Carriage Discreteness

Présentée les 15 et 21 octobre 1966, Carriage Discreteness est une performance chorégraphique d’Yvonne Rainer, qui juxtapose différents éléments livrés à l’interprétation du public.

Presented on October 15th and 21st 1966, Carriage Discreteness is a choreographic performance by Yvonne Rainer, who juxtaposes a variety of elements offered to the public for interpretation: displacement of objects and people on the stage, gravitation of mobiles at heights, a conversation about a film, and screen projections. 

This ambitious performance combines the growing interest of the dancer Yvonne Rainer for the cinema and the research carried out by the Judson Dance Theater into everyday gestures. Two planes appear to oppose one another in a complex grid of correspondences and meanings. A profane plane: that of the stage where a group of dancers displace slabs, beams and cubes designed by Carl Andre, just like workers or removal men. As background sounds, the conversation of a man and a woman about a film by Bertolucci. And a heavenly plane: that of objects circulating under the vaulted ceiling of the Arsenal, a rod and a sphere, just like satellites or abstract divinities. Among them, Steve Paxton, an acrobatic angel thrust from the balcony, sweeps through space on a swing until he gradually comes to a standstill above the stage. A reference to circus that we find in the extract from a film by W.C. Fields, followed by a sequence taken from a melodrama with James Cagney. 

We owe 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented in the large building of the Arsenal of the 69th Regiment of New York, in October 1966, to the complicity between the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, an engineer with the telephone company Bell. The concept was simple: allow a dozen artists to achieve the performance of their dreams thanks to the technology of the Bell laboratories.

Born from the experimentations of the members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Judson Dance Theatre, the 9 Evenings mark a decisive step in the changing relationship between art and technology. Evening after evening, projectors, video cameras, transistors, amplifiers, electrodes and oscilloscopes entered the stage at the service of ambitious, futuristic, iconoclastic or poetic visions – all filmed in black and white and in colour. When these films were rediscovered in 1995, Billy Klüver decided, in partnership with Julie Martin and the director Barbro Schultz Lundestam, to produce a series of documentaries reconstructing what had taken place on the stage and during the preparation of the performances. The original material was thus completed by interviews with the protagonists of each performance (artists and engineers) and a few famous guests. The 9 Evenings would thereby be restored to their place in the history of art. 

Source : Sylvain Maestreggi