Born in 1934 in San Francisco, Yvonne Rainer moved to New York City in 1957 to study theater. She found herself more strongly drawn to modern dance than acting, however, and began studying with Edith Stephens, Syvilla Fort, and the staff of the Martha Graham School. In 1960 she returned briefly to her native city to become a part of Ann Halprin╒s workshop program. Back in New York later that year, she danced for Simone Forti and James Waring and studied with Merce Cunningham. She was one of the organizers of the Judson Dance Theater, a focal point for vanguard activity in the dance world throughout the 1960s, and formed her own company for a brief time after the Judson performances ended.
Rainier, who began choreographing her own works in 1961 and continued through the early 1970s, was known as a rebel in the world of modern dance. She rejected ╥spectacle, virtuosity, the star image, and any type of theatrical ╘magic╒╙ in favor of an approach that saw the body more as the source of an infinite variety of movements than as the purveyor of emotion or drama. Many of the elements she employed, such as repetition, patterning, tasks and games, later became standard practice in postmodern choreography.
Her best-known work, ╥Trio A,╙ a section of a larger work called ╥The Mind is a Muscle,╙ consisted of a simultaneous performance by three dancers that included a difficult series of circular and spiral movements. It was widely adapted and interpreted, and was often referred to in the work of other choreographers. In all, she has choreographed forty-one concert works. Her best known works included ╥Terrain╙ and ╥This is a Woman Who╔.╙
Rainier sometimes included filmed sequences in her dances, and in the 1970s she began to detach herself from dance to concentrate on film directing. Her films did not follow narrative conventions, instead combining reality and fiction, sound and visuals, to address major social and political issues. She directed several experimental films about dance and performance, including Lives of Performers, 1972, Film About a Woman Who, 1974, and Kristina Taking Pictures, 1976. Later films include Journeys from Berlin/1971, 1980, The Man Who Envied Women, 1985 and Privilege, 1990. She was a 1990 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award.
