Yvonne Rainer

Born: 1934-11-24

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 Rainer presented her choreography throughout the U.S. and Europe. In 2000 and 2001 Rainer returned to dance via commissions from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation to choreograph work for the White Oak Dance Project, including a 35-minute piece called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Since 1972, Rainer has completed seven feature-length films, beginning with Lives of Performers (1972) and more recently The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990-95), and a Wexner Prize (1995), as well as four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees. Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73 was published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press in 1974; The Films of Yvonne Rainer, a collection of her film scripts, was published by Indiana University Press in 1989; and A Woman Who...: Essays, Interviews, Scripts was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999. Rainer's latest choreographic work, based on Balanchine's AGON, was presented at Dance Theater Workshop, April 2006, subsequently traveling to the Getty Museum. A memoir, Feelings are Facts: A Life, was published by MIT Press in 2006.


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Journeys from Berlin/1971

as uncredited
Released: 1980-01-11

An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.

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Home Movies 1971-81

as uncredited
Released: 1985-01-01

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

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Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer

as Self
Released: 2015-12-12

Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer chronicles the defiant, uncompromising, and highly...

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What Is Cinema?

as Self
Released: 2013-09-06

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock...

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What Maisie Knew

as uncredited
Released: 1975-05-20

The film is about looking. I bet that slight variations of few recurrent elements would...

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Kristina Talking Pictures

as Kristina
Released: 1976-11-02

Kristina, a self-named Hungarian female lion tamer, arrives in New York to become a dance...

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Madame X - An Absolute Ruler

as Josephine de Collage
Released: 1978-02-07

The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring...

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Lives of Performers

as uncredited
Released: 1972-01-01

Embodying Rainer’s aesthetic rigor and wit, the film combines fiction and documentary, script...

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Privilege

as Helen Caldicott
Released: 1990-09-26

Privilege is an intelligently conceived, boldly anarchic, and wickedly insightful exposition on...

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Film About a Woman Who…

as uncredited
Released: 1974-12-11

Rainer’s landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions...

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Salomania

as uncredited
Released: 2009-01-01

Salomania reconstructs a dance: the ‘dance of the seven veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent...

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