︎ English version, available below, please scroll down! Please note that the interview has been conducetd first in english and then translated into French. The Pdf version with image documentation is available here.
Après et à propos de Parts of Some Sextets (1965-2019)
Un entretien avec Nick Mauss, par Arlène Berceliot Courtin
Artiste basé à New York, Nick Mauss n’a de cesse d’interroger les frontières séparant pratique artistique, curating, écriture et publication ainsi que les distinctions établies entre les arts appliqués, les arts visuels et la performance. En 2014, Célia Bernasconi, conservatrice en chef au Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, a initié une collaboration avec Mauss, tout d’abord en l’invitant à participer à l’exposition Portraits d’intérieurs, puis en lui confiant la scénographie et la conception du catalogue de Designing Dreams : A Celebration of Léon Bakst (2016), ainsi que la rétrospective consacrée cette année à Christian Bérard, Excentrique Bébé. L’intérêt de Mauss pour les dynamiques réprimées à l’œuvre entre les histoires de l’art et de la performance se trouve motivé par l’opportunité de puiser dans les collections uniques du NMNM, dont une grande partie illustrent l’interdépendance entre les avant-gardes de la peinture européenne et la scénographie pour le théâtre, l’opéra, ou encore le ballet. En 2018, Nick Mauss a réalisé une exposition hybride au Whitney Museum of American Art, intitulée Transmissions. Réunissant des documents d'archives, des œuvres et des performances au cours desquelles les danseur·se·s recréaient ces trajectoires historiques, l'exposition était concentrée sur la transposition du paradigme du ballet collaboratif, héritage de Diaghilev transposé aux États-Unis, au début du XXe siècle. L’intention de Transmissions était de re-considérer le ballet moderniste en tant que forme artistique interdisciplinaire, étonnamment queer, précédant - et parfois annonçant - les expérimentations qui marqueront l'art et la performance des années 1960. À travers ce titre pluriel, l’exposition explorait l'interprète en tant que personnage et le·a danseur·seuse en tant qu'émetteur·rice et/ou récepteur·rice de la danse moderne. Initié après l'annulation d'un vol pour New York en mars 2020, cet entretien se déroule des premiers jours de la pandémie jusqu’à aujourd'hui. Prenant comme thème principal l’analyse du rôle des archives dans la performance, il souligne la participation de Nick Mauss dans la reprise d’une danse originale d’Yvonne Rainer intitulée Parts of Some Sextets (1965), commandée par la biennale Performa en 2019. Il interroge ainsi le passage personnel de Nick Mauss de l'archive à la scène, sa relation à la danse post-moderne et certaines des questions et déviations surprenantes inhérentes à tous processus de re-création et de re-constitution historique.
Arlène Berceliot Courtin: Vous avez participé à la reprise de Parts of Some Sextets (qui en raison de sa complexité n'avait pas été présentée depuis 1966), une danse fondamentale du répertoire d’Yvonne Rainer réalisée en collaboration avec Emily Coates dans le cadre d’une commande de la biennale Performa, en 2019. Avant de participer à ce processus, quelle était votre connaissance de l'œuvre d'Yvonne Rainer ?
Nick Mauss : Je pense que je connaissais parfaitement le langage de Rainer lorsque j’ai accepté de prendre part à ce projet. Au cours des décennies précédentes, j’ai assisté, dès que possible, à des représentations de ses œuvres « tardives », à New York et ailleurs, parfois même plusieurs fois de suite. J’ai vu certains de ses films pendant et après mes études, et j’ai aussi assisté aux premières recréations de ses œuvres des années 1960 par le White Oak Dance Project (compagnie au sein de laquelle Emily Coates s’est produite). L'œuvre de Rainer a ouvert et reconfiguré toutes mes idées, notamment sur la manière dont l'art, la danse ou l'identité queer se construisent. J'étais séduit par la documentation photographique du travail chorégraphique d'Yvonne (telle qu'elle circulait dans les catalogues et les revues contemporaines ou plus anciennes) et aussi par la tonalité très particulière de son écriture. Tout ceci a éveillé ma curiosité à propos du Judson [Dance Theater][1] et plus généralement des histoires liées à la scène new yorkaise en général [aussi appelée : downtown performance [2]], ce qui m'a ensuite conduit aux expérimentations menées par Jill Johnston qui introduisait des éléments autobiographiques dans ses textes critiques sur l’art et la danse.[3]Ma rencontre avec Rainer a été comme un effet domino.
Son livre Work 1961-73 et les images qu'il contient des représentations de Parts of Some Sextets en 1965 (ainsi que d'autres performances que nous ne pourrons jamais voir ou saisir entièrement) me préoccupent depuis longtemps (la principale raison à cela étant que les distributions de Rainer entremêlent des "scènes" interdisciplinaires et socialement imbriquées qui ne correspondent pas à l'image que nous avons du monde de l'art new-yorkais des années 1960, qui a été simplifié - peut-être est-ce là un effet du processus de canonisation – au cours duquel l'art et la danse se trouvent généralement séparés). Enfin, la critique dévastatrice d'Anna Chave sur la canonisation du minimalisme, en particulier son essai Minimalism and Biography, m'a aidé à réaliser à quel point les contributions de Rainer et de ses pairs étaient radicales et influentes et même l'histoire de l'art plus récente consiste autant à exclure des personnes qu'à les intégrer.
ABC : Internationalement reconnue, célébrée comme danseuse et chorégraphe post-moderne, Yvonne Rainer est moins connue comme théoricienne de la danse, du minimalisme, du cinéma féministe, ou même comme autrice et lectrice attentive. Pourtant, ses écrits offrent aux lecteur·rice·s une riche introduction à son travail et permettent même d’appréhender les liens que celui-ci entretient avec sa vie. Comment ce positionnement a-t-il influencé votre propre travail en tant qu’artiste et danseur non-professionnel ?
