The Brooklyn Rail

In the prefatory program notes for Yvonne Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets (1965/2019), Village Voice dance critic Jill Johnston prepared audience members for what they might encounter: “Improvisation, indeterminacy, repetition, poetry, romance, games, objects, dance movement, non-dance movement, manic behavior, expansive behavior, ‘irresponsible noises’.” Thudding into existence at the tail end of the Judson Dance Theater (1962–65), which structurally yoked pedestrian movements to conceptual games and Cageian chance operations, Parts of Some Sextets debuted in March 1965 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Judson Memorial Church in New York City (ironically enough, eliciting a mixed review by Johnston). This “dance for 10 people and 12 mattresses,” as Rainer called it, had a glitching, stuttering structure derived from a chart wherein the x-axis denoted 30-second intervals of time and the y-axis indicated a menu of thirty-one actions, such as “Bent-over walk” and “Human flies on mattress pile.” Rainer determined the movements’ order and duration by making random pencil marks across the chart; then, she filled in the initials of the performers (a mix of trained and untrained dancers, including Rainer herself, Deborah Hay, and Robert Rauschenberg) to indicate who would execute each action.

A dance to which the page was integral—fittingly for the linguistically inclined Rainer, who has penned a number of essays on her choreographies—Parts of Some Sextets was not only scored via a chart, but also timed to a book: Performers were cued by an audio tape of Rainer reading excerpts from the diary of William Bentley (1759–1819), a Salem minister who fastidiously recorded notable local events (an eclipse, a death, the arrival of an elephant). At times, the minister’s vignettes wholly diverged from the action unfolding live onstage, evoking a sense of cross-century parallel play; at other points, the two subtly dovetailed, loosely braiding past and present. The temporal layering in this now-legendary dance was complicated further when Rainer, in collaboration with dance scholar and choreographer Emily Coates, restaged the piece for the first time in fifty-four years in November 2019, as a Performa commission at Brooklyn’s Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center. Now, four years on, Performa, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Lenz Press have released a book occasioned by the revival. Organized by Rainer and Coates and designed by visual artist Nick Mauss (who, like Coates, performed in the 2019 iteration), Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 is an invaluable record of the life of a dance and efforts to reanimate it from archival remnants. While a project of this nature—particularly one regarding an artist as lionized as Rainer—could easily devolve into pure hagiography, Remembering a Dance retains a measure of criticality through its polyphony of voices, not all of whom seem convinced that the dance should have been revived (or at least, not in the way that it was).

Akin to Work: 1961–73 (1974/2020), a sweeping compilation of archival ephemera from the early years of Rainer’s career, this (slimmer) single-dance book assembles a wealth of archival material, including reproductions of old photographs and contact sheets depicting the work’s rehearsal and performance (snapped by Al Giese and Peter Moore); flyers and programs; Rainer’s handwritten notes, lists, and charts; Johnston’s review; and Rainer’s retrospective essay on the dance, published in the Tulane Drama Review in Winter 1965. These materials are interpolated by their contemporary counterparts such as updated program notes penned by Rainer and Coates and photographs from 2019 rehearsals and performances. Also featured is a roundtable with Rainer, Coates, and Mauss; a detailed accounting by Coates of her experience in Rainer’s archives; and shorter essays considering the performance from distinct vantage points, authored by curator Kathy Noble, artist David Thomson, writer Lynne Tillman, and art historian Soyoung Yoon.

As Coates’s essay makes clear, it was a prodigious undertaking to reconstruct and reconfigure what Rainer began to refer to as “the mattress monster”—a monster perhaps not only because it roared back to life once its heteroclite component parts (and some fresh ones) had been sutured into a new whole, but also because it prompted Rainier to pen her famous “No manifesto” (1964), which in the ensuing decades would endlessly dog her as the lens through which her entire oeuvre was often read. Coates’s text lays out some impediments to the monster’s reanimation. As Rainer moved away from choreography and toward filmmaking in the 1970s, Parts of Some Sextets was among those dances that exited the embodied space of repertory to exist instead in the form of archival ephemera. Furthermore, unlike Rainer’s famous Trio A (1966), which was filmed in 1978, Parts of Some Sextets had never been filmed. Coates, with Rainer’s guidance, gathered the extant ephemera—namely, the original score (minus the final third, which had been lost), a list of verbal cues from Bentley’s diary, and the audio recording (rediscovered a month before the performance)—from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where Rainer’s archive is housed, and the Rauschenberg Foundation in New York. Because the score had been cut short, Rainer reinvented the final third of the dance for the revival; there were also specific movements, like “Corridor Solo,” that she didn’t fully remember and had to partly reconceive. This flexible, playful engagement with the archive chimes with Rainer’s habitual practice, since her return to choreography in 1999, of “raiding her icebox,” or appropriating fragments of earlier dances for new works. Coates’s essay fluidly incorporates snippets from Rainer’s old notebooks and the pair’s email exchanges; as in Rainer’s work, the archive is cast as a lively and (re)generative site.

Raiding history’s icebox is not always such an innocuous thing. To repurpose Bentley’s diaries, for example, is to bring the occasionally fraught musings of a long-dead minister into the present; to restage a Judson Dance Theater performance is to foreground a group whose recognized members were all white and able-bodied. In an effort to diversify the cast in the remake, Rainer and Coates invited three performers of color, including Thomson, to participate. Among the response-style essays dealing with the dance’s reception in a contemporary context, Thomson’s is particularly compelling. The inclusion of performers of color, he argues, did not negate the colonial histories and white gaze underpinning the piece. In one instance, he was thrown to find himself soloing to Bentley’s description, flatly relayed by Rainer, of the death of a Black servant named Jack. At another point, the choreography directed an all-white group of performers to perch atop a stack of mattresses and observe the Black performers; then, unwittingly reinscribing the erasure of Black bodies from the archive, Performa elected to use a photograph of the all-white group as a promotional image. “As American history is steeped in the contradictions of equality and false constructs of race, the history of postmodernism in dance is based on the false premise of neutrality,” Thomson writes, adding that “[Parts of Some Sextets] cannot escape the reality of the village in which it lives.”

Could the reconstitution process have been made more horizontal without undermining Rainer’s authorship, or alternatively, with recognition that some concerns supersede matters of authorship? Could the undertaking have involved more sensitivity to and discussion of racialized histories—including acknowledgement that archives, like bodies, are never neutral—and if so, could the wrongs that Thomson describes have been averted? And if not—if fraught racial dynamics are constitutionally embedded in Parts of Some Sextets—then does it still merit a revival by virtue of its historical importance? If it does, how might it be contextualized ethically, with care and depth? On this front, Remembering a Dance has some questions, and answers.