Une femme qui…

A woman who …

Dancer, choreographer, performer, filmmaker, and writer, Yvonne Rainer is a central figure in the history of the New York avant-garde. After studying with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, she created her first choreographies and founded the Judson Dance Theater together with other dancers. She started making short films, which she included in her performances, in 1967; she later turned to a cinema that put the accent on language, and showed a growing interest in theory. Her first feature-length films projected her to the forefront of independent cinema: ignoring narrative conventions, they question the place of the spectator and combine reality and fiction, dialogue and theoretical discourse, exploring social and political questions. Her most recent films reintegrate conventional narrative structures to address personal questions with political relevance.

“Une femme qui…” brings together written texts and films, a selection of interviews, symposia, and essays, which constitute Rainer’s biography. The singularity of her culture, her intimate preoccupations, and complex writings, not devoid of humor, are all elements that reveal her personality and illuminate the reading of her films. Her writings, which span three decades, explore questions of representation and identity, feminism, age, sickness, the menopause, sexual dissatisfaction, and political violence.

The book has been edited in collaboration with Yvonne Rainer by a team of teachers from the CCC Critical Curatorial Cybermedia Program of the Haute école d’art et de design in Geneva.

The book is part of the Positions series, co-published with Les Presses du réel and dedicated to artists’ writings.

Only available by les presses du réel. Limited stock.