NM : La façon dont Rainer questionne l’expérience de la danse à travers l’analyse de la place de l’interprète et de celle des spectateur·rice·s avec en toile de fond le rôle des conventions historiques, a exercé sur moi une influence majeure — même si mon degré de compréhension [ou d’incompréhension] du travail d’Yvonne n’a affecté ma perception des choses de manière tout à fait manifeste qu’au moment où j’ai travaillé avec elle et Emily. Ce n’est pas un hasard si je me suis surtout intéressé ces dernières années au statut des archives et autres traces de performances, tout comme les questions que cela pose dans le cadre d’une histoire de l’art et des pratiques curatoriales véritablement interdisciplinaires. Comment des œuvres historiquement spécifiques fondées sur le temps et le corps peuvent-elles être re-présentées devant un public contemporain, tout en étant rigoureusement contextualisées, sans succomber aux impératifs idéologiques d’une interprétation historisante, appauvrissante ? Comment le musée, les archives, les collections, le·a spectateur·rice et l'interprète peuvent-i·elle·s interagir lors de ces représentations ? Comment retracer et décrire l’histoire des relations — plutôt que des oppositions — entre l’art et la danse ? À la suite de Transmissions, être impliqué en tant qu’interprète, prendre part à un processus qui relève du travail d’archive tout en étant incarné m’a enthousiasmé. Pour les avoir vu danser ensemble, et conscient qu’Emily constitue
à bien des égards l’archive principale d’Yvonne, j’étais curieux de voir comment toutes deux collaboreraient sur un tel projet. J’étais également curieux de voir comment la problématique de la re-création serait abordée : autrement dit, avec quel degré de « fidélité » l’« original » inaccessible allait-il être présenté ?
ABC : Yvonne Rainer a initié Parts of Some Sextets lors d'un séjour avec Robert Morris à Düsseldorf. À l’époque, elle travaillait mécaniquement et désespérément sur le mouvement. Dans un essai, elle écrit : "Il était nécessaire de trouver une autre façon de bouger. Je sentais que je ne pouvais plus faire appel à l'énergie et aux impulsions violentes qui avaient caractérisé mon travail jusqu’alors, et je ne voulais pas non plus explorer davantage le type de mouvements excentriques "imitations de la vie" que quelqu'un avait un jour qualifié de "glamour niais"(...).[4] En tant que non-danseur, comment avez-vous appréhendé cette "manière différente de bouger"[5]?
NM : N’étant pas danseur, il m’est difficile de dire quelle a été mon expérience de cette « manière différente de bouger », puisque je n’ai aucun élément de comparaison en termesde mouvements formellement acquis : je n’avais rien à désapprendre. J’ai été engagé sur Parts of Some Sextets afin de remplir les obligations de l’un des deux artistes qui dansaient à l’origine dans cette pièce, ce qui signifie que l’on attendait de moi les éléments suivants : une certaine capacité de mouvement, la volonté d’interpréter ou d’improviser ainsi que de l’endurance afin de survivre à une chorégraphie de près d’une heure. Cela peut sembler assez direct, mais mon expérience — qui m’a amené à collaborer souvent avec des artistes dont le travail consiste à revisiter les histoires de la performance et l’expérience des spectateurs·rice·s, mais généralement sans que je me produise moi-même sur scène — relève un peu de l’inversion des rôles, outre le fait que je me suis retrouvé
à interpréter l’œuvre d’une de mes artistes favorites (dans le rôle initialement joué par Robert Morris, avec le travail duquel j’entretiens des rapports ambivalents, et dont l’intense relation amoureuse et créatrice avec Rainer ajoutait encore davantage à cette spirale psychologique). Il était intéressant d’être confronté aux écarts entre, d’une part mon expérience du travail d’Yvonne (avec tout ce que j’avais pu projeter sur lui qui venait de moi) en tant qu’étudiant, et donc en tant que spectateur, puis en tant que chercheur et en tant qu’artiste, et, d’autre part, la façon dont ce travail fonctionnait de l’intérieur. Durant la phase de répétition/construction/apprentissage, j’ai dû affronter et distinguer les différentes impulsions à l’œuvre et questionner ce qu’elles pouvaient signifier pour moi : bien jouer mon rôle, suivre les indications, interpréter les instructions, me produire moi-même, produire l’aliénation à partir de moi-même.
ABC : À quel point cela était-il « nouveau » pour vous ?
NM : Tout me paraissait entièrement nouveau, et pas uniquement parce que je ne suis pas un danseur. Bien sûr, les dynamiques techniques et interpersonnelles, qui tiennent au travail que l’on mène avec les autres danseur·se·s, à sa longueur, à l’épuisement physique et aux blessures inévitables, tout cela était nouveau pour moi. Et bien queje collabore en permanence avec d’autres artistes, et aussi avec des curateur·rice·s, des historien·ne·s de l’art et des auteur·rice·s, la façon dont les danseur·se·s et les chorégraphes travaillent ensemble à l’élaboration d'une pièce est complètement différente. Il y a tant de niveaux de communication supplémentaire, à commencer par la tendresse affective que les danseurs manifestent, les un·e·s envers les autres, l’attention que chacun·e d’entre eux·elles prête au bien-être des autres, à leur sécurité, à la guérison de leurs blessures. J’ai appris beaucoup
de nouveaux étirements, et aussi comment me protéger et protéger les autres lorsqu’on exécute des mouvements difficiles. Après quelques sessions de « répétitions »(qui fonctionnaient en même temps comme un laboratoire de reconstruction), il était devenu évident que nous étions tou·s·tes engagé·e·s dans un processus ouvert que nous inventions au fur et à mesure que nous avancions —
en ce sens, notre démarche était tout à fait chorégraphique. Une majorité du matériau à notre disposition, et aussi notre façon d’appréhender ce qui en subsistait et qui avait résisté au passage du temps, était « nouveau » pour nous, je veux dire par là qu’il fallait le restituer au présent. La dynamique des répétitions était guidée par un dialogue intime, intense et de longue date entre Emily et Yvonne, qui a également permis de découvrir la façon dont Yvonne génère du nouveau matériel et "réécrit" l'ancien. Je me suis demandé comment Yvonne affronterait l'idée de reconstitution historique, qui semble tout à fait contraire à son éthos - trop grandiloquent, trop lié à la permanence associée au mythe du chef-d'œuvre - mais cela s'est produit tout naturellement car la notion
de reconstitution, ou d’un tout "original", s'est évaporée. Il y a plusieurs raisons à cela : nous étions dans une autre époque, nous étions nous-mêmes des personnes très différentes (j’ai mis longtemps à le comprendre, même si c’est évident à présent) et Yvonne était une artiste très différente de la « jeune artiste » qu’elle était en 1965. Environ un an avant de travailler sur Parts [of Some Sextets], j’ai eu l’occasion de visiter le studio de Trisha Brown, dans son loft de Broadway, où Cori Olinghouse avait convié plusieurs personnes à participer au travail et à la réflexion préalable à la reprise d’une oeuvre ancienne que Brown a réalisée en collaboration avec Sylvia Palacios Whitman (une artiste dont j'ai également interprété le travail). Tandis que je me trouvais dans ce loft, assistant à la présentation de Cori et aux répétitions, j’ai soudain commencé à comprendre quelque chose à propos de ces chorégraphies new-yorkaises des années 1960 et 1970, j’ai compris pourquoi ce type si particulier de performances s’est développé précisément à cette époque et dans ces espaces. J’ai réalisé que les protagonistes vivaient dans des espaces identiques à ceux dans lesquels i·elle·s dansaient (quand ils n’avaient pas ce double usage), et qu’i·elle·s interprétaient souvent ce qu’i·elle·s vivaient — ce qui m’a aidé à comprendre différemment ce que nous prenons désormais pour acquis lorsque nous parlons, au sujet de la danse postmoderne, de mouvements dits « du quotidien » ou de mouvements « trouvés ». Donc, assez tôt durant les répétitions de Parts[of Some Sextets], j’ai demandé à Yvonne si cette danse traduisait bien cela — le fait de vivre à proximité des autres, ou même la vie sexuelle de tout le monde —, et elle n’a même pas eu besoin de répondre. Mais la question de la spécificité historique de Parts [of Some Sextets] continuait de m’occuper l’esprit : ce type de travail pouvait-il encore être mené, ou bien ces pièces relevaient-elles d’une certaine urgence inhérente à l’époque de leur création ? Il était évident aussi qu’Yvonne avait conscience de la distance énorme entre le contexte de l’époque, celui qui avait engendré ses premières œuvres,
et les crises actuelles.
