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.