Dance is Hard to See – Transmitting Trio A (1966) and other Acts of Preservation

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Trio A (1966) by Yvonne Rainer, taught by Sara Wookey being performed by dancers at Palazzo Grassi museum. Photo by Matteo de Fina.

My practice and research look at ways dance lives in the museum as an artwork, a practice and a form of relation that informs the human ecology within the museum.

In 2015, I conducted a series of interviews with curators and dance artists on what dance in the museum means to them. Those interviews are published in my book Who Cares: Dance in the Gallery and Museum (1) and I have a forthcoming monograph Spatial Relations: Dance in the Changing Museum (2).

Sara Wookey, Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum, Siobhan Davies Dance, 2015. Purchase the book here.

The title of this short essay, “Dance is Hard to See … ,” suggests that dance is difficult to see. This question of seeing dance takes on a double meaning in the context of conservation: Firstly, it can signify seeing dance as a spectator and, secondly, it can suggest dance as a thing to “see” into the future.

The dance Trio A by choreographer Yvonne Rainer was initially performed in 1966 as a trio as part of the work The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1, and there is a 1978 digitized film recording of the dance performed for the camera by Rainer.

Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (2008) that the crucial site of dance, such as Rainer’s interventions in the 1960s, was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer—or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer’s art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display. Through close readings of Rainer’s works of the 1960s Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called “the seeing difficulty.”

In her book, A Mind is a Muscle (2007), Catherine Wood writes, “Lambert-Beatty has analyzed the way in which Trio A’s structure as a continuous stream of movement without breaks or still moments deliberately elude photographic capture as still image.” Wood also suggests that Trio A is a “fine art object” (2007:20). She claims that Rainer created “model forms of social relations that re-imagined prevailing social scripts that determine how people might act, cooperate, be alone and together. Trio A’s existence in material form (i.e. as dance) is also founded upon a network of relationships that enables its transmission.”

I am one of seven dancers “certified” by Rainer to “transmit” the dance through bodily and oral instructions. Along with Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Linda K Johnson, Elliot Mercer, Emmanuèle Phuon and Shelley Senter and myself are the selected custodians of the work and hold the task of carrying the dance in our muscle memory (for Rainer does not agree to the 1978 film being used to teach or learn the dance).

Rainer’s choice of who transmits her dances came out of one-to-one professional relations and personal friendships she has with each of the transmitters, including myself. This speaks volumes about dance’s web of inter-personal connection and relation. How might the relations (dancer to choreographer, transmitter to transmitter, transmitter to learner) be included in the archive of Rainer’s work (the majority of which is held at the Getty Research Center and online with Performa)? Pip Laurenson’s article “Charisma and Desire in the Conservation of Performance Art” in the first volume of Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (edited by Hanna B. Hölling, Jules Pelta Feldman and Emilie Magnin, Routledge 2023) speaks about the network and the artist, and the need to consider and develop an understanding of such social network and its evolving role in sustaining artworks. I am interested in mapping the constellation of relations between Rainer and her seven transmitters and how that constellation has and will shift, change and re-arrange itself over time and into the future.

Although Trio A has been notated using the technique of Labanotation, Rainer holds by her belief that the best way to learn the dance is to be taught or have it transmitted by one of the dancers she has selected.

To capture the movements, spatial and temporal directives and precise language Rainer uses in the transmission of Trio A (and as I experienced in the studio with her), I have created a set of approximately one hundred index cards that contain my hand-drawn illustrations and words in the form of quotes from Rainer and my own descriptions. This personal notation system can be helpful for me in capturing the names of movements and directives of Rainer as a certified transmitter of her dance. It also serves as a personal archive of the dance for when I no longer can reference Rainer herself or doubt my bodily memory.

First of a series of 100 index cards that make up my personal notation system of Trio A (1966)

Wood claims that Trio A is an “editioned” artwork taught person-to-person as a kind of “code” (2007: 93). Each time I’m traveling to transmit the dance I have this very poetic feeling of bringing information in my body, a dance embedded in my muscles and bones, a vessel carrying information, history and stories. I do not consider it a “code” but more of a map or script of movement and text inside of the body/mind.