ABC: Parts of Some Sextets (1965-2019) fait référence au "sommeil, au sexe, à la mort, à la maladie".[6]À ce titre, cette oeuvre évoque, d'une part, sa vie hétérosexuelle avec Robert Morris et, d'autre part, les conditions de vie et de travail difficiles des artistes de l’avant-garde newyorkaise des années 1960. Il s'agit d'une chorégraphie conceptuelle fondée sur l'ambiguïté d'un objet, à savoir le matelas en tant que porosité entre espace de vie/travail, sphère privée/publique, objets/corps interchangeables, reposant sur la mobilité/immobilité de l'un ou de l'autre. Cet effet ambigu et la présence de 12 matelas pour dix personnes (11 dans la dernière version) renforcent le déplacement et la délocalisation de la danse et de l'objet dansé. La danse étendue à l'objet (et vice versa) obtenue par une volonté d'objectiver le mouvement par la répétition ; une impression d'" aller nulle part "[7]qui résonne avec la littérature objective du nouveau roman.[8]Plus récemment, dans l'histoire de la littérature française, cette réflexion pourrait même être élargie aux écrits de Monique Wittig.[9] En effet, Wittig est lectrice et admiratrice de l'œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute.[10]Yvonne Rainer a elle-même confirmé l'influence du nouveau roman français (principalement Alain Robbe-Grillet). La première apparition de cette référence se produit dans les années 1960 dans ses notes personnelles,[11]une critique des sculptures de Robert Morris,[12]puis dans son autobiographie en 2006,[13]et dernièrement, à l'occasion de Performa, en 2019.[14]Pourriez-vous expliquer davantage votre expérience personnelle de ces multiples ambiguïtés autour de l'objet, par exemple, le matelas et les expressions du mouvement dans cette danse ?
NM : Je dois préciser que les matelas que nous avons utilisé ont été fabriqués sur mesure afin de ressembler aux matelas originaux de 1965. Pour nous autres interprètes, ils avaient l’air — et donnaient l’impression d’être — anachroniques, car plus personne ne possède
de matelas en crin de cheval et toile rayée garnie de boutons. Ils étaient rigides, lourds et encombrants au début. Il nous a fallu beaucoup d’efforts pour apprendre à les manier, les traîner, les entasser, mais au bout de quelques semaines nous avons eu raison d’eux, ils sont devenus beaucoup plus souples et nous plus forts.
Le tableau d’ouverture de la pièce — une grande pile de matelas — m’a toujours fait penser au conte La Princesse au petit pois. Au-delà des allusions que fait Yvonne (le sommeil, le sexe, la mort, etc.), il était fascinant d’observer ce qu’on peut faire d’un matelas ou lui faire faire, de la même façon qu’un enfant revêt les objetsde significations. Nous nous sommes adonnés à tant de constructions, d’érections et de destructions. Le matelas devenait rapidement une petite scène, ou une montagne indisciplinée, ou un tas de feuilles. L’usage nous les rendait familiers, aussi bien pendant et en dehors des répétitions, quand on s’affalait dessus, que nous y faisions nos étirements ou la sieste Du point de vue de l’interprète, il est difficile de parler d’ambiguïté à propos de cette pièce. Pour qu’une oeuvre fonctionne, il faut être absolument absorbé dans son univers, comme si toutes les actions interprétées, et toutes les relations apparaissant tout du long, étaient tout à fait réelles, naturelles et guidées par un objectif — pour ainsi dire précises, mais sans être trop réfléchies. Sans quoi nous aurions l’air perdu·e·s sur scène. Yvonne parlait souvent d’« efficacité » afin de diriger nos mouvements. Le sentiment d’une conduite presque irrationnelle est essentiel à l’œuvre (et pour moi, étant de nature timide, cette forme de concentration était la seule manière de surmonter le fait d’être exposé sur scène). Nous passions l’essentiel de notre temps de « répétition » à construire la pièce avec Yvonne et Emily, puis à essayer de mémoriser les indices textuels et les séquences de mouvements, de sorte que chacun·e de nous soit en mesure de se mouvoir correctement au sein de ce système apparemment aléatoire, mais en réalité très structuré. Au tout début, l’un des danseurs qui travaille souvent avec Yvonne m’a assuré qu’il n’y avait aucune raison d’être nerveux, puisque toutes les chorégraphies d’Yvonne sont des systèmes à l’intérieur desquels vous agissez et qui vous indiquent ce qu’il faut faire. À mesure que l’on intériorise le minutage, et les liens entre les gestes et les phrases de la bande sonore, la danse se développe comme un réseau neuronal.
ABC : Avez-vous personnellement remarqué / ressenti son désir de créer « une objectivation du mouvement » ?
