Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Autobiography)

If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested indifficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that aclub sandwich and other meals -- including breakfast -- have remained in the memory of the presentwriter, keep reading. -- from Feelings Are Facts

In this memoir, dancer,choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age.Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-timepsychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots,and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman inpostwar America.

Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmedout by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in SanFrancisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City danceworld. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s,cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including RobertRauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and becameinvolved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how sheconstructed her dances -- including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section,Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies theSwan -- and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes aboutmeeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.

A transformative career in dance and the development of an experimental artist are examined in choreographer, dancer and filmmaker Rainer's engrossing memoir. Organized by concepts, such as her burgeoning sexuality and her cultural memories, rather than by strict chronology, the structure makes a difficult childhood seem even more unmoored and the dizzying parade of men she slept with more kaleidoscopic. Rainer doesn't have many kind words for anyone in her early years and is equally hard on herself. A ferocious intelligence combined with years of psychotherapy have made her intensely self-aware, and Rainer exposes her flaws, acknowledging potential objections to her behavior and character. Rainer's position at the epicenter of postmodernism in dance in the early '60s is illuminated through descriptions and photographs of working and playing with fellow Judson Dance Theater pioneers such as Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton, as well as artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Particularly fascinating are her descriptions of her intentions in creating certain dances and the struggle between directing dancers and allowing improvisation to color the work. The explorations of the Judson crew, including Rainer, continue to influence contemporary dance, and Rainer's chronicle of her journey as an artist is a winning addition to the literature about this groundbreaking era. (July)
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