Memoir by the avant-garde dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker
recounting her childhood years, sexual misadventures, and artistic
explorations.
If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're
interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics,
cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other
meals--including breakfast--have remained in the memory of the present
writer, 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-time psychotherapist)
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 in postwar America.
Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by
her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and
intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic
discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. 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 Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover
and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with
feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about
how she constructed her dances--including The Mind Is a Muscle and its
famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer
Dies the Swan--and about turning from dance to film and back to dance.
And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and
discovering the pleasures of domestic life.