NM : Les instructions d’Yvonne peuvent faire l’effet d’énigmes dans la mesure où elles obligent à se poser des questions et elles laissent beaucoup de place à l’interprétation. Par exemple, pendant mon audition, il m’a été demandé d’interpréter le signal « course d’oiseau » avec très peu d’indications, et apparemment l’idée que je me faisais d’une course d’oiseau était plutôt bizarre, mais intéressante. Bien sûr, Yvonne vise une clarté tranchante, mais qui est différente pour chaque interprète. Il a fallu beaucoup de répétitions pour que tout le monde soit en phase avec ses attentes. Je pense qu’il y a une « objectivation du mouvement », mais il y a aussi (et peut-être est-il plus facile d’en juger en tant que spectateur·rice) une distribution d’affects à travers l’espace scénique, une sorte d’équilibre et d’uniformité très particulière, rompue par intermittence. J’ai été surpris par une chose, c’est la manière qu’avait Yvonne de recourir à des images afin de composer ses petites séquences ou tableaux. Dans Parts [of Some Sextets], il y avait une image emblématique de l’histoire de l’art (le Laocoon), et d’autres tirées de je-ne-sais-où qui avaient dû retenir son attention, qu’elle utilisait comme une sorte d’échafaudage, et qui nous servaient d’appuis pour certaines formations de corps. Puis Yvonne m’a demandé de faire quelques dessins de ces formations afin qu’elle puisse les emporter chez elle, y réfléchir avant la prochaine répétition et s’en servir comme aide-mémoires que nous tentions de reproduire.
ABC: Dans une conversation entre vous, Yvonne Rainer et Emily Coates, qui sera publiée prochainement par Performa [15], vous indiquez que la moitié de la partition originale et l’enregistrement audio étaient tout d’abord perdus. Puis la partition originale a été retrouvée par hasard, pendant les répétitions, dans les archives de la Fondation Rauschenberg. La dernière version de Parts of Some Sextets se compose ainsi de 60% de l’original[16]. Pouvez-vous m’en dire plus sur le processus de recréation tel qu’il s’est déroulé pendant les répétitions ? Comment se sont articulés les différents matériaux d'archives provenant d’une part de ses archives au Getty Research Institute, de sa mémoire personnelle, de ses écrits ainsi que des photographies originales d'Al Giese et de Peter Moore ?
NM : Nous avons entamé les répétitions en étudiant les photographies existantes des représentations de 1965.
Il nous fallait identifier les danseurs d’alors et distribuer les « rôles » de chacun·e, puis coordonner nos mouvements en nous appuyant sur la moitié conservée de la partition (l’autre moitié ayant été perdue). Tout ce matériel avait été minutieusement recherché et rassemblé par Emily Coates, à l’initiative du projet de recréation de Parts [of Some Sextets] parce qu'elle représentait une sorte de paradoxe dans le répertoire d'Yvonne - une œuvre majeure continuant à faire l'objet de beaucoup de curiosité et d'analyse alors même qu’elle était majoritairement perdue - personne n'avait vu cette danse depuis plus d'un demi-siècle. Dans ce processus de répétitions / reconstructions, l’idée était qu’en arrivant au bout de la première partie de la partition, la manière d’inventer la seconde nous apparaîtrait clairement. Pendant cette partie du processus, nous avons plus ou moins appris tous nos mouvements et leur vocabulaire, même si nous savions qu’au final nous n’exécuterions
pas certains gestes, et c’est ce qui a permis à Yvonne de remarquer dans la prestation des danseur·se·s certaines choses qu’elle aimait, et d’autres qu’elle n’aimait pas, ce qui nous a amenés à comprendre le langage de la pièce et comment chaque indication devait être exécutée. Ce processus a rapidement absorbé les accidents, les mouvements involontaires, les nouvelles idées,
les plaisanteries, les choses qui surgissent lorsqu’autant de personnes sont réuni·e·s dans une pièce afin de tenter de comprendre quelque chose. J’ai oublié de préciser que tous les danseurs avaient un deuxième nom. J’étais Nick, mais aussi Bob, et Shayla était aussi Yvonne. C’était une question simplement pratique, afin de « se » situer mutuellement dans la partition (dans les rôles qui nous avaient été donnés, créés à l’origine pour et par d’autres danseurs), mais c'était aussi intéressant, ne serait-ce qu'un moment, d'essayer de superposer ce que nous savions de ces ancien·ne·s interprètes et les interprètes avec lesquel·le·s nous étions en train de travailler. Dès que les noms ont perdu leur valeur historique, ils sont devenus des signes vides et flottants, ce qui allait très bien à la manière que nous avions de nous frayer un chemin au milieu de tout cet assaut de langage et de poursuivre l’inventaire d’un monde qui correspondait parfois à nos actions.
ABC: Yvonne Rainer a déclaré pendant le processus de répétition original de Parts of Some Sextets son fameux No Manifesto. Selon votre connaissance et votre expérience personnelle de l'œuvre de Rainer, comment la danse annonce-t-elle son refus des paradigmes normatifs de la danse moderne ainsi que son chef-d'œuvre Trio A - produit un an plus tard ?
NM : Ce soi-disant "No Manifesto" est une leçon intéressante en termes de révisionnisme de l’histoire – nous pourrions même aller jusqu'à dire qu'il s'agit d'une fiction. En réalité, le No Manifesto n’existe pas. La litanie de "non" que l'on considère aujourd'hui comme un texte autonome est en fait une partie d'un post-scriptum d’un long essai sur Parts [of Some Sextets], publié par Rainer dans Tulane Drama Review, en 1965. Au fil des années, cet extrait a été constamment mal interprété comme une déclaration monolithique, plutôt que comme une tentative partielle « de définir plus rigoureusement les règles et les limites de mon propre jeu artistique « du moment » Yvonne, elle-même a déclaré à propos de ce fragment décontextualisé : « J'aimerais qu'il soit enterré », et elle a trouvé de nombreux moyens de s’opposer et de répondre à cette déformation de son propre langage, y compris une révision du manifeste en 2008. La motivation d'Emily de faire revivre cette danse particulière provient en partie d’un désir de faire prendre conscience aux spectateur·rice·s du contexte situationnel des statement(s) d'Yvonne, c’est ce que nous mettrons en évidence dans une prochaine publication avec Performa et Lenz Press,
qui reviendra sur toute la « vie » de cette pièce de 1965 à 2019. Quant à Trio A, il pourrait être vu, du moins en termes de vocabulaire et de tonalité gestuelle, comme une distillation de Parts [of Some Sextets], mais je ne suis pas certain que ce soit une analyse satisfaisante, d'autant plus que l'engagement dissonant avec le langage parlé n'y est pas présent.
