Yvonne Rainer: RoS Indexical

What does performance art mean to you and what does it feel like to be included in a performance-art biennial?
I’ve never been included in one before so I can’t answer that part. I returned to dance seven years ago, so this is my field. Are you making a distinction between performance and dance or choreography?

Is there one for you?
No. [Laughs] Performance art, as it’s come to be known in the past 20 years, is a hybrid of speech and movement or actions, like Karen Finley and Marina Abramovic and others. I’m a choreographer, so I deal with arrangements of bodies in space; it’s a somewhat different discipline. Of course, there’s all kinds of dance now that verges on performance art, and in some ways this current piece, RoS Indexical, verges on performance art. The dancers actually make sounds. But I always spoke in my early work in the ’60s—I used language and movement and mixed things up. Games. I always thought of myself as a choreographer; of course, this was long before the term performance art emerged with artists from the visual arts entering the field.

How does multimedia art maintain its relevance in the age of YouTube?
For one thing, it’s live. YouTube is very fragmentary, it’s very spontaneous, and it’s more like a visual chatroom. I enjoy a live audience. I call myself a technophobe. I don’t easily navigate cyberspace and computer technology. In fact, it was clear to me that I didn’t want any video projections in my set. There are words that become visible, but they dangle on banners. It’s very low-tech, and they’re pulled from offstage. There’s no electronic technology involved, and I like that kind of primitiveness. The language as print on an enlarged page.

What does the word radical mean to you?
In terms of art? It’s one of these words like avant-garde. Well, to put it simply, radical art is something you haven’t seen before, and that’s rather difficult [to achieve] today. Even in the ’60s, there was this saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun; there are just different ways of putting it together.” I guess the word radical implies a certain kind of resistance—there’s a political edge to it, either explicit or implied. In RoS Indexical, one of the words is terror, which is with us in all kinds of ways, from the lips of our criminal President to its psychological implications. Radical is a positive thing. Even in abstract or formal choreography, I try to insert moments of outrage. Certainly, as one of my source materials is the myth of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which was a completely outrageous event, I’m trying to invoke outrage in all kinds of ways.

How would you describe your piece to someone who would have no idea what to expect?
I call it a revision of Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The source materials vary from the BBC dramatization of the making of The Rite of Spring called Riot at the Rite. I drew a lot of images from that, with the Finnish National Ballet performing a so-called reconstruction of The Rite of Spring. But I also bring in other material including Groucho Marx and Robin Williams and Sarah Bernhardt and all kinds of gestural materials into the mix. I like to call it a pedagogical vaudeville, as it’s both a kind of pedagogical reference or teaching instrument, but also it’s very funny and a mixture of things in the way vaudeville was. It’s an entertainment.

Did you choose the Hudson Theatre?
Yes. We went around looking at various spaces and I was intrigued with the 19th-century jewel-box look of this restored theater. It seemed appropriate for the piece, and I think it was built around the early 20th century.

Are you going to re-create that riot?
In the New York audience? I doubt it. [Laughs] They’ve seen everything.

RoS Indexical is at the Hudson Theatre at the Millennium Broadway Hotel (145 W 44th St between Sixth and Seventh Aves, 212-768-4400) Nov 18 and 19.