Yvonne Rainer, Trio A review: watching this thrilling performance for free feels like an enormous privilege
With this work, the choreographer changed the course of dance – and on its 60th anniversary, viewed by babies, tourists and passers-by, it’s as beguiling and hypnotic as ever
At the back of the Turbine Hall, three people are dancing. If it weren’t for the vinyl dancefloor and the white line separating it from the audience, however, you might not immediately realise it. You could be forgiven for thinking that they were performing some idiosyncratic form of Tai chi or, if this were a different dancefloor, that they had taken rather too many drugs: one rolls around on the ground, another stretches his arms out wide, a third sinks to her haunches and touches her toes. All appear so enthralled by the actions of their own bodies as to be oblivious both to their partners onstage and the audience in front of them.
This being Tate Modern on a Friday afternoon, that audience includes not only art school kids dressed in the same casual fashions as the performers onstage, but also babies screeching from pushchairs and mischievous schoolkids shouting heckles from the mezzanine. None of this seems to perturb the dancers. Having completed her routine, one walks away from the mat and disappears through a door at the back of the hall. The others follow in their own time, and the audience applauds. After a short interval, they are replaced on the stage by a new trio of performers, and the dance begins again.
Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A is among the most influential works of art to emerge from that remarkable period in the cultural history of New York from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. The staging at Tate marks the 60th anniversary of its first recital, when it was performed by Rainer (who continues to instruct new dancers in the work) alongside David Gordon and Steve Paxton, and a revolutionary moment in dance as an art form. The reasons for this are dull in the description – it introduced everyday movements into choreography, stripped dance of its traditional theatricality – but quietly thrilling in the observation.
Each performance lasts about five minutes and, if you were to join it halfway through, you might initially think that the dancers were improvising, so naturally does each pose follow from the last. It might only take a second viewing before you realise that the dancers are not only following a strict choreography, but that they are each following the same choreography. It is only that, in executing it at their own speed, they soon fall out of sync. Part of what makes Trio A so compelling to watch is that each performer is licensed to execute the poses at a tempo that feels most appropriate to them, meaning that some hold the pose for a little longer or move more swiftly through certain transitions. There is no imperative to co-ordinate this rhythm, and so idiosyncrasies emerge in the different renditions by dancers spanning a range of ages and body types.
Rainer’s innovation was to remove the psychological drama from dance by insisting that the performers disregard the audience and each other. So you get a trio of people acting out a set of precise instructions for no one’s benefit but their own. This dancer is languid, that dancer has snap; her expressions are more defined, his are more lyrical. I am reminded of those 18th-century portraits that depict the sitter absorbed in an activity – playing a guitar, for instance, or reading a book – rather than looking out to meet the viewer’s gaze. That we are defined by our inner lives rather than by our appearance in the eyes of others is a quintessentially modern idea. Rainer extends that principle to dance. These dancers are not performing for you, but this makes them no less compelling to watch.
The experience is instead hypnotic, particularly with the advantage of those repeated viewings afforded by Tate’s decision to stage it as a looping performance over several hours each day. The action in the choreography is evenly distributed: no pose holds a greater weight than any others, there is no sense of it building to a climax or relaxing in lulls, there is triumph or tragedy. It is in this respect reminiscent of some of the more trancelike music of Philip Glass, another great artist to emerge from the New York scene of the period.
Simply to observe highly trained human beings concentrating absolutely on the execution of a set of physical instructions, with varying degrees of precision or elegance, feels like a privilege. That this should be freely available to anyone in London with a few moments to spare, without having to pay the exorbitant entrance fees that are elsewhere transforming museums into leisure centres for the rich, is to be cherished. For the two hours I am there, the audience drifts in and out as the dancers move and change. It feels appropriate to the work that the dancers should be allowed to get on with their solitary business, as the world revolves around them.