ABC: Lorsque j'étais à New York pour le début de mes recherches au printemps 2019, j'ai eu la chance d'assister au Trio A With Flags (1970/2019) lors du Printed Matter Benefit Gala à Judson Church. Au-delà de l'émotion de se retrouver au même endroit près de soixante ans plus tard, j'ai eu le sentiment que la charge politique de Trio A et surtout Trio A With Flags était intacte voire même renforcée dans le contexte de la présidence de Donald Trump. Partagez-vous cet avis ?
NM : Le rapport entre art et politique dans le contexte actuel aux États-Unis peut être particulièrement contraignant. En effet, le désir de faire correspondre art et réalité politique aboutit bien souvent à du kitsch illustratif. En ce qui concerne Trio A with Flags, l’oeuvre peut faire penser à l’hystérie bidon déployée par Trump autour du sacro-saint drapeau américain et des autres symboles nationalistes, dont on présume qu’ils sont menacés par Black Lives Matter et ses combats, mais je ne pense pas que l’équation « drapeau = politique » soit l’effet le plus intéressant obtenu par cette pièce. Je m’intéresse davantage au contexte dans lequel elle a été interprétée pour la première fois (“The People’s Flag Show”, à la Judson Church, en 1970) — manifestation parmi tant d’autres du sentiment anti-guerre et de la désobéissance civile par tout un tas de détournements imaginatifs du drapeau — et par la question : quelles sont les significations produites par cette pièce de nos jours ? La question que vous posez à propos de Trio A with Flags peut également être posée à propos de Parts [of Some Sextets], qui en 2019 a gagné en caractère d’urgence politique (en raison de la nature de la bande sonore et du journal intime restituant les problématiques biopolitiques en jeu au XVIIIe siècle dans la Nouvelle-Angleterre des colons esclavagistes)[17] d’une façon qui ne faisait manifestement pas partie des implications de la pièce originale. En ce qui concerne le contexte historique et la réception de l’oeuvre, il est intéressant de penser à la position plutôt méprisante de Jill Johnston à propos de Parts [of Some Sextets] en 1965, au regard du fait que le public était en pleurs lorsque nous l'avons joué en 2019.
[1] Le Judson dance Theater est un groupe informel de danseur·se·s et chorégraphes annonciateurs de la danse post-moderne qui se réunissait tous les lundis au sein de Judson Mémorial Church (55 Washington Square, New York) entre 1962 et 1964. La plupart ont suivi l’enseignement de Robert Ellis Dunn (1928-1996), nous retrouvons parmi celui-ci : Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer.
[2] Le terme de “downtown performance” est utilisé en référence/opposition au répertoire plus conventionnel du New York City Ballet situé en haut de Manhattan (et donc « uptown »).
[3] Jill Johnston est parmi les voix critiques les plus influentes de l’avant-garde newyorkaise des années 1960. En effet, elle a publié de nombreux articles à propos des « dance concerts » du Judson Dance Theater dans The Village Voice, entre 1960 et 1974 dont la plupart sont reproduits dans The Disintegration of a Critic, coédité par Sternberg Press, et Bergen Kunsthall, 2019.
[4] Yvonne Rainer, Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called "Parts of Some Sextets," performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March 1965, The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2, 1965, page 168-78.
[5] Pour une lecture détaillée de ce sujet, lire Marcella Lista, A Different Way to Move, Minimalismes, New York, 1960-1980, Catalogue d’exposition, Nîmes: Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, 2017.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Literature Objective Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes, Evergreen Revue, n° 5, 1958. Pour une analyse détaillée, lire : Johanna Renard, Un arrangement d’objets et de personnes : étude de Parts of Some Sextets d’Yvonne Rainer, Agôn, Dossiers, N°4, L’objet, le corps : de la symbiose à la confrontation, ENS Lyon, 2011.
[9] Comment Yvonne Rainer et l’écrivain et activiste féministe française Monique Wittig sont reliées, et surtout en quoi leurs féminismes entrent en résonance ? Il s’agit du sujet principal de ma résidence de recherche à New York en tant que lauréate de la Villa Albertine. J’espère par conséquent pouvoir développer ce point dans un futur proche.
[10] Monique Wittig, Le chantier littéraire, publié de manière posthume, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2010. À noter qu’Annabel L. Kim, Professeure associée au département de Littérature et Langues Romanes de Harvard University, travaille actuellement sur la première traduction en langue anglaise de l’ouvrage. Pour davantage d’informations à propos de la relation entre Monique Wittig et Nathalie Sarraute, voir Monique Wittig Aujourd’hui, dirigé par Benoît Auclerc et Yannick Chevalier, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2012.
[11]Yvonne Rainer Papers, Series I. Notebooks, appointment and address books, 1949-2012, undated, Special Collections, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
[12] Yvonne Rainer, Don’t Give the Game Away, Arts Magazine, no. 44, April 1967.
[13] Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are facts, A Life, Chapître 17, Feelings are Facts, page 380, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, première publication en 2006, réédité en 2013.
[14]Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets (1965-2019), Statement, Performa, November 2019.
[15] Nick Mauss travaille actuellement sur une publication liée à Parts of Some Sextets,
co-édité par Performa et Lenz Press, qui sortira à l'automne 2022. L’ouvrage rassemble des archives et des contributions inédites d’Yvonne Rainer, Lynne Tillman, David Thompson, Emily Coates, Soyoung Yoon, Jill Johnston, Peter Moore, Al Giese, Babette Mangolte, Paula Court et Nick Mauss.
[16] Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets, (1965-2019), A Performa 19 Commission, texte de présentation, https://vimeo.com/429772761, consulté le 14 Mai 2022.
[17] La bande sonore se compose d’extraits de l’ouvrage : The Diary of William Bentley, 1793-1802, lu par Yvonne Rainer.
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎
“After and About Parts
of Some Sextets (1965-2019),” an interview with Nick Mauss by Arlène
Berceliot Courtin.