This task of carrying Rainer’s iconic dance into the future leaves me with a curiosity of ways in which the dance can be transmitted but also how certain methodologies, bodily movement, politics of collaboration and collectivity, relationality and value systems of socio-spatial-temporal organisation might live on and come alive through the idea of “mobilising the archive.”

Work of Maaike Bleeker and Laura Karreman as part of the Transmission in Motion interest group at the University of Utrecht has put forward thinking that suggests to

[s]hift attention from meaning and knowledge of dance towards dance as partner in dialogue in rethinking meaning and knowledge from the perspective of permanent transfer, rather than storage.

And […] exchange and transmission of archives by setting knowledge in motion. A key affordance of such projects is to create awareness about the exclusions and absences in our existing systems of knowledge and invite a reconsideration of the role that archives play in them.

Other case studies I will address attempt to “mobilise the archive” in the way they hold influence of Rainer’s work on my own practices. These performative works of mine in collaboration with architect Rennie Tang and others amplify the complexities and possibilities of engaging with some of the approaches of Rainer’s dances. This influence allows a way in to see and experience aspects of dance making, to make them visible and to share them more widely.  The influence of working closely with Rainer that comes through in these works gives access to certain sets of values and ways of working that include collaboration, collectivity, shared leadership, an invitation for anyone to dance while creatively rubbing up against institutional boundaries, behaviours and policies.

Examples of my projects include Performing Navigations: ReMapping the Museum
(2010) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles which involved modes of collaboration, everyday movement in the museum stretched further towards performative action and inviting in bodily gestures of rest, play and response. Another example of my work is Punt.Point (2014-2017) commissioned and collected by the Van Abbemuseum which stretched the everyday gesture as performance in the museum by inviting visitors to perform physical gestures of rest, exploration and play in the museum space. This project also included close working relations with curator Christine Berndes and between curation and mediation departments of the museum. It also necessitated a collaboration with museum staff engaging skills and knowledges of the space that were then built into the work’s manual. Instructions for re-installing the work in the future included employing a dance artist to work alongside a guard and curator to take decisions of positioning of aspects of the project in the museum. The Punt.Point work builds on the ethos of interdisciplinary collaboration while recognising different sets of knowledge about
art, body, movement, space and time.

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Sara Wookey & Rennie Tang, Punt.Point (2014-2017), performative artwork, acquired in 2018 by the Van Abbemuseum.

Erin Brannigan’s book The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art (2023) discusses dance in the museum as being restless and as something that continuously moves to spaces and places that support it–a mobile form that eludes fixity. When discussing dance, Brannigan iterates the word “intermedial,” not as something that is an “undefined, conservative model of dance” but as a “holistic notion of experimental, intermedial contemporary dance” that is expansive, inclusive and unlimited. In my review of Brannigan’s book, forthcoming in Dance Chronicle, I address the tension between conserving dance and allowing it its inherent slipperiness, complexities and unfixed-ness while, at the same time, recognising Brannigan’s instance that “dance forces institutional change through internal procedures for collection, conservation and archiving” (2023:6).

I am interested in how the traces of notes and systems of remembering play a role in the transmission process of dance. I am intrigued by the relational networks involved in the creation and dissemination of dance, as well as the ways methodologies, value systems, and approaches within dance are carried forward through subsequent works. I explore how these works facilitate the mobilization of resources and enhance accessibility to the processes of creation, including the inherent value systems. My interest lies in the “behind the scenes” activities—the notes, the relationships, the methods—and in bringing these aspects forward. These can not only invite dance’s aliveness but also inform the processes of preservation. I am committed to making the less-seen or difficult-to-see aspects of dance more visible through archiving, conserving, and collecting, provided that dance does not become fixed, rigid, or immobile.

Sara Wookey, photo by Camilla Greenwell

Sara Wookey, a dance artist, choreographer and scholar, reflects on Yvonne Rainer’s work Trio A (1966) through the lens of bodily and verbal transmission, methods of remembering and material pedagogical tools. She also discusses her own work, Punt.Point, which entered the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2018. In the pursuit of reactivating and preserving dance and expanded choreographic practices in the art museum, what might be missing in the performance archive and in the recording of the transmission processes? How might the intertwined practices of collecting and conserving dance and performance be informed by collaborative, cross-disciplinary methodologies derived from dance, and how can we embrace multiple forms of knowledge?