monte’s “2 sounds”, which is performed to a recording by minimalist composer La Monte Young. Standing in a large loop suspended from the ceiling, a dancer is wound and unwound. The piece ends when the recording stops.  In addition to the live performances, recordings of Forti’s later works based on her observations and studies of the movements of animals, children, and nature will be screened within the gallery.

The set of performances start on the hour at noon, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00 p.m. in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on the second floor.

Yvonne Rainer
Trio A is Yvonne Rainer’s best-known dance sequence. Since its first presentation in 1966 as part of a larger performance called The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 at Judson Church, it has been performed repeatedly in various formations and contexts by dancers and non-dancers alike. The four-and-a-half minute piece comprises a sequence of unpredictable movements that unfold in a continuous motion, deliberately refusing familiar dance patterns that rest upon arcs of development and climax. Trio A will be performed by dancer Cat Patterson, along with artists and non-dancers Jimmy Robert and Ian White, in front of the projection of a historical recording of Yvonne Rainer’s performance.

The performance takes place at 12:30 and 4:30 p.m. in the Contemporary Galleries on the Museum’s second floor, in the exhibition Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art organized by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings. 

SPONSORSHIP:
The Performance Exhibition Series is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.

ABOUT MoMA’S PERFORMANCE EXHIBITION SERIES:
The Performance Exhibition Series is a two-year series of exhibitions that will bring installations documenting past performances, live re-enactments of historic performances, and original performance pieces to various locations throughout the Museum.  The series began with Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh, a gallery installation documenting the work of this pioneering performance artist on view from January 21 through May 18, 2009.

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