ROGER COPELAND
No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic
and make believe .. . no to involvement of performer and spec-
tator .. . no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the per-
former ... no to moving or being moved .
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In the early 1970s, Rainer began to make films ; and in a subse–
quent interview with Jonas Mekas, she described the satisfaction
that came from being "totally outside of what I was making ." Per–
haps inevitably, Rainer abandoned live performance for filmmaking
soon thereafter.
I believe there is a lesson to be learned here: What began for
many postmodern choreographers as a repudiation of primitivism
ended up as a repudiation of dance. Rainer at least was honest
enough to admit that she had stopped producing dances. That, of
course, was not always the case for many of her colleagues . As the
composer Steve Reich once quipped, "For a long time during the
1960s, one would go to the dance concert where no one danced, fol–
lowed by the party where everyone danced."
Coming in
PARTISAN REVIEW
• Roger Shattuck on the 1935 Paris Writers' Congress
• Fiction by Sergei Dovlatov, Yuz Aleshkovsky,
and Joseph McElroy
• Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on writing biographies
• Glenway Wescott on Marianne Moore and other poets
• Eugene Goodheart on V.S. Naipaul
• Sandra Gilbert on Rider Haggard
• Dan Jacobson on English migratory workers