Nick Mauss is an artist based in New York. His work continually challenges the boundaries of artistic practice, exhibition-making, writing, and publishing, and the distinctions between the applied, fine, and performing arts. In 2014 curator Célia Bernasconi initiated an ongoing collaboration with Mauss at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, inviting him to participate in the exhibition Portraits d’Intérieurs, followed by Designing Dreams: A Celebration of Léon Bakst(2016), for which Mauss devised the mise-en-scene and catalogue, and this year’s survey of Christian Bérard, Excentrique Bébe. Mauss’s interest in the repressed dynamics between histories of art and performance was animated by these opportunities to work intimately with the NMNM’s singular collections, many of which trace the interdependent histories of European vanguard painting and design for theater, opera, and ballet. In 2018, Mauss made a hybrid exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, titled Transmissions.Comprising archive documents, artworks, and live performances in which dancers processed these histories, the exhibition centered on the transposition of Diaghilev’s collaborative ballet paradigm to the United States in the early 20th century. Transmissions’ statement was to re-consider modernist ballet as a strikingly queer interdisciplinary art form that preceded (and sometimes foretold) the experimental developments in art and performance of the 1960s. Through this title in the plural form, the show explores the performer as a persona and the dancer acting as a transmitter and/or receiver in modern dance. Initiated after a canceled flight to New York in March 2020, this interview flows from the early days of the pandemic. Its major topic is to examine the archive’s role in the performing arts, this interview highlights Nick Mauss’s participation in the 2019 Performa Biennial’s commission of a revival of Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 dance Parts of Some Sextets. Thus it examines Mauss’s own move from the archive to the stage, his relationship to post-modern dance, and some of the questions and surprising deviations that emerge in processes of re-staging and historical reenactment.
Arlène Berceliot Courtin: You participated in the revival of Yvonne Rainer's crucial dance work Parts of Some Sextets (which had not been performed since 1966, due to its complexity), commissioned by Performa and realized as a collaboration between Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates for the 2019 Performa biennial. Prior to your participation in this process, what was your knowledge of Yvonne Rainer's work?
Nick Mauss: I thought I was completely “fluent” in Rainer’s work when I agreed to take part in this process. Over the past decades I had attended performances of the “late” dance works whenever I possibly could, sometimes repeatedly, in New York and elsewhere. I had seen some of her films as a student, and later, the first re-stagings of her dances from the 1960s by the White Oak Dance Project (with whom Emily Coates performed at the time). Rainer’s work blasted open and reconfigured ideas I had inherited about how art, dance, or queer personhood are constructed. I was seduced by the photographic documentation of Yvonne’s dance work (as it circulated in vintage and contemporary catalogues and journals), and by her very particular writing voice, and they made me curious about Judson and histories of “downtown performance” more generally, which led me to Jill Johnston’s experiments in art-and-dance-criticism-as-autobiography…the encounter with Rainer was like a domino effect. Her book Work 1961–73 and its images of the 1965 performances of Parts of Some Sextets (along with other performances we will never be able to see or fully grasp) have been on my mind for a long time (a primary reason being that Rainer’s casts of performers embody interdisciplinary and socially imbricated “scenes” that do not conform to the image we have of the 1960s’ NY art world, which has been simplified—perhaps this is an effect of the process of canonization—with art and dance generally pulled apart). Finally, Anna Chave’s devastating critique of the canonization of minimalism, particularly in her essay Minimalism and Biography, helped me realize how radical and influential the contributions of Rainer and her peers had been, and that even very recent art history is as much about writing people out as it is about writing people in.
Yvonne Rainer is internationally well-known and celebrated as a post-modern dancer and choreographer, but less as a theorist of dance, minimalism, feminist cinema, or even as an author and attentive reader. However, her writing voice offers the readers a rich introduction and even a large overview of the interrelation between her work and her life. How did this position influence your work as an artist/non-professional dancer?
Rainer’s interrogation of performance and spectatorship against a backdrop of historical conventions has been a key influence for me (though the degree to which my understanding [and misunderstanding] of Yvonne’s work had impacted my ways of reading only became fully apparent to me during the process of working with her and Emily). Not by coincidence, my focus of the past few years has been directly motivated by my interest in the status of documents and traces of performances, and the questions they pose for truly interdisciplinary art history and exhibition practices. How can historically specific time- and body-based works of art be re-presented for a contemporary audience, giving an accurate sense of context, without succumbing to the ideological imperatives, or the flattening, of historical reenactment? How can the museum, the archive, the collection, the viewer, and the performer interact in such presentations? How can some of the histories of the interrelationships (rather than oppositions) between art and dance be traced and formulated? On the heels of Transmissions, I was thrilled to be brought on as a performer to take part in a process that was both archival and embodied. I was curious to see how Emily and Yvonne would work together on something like this, having seen them perform together, and knowing that Emily is, in many ways, the primary archive of Yvonne. I was also curious to see how the problematic of reenactment would be addressed: i.e. how much fidelity would be shown to the unknowable “original.”
Yvonne Rainer initiated Parts of Some Sextets during a stay with Robert Morris in Düsseldorf. At that time, she worked mechanically and desperately on movement. In an essay, she wrote: "It was necessary to find a different way to move. I felt I could no longer call on the energy and hard-attack impulses that had characterized my work previously, nor did I want to explore any further the ’imitations-from-life’ kind of eccentric movement that someone once described as ‘goofy glamour.’"(…).[1]As a non-dancer, how did you experiment with this "different way to move"?[2]
As a non-dancer it is difficult for me to say how I experienced this “different way to move,” as I have nothing to gauge it against in terms of formal movement training—there was nothing for me to un-learn. I was cast inParts of Some Sextets to fulfill the obligations of one of two of the original artist-dancers who performed in it, meaning that the following was expected of me: some movement ability, willingness to interpret or improvise, and sufficient stamina to survive the nearly hour-long performance. That may seem straight-forward enough, but my experience—as someone who often collaborates with performers, makes work “through” histories of performance and spectatorship, but does not generally perform on a stage—was something of a role-reversal in addition to the fact that I now found myself performing for one of my favorite artists. in the role originally performed by Robert Morris, whose work I have an ambivalent relationship with, and whose intense romantic and creative partnership with Rainer added another layer to the looping psychology of all of this. It was interesting to be confronted with the difference between how I experienced (and sometimes projected on) Yvonne’s work as a student, and subsequently, as a spectator, as a reader, as an artist, and how the work operated from the inside. During the process of rehearsing/constructing/learning, I had to confront and distinguish between impulses and questions, such as what would it mean for me: to perform well, to follow instructions, to interpret instructions, to perform myself, to perform alienation from myself.
How much “new” was it for you?
