Trio ABC

1966 was an extraordinary year for culture. Bergman’s Persona, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, Richard Hamilton at the Tate, Oldenburg’s Soft Bathtub, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, the opening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Yvonne Rainer performs Trio A for the first time.

It is easy in retrospect to be a bit blasé about this period as if the spirit of the sixties was some sort of inexorable force, less a consequence of human action or praxis than something in the air, a prevailing wind of change. The presentation of Trio A at the Judson Memorial Church in New York was however a critical happening and exemplary of the new demands that the arts were making on the ‘conservative’ structures of the establishment. The experimental, political and collective gestures that were emerging in the New York scene art at this time are neatly described by dance theorist and Rainer biographer Sally Banes.

“…numerous small, overlapping, sometime rival networks of artists were forming the multifaceted base of an alternative culture that would flower in the counterculture of the late 1960’s, seed the art movements of the 1970’s, and shape the debates about postmodernism in the 1980’s and beyond. Inspired by–and fully conscious of–half a century of avant-garde activity, and sparked by visionary voices of the Fifties, these artists were forging new notions of art in their lives and in their works, and–through their art–new notions of community, of democracy, of work and play, of the body, of women’s roles, of nature and technology, of the outsider and of the absolute”.

In this context Trio A is often cited as a pivotal work, the first important statement of postmodern dance, one of the most studied and discussed works of modern dance history and part of the canon of every dance theory course! So the question arises ‘Why put on a version of Trio A in Tensta in 2010?” In less than two weeks time we will be presenting a ‘re-worked’ version of the piece choreographed by Tanja Tuurala. Tuurala’s version is a Tensta one, a local version that has been developed and rehearsed at Tensta Community Center and at Tensta Konsthall so it is worth setting the original in its own context. In the early Sixties the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village became the epicentre for new dance. It was Rainer herself after seeing a poetry reading there who suggested it as a venue for the experiments that were emerging from Robert Dunn’s choreography classes at the Cunningham Studio and John Waring’s concerts at the Living Theater. The group that emerged, The Judson Dance Theater, reads like a who’s who of postmodern dance with Steve Paxton, Judith Dunn, Fred Herko, David Gordon and Elaine Summers all joining Rainer. But is perhaps the mix of dance, music and visual arts that singled out the JDT with Robert Rauschenberg and composer Philip Corner being amongst the regulars. The non-hierarchical structure of the JDT echoed the openness of disciplines and the organisation apparently worked with an absolute democracy, major decisions being voted on by everyone. There are many stories of the chaos of JDT meetings but the descriptions also often have a sense of euphoria. It is important therefore to see that Rainer’s work emerges from a desire to construct an alternative community and in that sense was radical on many levels. Unlike many of the visual arts groups of the Sixties such as the neo Dadaists and Fluxus, men did not dominate the JDT. In many respects the feminist agenda that Banes amongst many others sees as central to the democracy of the Sixties New York avant-garde art scene found one of its most defined expressions in this eclectic group. Trio A is without doubt a ‘political’ work as Rainer’s own description of her practice form that time amplifies. Here is a passage from the program notes of Rainer’s The Mind is a Muscle from ’68 (The title under which Trio A first appeared two years earlier).

“If my rage at the impoverishment of ideas, narcissism, and disguised sexual exhibitionism of most dancing can be considered puritan moralizing, it is also true that I love the body–its actual weight, mass and unenhanced physicality. It is my overall concern to reveal people as they are engaged in various kinds of activities–alone, with each other, with objects and away from the superstylization of the dancer. Interaction and cooperation on the one hand; substantiality and inertia on the other”.

Trio A emerges out of a clear feminist political intention to sublimate the voyeuristic aspects of dance. The body, the female body specifically was re-contextualised without the coquettish and seductive trappings associated with much modernist dance. As much as Sixties sexual liberation was seen as just that; a liberation, but it also quickly became another form of subjugation. Rainer’s work is critically positioned as a questioning of the relation of audience to dancer and in Trio A the dancers never make eye contact with the viewer thus repudiating any intimacy, refusing the gaze. It would be disingenuous not to add that Rainer’s strategies of refusal at this time were not just gestures of rejection created by removing the overt sexuality of dance practice. In other works from this time she also made specific use of the body as a site of sexual desire as a means of questioning power relationships. In her piece Words Words with Steve Paxton the two appeared in G-strings (with pasties for Rainer,) she also appropriated the moves form strip tease bump and grind dances and poses from the Kamasutra into her work. The body is not effaced but becomes a political site.

Through its many forms Trio A has retained a political edge. In a later version Rainer performed it whilst convalescing after major surgery as a tribute to the returning wounded Vietnam veterans. In 1970 it was performed naked with American flags tied to the dancers necks as a protest against artists who had been arrested for ‘desecrating’ the American flag. Trio ABC is no less political but there are marked differences. Although the JDT were concerned about issues of race and ethnicity it would be wrong to see this as a central focus. To perform Trio A in Tensta is to add a recognition of the marked site of difference that the area represents. Unlike the middle class intellectualism that distinguishes the collaborators at Judson Church, Tensta is characterized by a population that is 87% non ethnic Swedish with the largest group of recent arrivals including refugees and asylum seekers coming from Somalia and Afghanistan. So to present Trio A as Trio ABC choreographed by a local resident, Tanja Tuurala and including a young local dancer Rani Al Hallak is to add a very particular new emphasis. The work is a duet between an experienced dancer and a novice, between a large young man and a much smaller woman. In this respect Tuurala is following Rainer’s original plan of making the piece without an immediate relation to expertise. In the many versions that have been staged of the work there have been dancers and non dancers included and part of the intention of the original was a denial of the trained dancer’s body as the sole proprietor of dance itself. It will be fascinating to see how a classic work of postmodern dance takes yet another turn.