Yvonne Rainer

Performance image of Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical, featuring Emily Coates, Sally Silvers, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Yvonne Rainer.

This work is a wonderful meditation on how we experience art, using recordings of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (with commentary) and combining daily and extra-daily movements as if to suggest both the familiar and the unfamiliar. At one point, presumably as a gesture to Rainer’s ongoing critique of the performer-audience hierarchy, members of the audience (obviously planted, as some were dressed in homage to the original Rite of Spring) began to heckle and shout at the dancers (who at that point wore what appeared to be kleenex boxes on their feet) and invade the stage. Phrases like, “Go back to Scarsdale!” and “This isn’t art!” could be heard before the “irate” viewers returned to their seats. The effect was quite funny and unexpected.

At one point, a number of banners dropped from the ceiling and unfurled to reveal various words printed on either side. Spinning slowly, they made a kind of ever-shifting poem in the air.