To me it all felt entirely new, and not only because I’m a non-performer. Of course, the technical and interpersonal dynamics of working with so many other performers, the duration, physical exhaustion, and inevitable injuries were all new to me. And though I constantly engage in collaborative processes with other artists, as well as curators, art historians, and writers, the way that dancers and choreographers work together in the construction of a piece is a completely different type of collaboration. There are just so many more levels of communication, including a very affecting tenderness and care among dancers for each other’s well-being, safety, and recovery from injury—I learned a lot of new stretches and how to protect myself and others when doing difficult movements. Within a few sessions of “rehearsal” (which was simultaneously a laboratory of reconstruction), it became clear that we were all involved in an open-ended process that was being invented: in that sense, it was very much a choreographic procedure. Much of the material, or even the approach to surviving/existing material was “new”, that is, it had to work in the present. The dynamic of rehearsals was guided by Emily and Yvonne’s intimate, intense, long-standing dialogue, and also provided a window into Yvonne’s ways of generating new material as well as “re-writing” the old. I had wondered how Yvonne was going to confront the idea of historical reenactment, which seems entirely against her ethos—too grandiose, too invested in the permanence associated with the myth of the masterpiece—but it just happened very naturally that the notion of reenactment, or of any “original,” evaporated. There were many reasons for this: It was a different time, we were different people, and, though this took a long time to understand, even if it’s very clear now, Yvonne was a very different artist from the “young artist” she had been in 1965. About a year before working on Parts, I had the experience of visiting Trisha Brown’s studio, in her loft on Broadway, where Cori Olinghouse had invited some people into the labor and thinking that went into her re-staging of an early work that Brown had made in collaboration with Sylvia Palacios Whitman, an artist whose work I had also performed in. And while I was in that loft watching Cori’s presentation and the rehearsal of the reenactment, I suddenly began to understand something about these New York dances of the ’60s and ’70s, why this particular kind of performance developed at this particular moment, in these spaces. I realized that these protagonists lived in spaces that were identical to, or even doubled as, the spaces in which they performed, and that they often performed what they lived, which helped me understand differently what we have by now taken for granted when we think of concepts such as “everyday” or “found” movement in postmodern dance. So, early on in rehearsal for Parts, I asked Yvonne if the dance was about that—about living in proximity to everyone, or even about their sex lives—and she didn’t even have to answer. But the question of Parts’ historical specificity kept on coming up for me: whether this kind of work could even be made anymore, or why it had a certain urgency at the time when it was made. It was evident that Yvonne also saw the huge distance between the contexts that enabled her early work and the crises of our current moment.
Parts of Some Sextets (1965–2019) refers to “sleep, sex, death, illness”.[3]It points to, on the one hand, her heterosexual life with Robert Morris and, on the other hand, to the difficult living and working conditions of avant-garde artists in New York City during the 1960s. It is a conceptual choreography founded on the ambiguity of an object, i.e., the mattress as a porosity between living/working space, private/public sphere, objects/bodies that are interchangeable, and rely on the mobility/immobility of one or the other(s). This ambiguous effect and the presence of 12 mattresses for ten people (11 in the last version) reinforces the displacement and delocalization of the dancing and the danced object. The dance extended to object (and vice versa) achieved by one desire to objectify the movement through repetition; an impression of “going nowhere”,[4]which resonates with the French new novel’s objective literature.[5]More recently, in the history of French literature, this reflection could even be extended to writings by Monique Wittig.[6]Indeed, Wittig is known as an attentive reader of the French new novel and admirer of Nathalie Sarraute's work.[7]Yvonne Rainer herself confirmed the influence on her of the French new novel. The first apparition of this reference occurs in the 1960s in her notebooks[8]and a review about Robert Morris’s sculptures,[9]then in her memoir in 2006,[10]and lately, on the occasion of Performa, in 2019.[11]Could you tell us more about your personal experience of the multiple ambiguities related to the object, for instance, the mattress and the movement expressions in the dance piece?
I should point out that the mattresses we used had to be custom-made to resemble the types of mattresses originally used in 1965. To us performers they looked (and felt) anachronistic, because hardly anyone has mattresses filled with horse-hair and covered in striped ticking and buttons anymore. They were stiff, heavy, unwieldy at first. We had to get used to lugging them around, piling them up, but within a few weeks we had beaten them into submission and they became more pliant, and we became stronger. The opening image of the dance—the full pile of mattresses—always reminded me of the fairytale The Princess and the Pea. Besides the allusions Yvonne refers to (sleep, sex, death, etc.), it was fascinating to see what the mattress could be and do, very much like the way children invest materials with meaning. We did so much building, erecting, destroying. The mattresses easily became a little stage, or an unruly mountain, or a pile of leaves, and we became familiar with them through use, both in and out of rehearsal, when we would just flop around, do our stretches, or take naps on them. From the point of view of being a performer in this work it’s hard to talk about ambiguity. In order for the work to function one must be completely absorbed in its world, as if all the tasks one was performing, and all the relationships that exist within the duration of the piece are very real, natural, and driven by purpose, that is to say, not over-thought, but specific. Otherwise we’d look lost on stage. Yvonne often used the word “workmanlike” to direct our movement. A sense of almost irrational drive is essential to the work (and for me, this concentration was the only way that I could survive the exposure of being on stage, as I am by nature a shy person). We spent the majority of our “rehearsal” time actually building the piece with Yvonne and Emily, and then trying to memorize the textual cues and sequences of movements so that each of us would be able to move correctly within this seemingly randomized but highly structured system. At the very beginning, one of the dancers who frequently performs with Yvonne assured me I had nothing to be nervous about because all of Yvonne’s dances are systems that you operate within and they tell you what needs to be done. As we internalized the timing, and the links between gestures and phrases in the soundtrack, the dance grew together, like neural pathways.
ABC: Did you personally notice/feel her desire to create an "objectification of the movement"?
NM: Yvonne’s directions can appear like riddles in that they force you to ask yourself questions and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. For example, during my audition, I was asked to perform the cue “bird run” with very little direction, and apparently my idea of a bird run was quite bizarre, but interesting. Of course Yvonne is aiming for a razor-sharp clarity that is different for each performer. It took many rehearsals for everyone to come into focus in the way that Yvonne intended. I think there is an “objectification of the movement” but there is also (and perhaps you can judge this better as a spectator) a distribution of affect across the field of the stage, a very particular kind of balance and evenness that is intermittently ruptured. One thing that surprised me to see in action was Yvonne’s use of images in the building of smaller phrases or tableaux. In Parts there was an art historical image (Laocoön), and images cut out from I-don’t-know-where that must have caught Yvonne’s eye, and these were used as a kind of scaffolding, they gave us a base-line for certain formations of bodies. Then Yvonne asked me to make drawings of these formations so that she could take them home and think about them before our subsequent rehearsal, and also use them as aide-memoires when we tried to reconstruct them again.
In a conversation between you, Yvonne Rainer, and Emily Coates, which will be published by Performa shortly,[12]you report that half of the original score and the audio recording were missing. Then the original score was fortuitously rediscovered in Rauschenberg's foundation archive during the rehearsals for Performa. The last version of Parts of Some Sextets is composed of 5/8 of the original.[13]Could you tell me more about the recreation process during the rehearsal? How was the articulation organized between the various archive materials sourced from her papers at the Getty Research Institute, her personal memory, and writings and original photographs by Al Giese and Peter Moore?
We began the rehearsals by studying extant photographs of the 1965 performances, identifying performers in the photographs, getting our “roles” assigned, and stringing together movements based on the remaining half of the score (the other half is lost). All of this material had been painstakingly researched and brought together by Emily Coates, who initiated this revival of Parts in the first place because she recognized it as a kind of paradox in Yvonne’s repertoire—a major work that continued to be the subject of much curiosity and analysis even though it had essentially been lost to time—no one had seen the dance in over half a century. In this rehearsal/reconstruction process, the idea was that by the time we got through the first half of the score it would become clearer how to invent the second half. During this part of the process we learned more or less all of the movement vocabulary, even if we ultimately weren’t going to perform certain prompts, and that allowed Yvonne to notice things she liked in certain performers’ execution of the movement, as well as what she didn’t like, to get us to a place where we could all understand the language of the dance, and how each prompt was to be executed. This process quickly absorbed accidents, involuntary movements, new ideas, jokes, things that come up when so many people are in a room together trying to figure something out. One thing I haven’t yet mentioned is that all the performers developed double names. I was Nick, but also Bob, and Shayla was also Yvonne. This was purely a matter of expediency, so that we could locate “ourselves” (the roles we had been assigned, originally created for/by and performed by others) on the score, but it was also interesting, if even for a moment, to try to overlay whatever we knew about these former performers with the performers we were now working with. Once the names lost their historical character, they just became empty signs bobbing around, which somehow fitted into the way we were swimming through this onslaught of language and the inventorying of a world that sometimes corresponded with our actions.
Yvonne Rainer stated during the original rehearsal process of Parts of Some Sextets herwell-known No Manifesto. According to your knowledge and personal experience of Rainer’s work, how did the dance announce her refusal of the modern-dance normative paradigms, and her masterpiece Trio A, produced one year later?
The so-called “No Manifesto” is an interesting object lesson in historical revisionism—one could even go so far as to call it a fiction. There is no such thing as the “No Manifesto.” The litany of “no’s” that is now taken for granted as a stand-alone text is in fact part of a postscript to a long essay Rainer published in 1965 in the Tulane Drama Review about Parts of Some Sextets. Over the years this excerpt has been consistently misconstrued as a monolithic statement, rather than as part of an attempt “to define more stringently the rules and boundaries of my own artistic game at the moment.” Yvonne herself has said of this decontextualized fragment, “I wish it could be buried,” and has found numerous ways to counteract and respond to this distortion of her own language, including a revision of the manifesto in 2008. Emily’s motivation to revive this particular dance came in part from a desire to make viewers aware of the situatedness of Yvonne’s statement(s), and this will be reflected in a forthcoming publication with Performa and Lenz Press, which will span the entire “life” of this dance between 1965 and 2019. As for Trio A, it could be read, at least in terms of gestural vocabulary and tone, as a distillation of Parts, but I’m not sure that’s a satisfying analysis, especially since the dissonant engagement with spoken language is not present.
In spring 2019, when I was in New York for the beginning of my research, I had the chance to attend the Trio A With Flags (1970/2019) at the Printed Matter Benefit Gala at Judson Church. Apart from the emotion of being in the same place almost sixty years later, I felt that the political charge ofTrio A and especially Trio A With Flags was intact and even reinforced in Donald Trump’s presidency. Do you share this opinion?
The correlation between art and politics in the current American situation can be very limiting. There is a desire for art to directly correspond to the political reality in a way that often results in illustrative kitsch. With regard toTrio A with Flags, it can bring to mind Trump’s phony hysteria around the sanctity of the American flag and other hallowed nationalist symbols perceived to be undermined by the agonisms of BLM, but I don’t think that the equation of flag=politics is the dance’s most interesting effect. I am more curious about the context in which the dance was first performed (“The People’s Flag Show” at Judson Church in 1970), when it was one of over a hundred gestures of anti-war sentiment and civil disobedience via imaginative mis-uses of the flag, and in the question: What kinds of meanings does this dance produce today? The same question you ask about Trio A with Flags can be asked about Parts, which by 2019 gained in degrees of problematic political urgency (due to the nature of the diary soundtrack and its narration of the biopolitics of 18th-century settler-colonial, slave-holding New England) that were clearly not part of the work’s original resonance. With regard to historical context and reception, it is interesting to think of Jill Johnston’s rather dismissive take on Parts in 1965 in light of the fact that audience members were weeping when we performed it in 2019.
[1] Yvonne Rainer, Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called "Parts of Some Sextets," performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March 1965, The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965), pp. 168-78.
[2] For further reading on this topic, see Marcella Lista, A Different Way to Move, Minimalismes, New York, 1960-1980, exhibition catalog (Nîmes: Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, 2017).
[3] Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts, A Life, chapter 12 Implosions, pp. 262, 400 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), new ed. 2013.
[4] “The dance ‘went nowhere,’ did not develop, progressed as though on a treadmill or like a 10-ton truck stuck on a hill: it shifts gears, groans, sweats, farts, but doesn’t move an inch.” Rainer, Some Retrospective Notes, op. cit.
[5] The term “objective literature” attributed by Roland Barthes to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writings appeared for the first time in the USA in: Roland Barthes, “Literature Objective Alain Robbe-Grillet,” Evergreen Revue, no. 5 (1958). For further reading on this topic, see: Johanna Renard, “Un arrangement d’objets et de personnes : étude de Parts of Some Sextets d’Yvonne Rainer,” Agôn, Dossiers n°4, L’objet, le corps : de la symbiose à la confrontation, ENS Lyon (2011).
[6] How are Yvonne Rainer and the French feminist writer and activist Monique Wittig related, and how do their feminisms resonate? This is the major topic of my research residency in New York as a Villa Albertine laureate. I hope to address this point in the near future.
[7] See: Monique Wittig, Le chantier littéraire, published posthumously (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2010). Please note that Annabel L. Kim, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, is currently working on its translation into English. For further reading on Monique Wittig’s relation to Nathalie Sarraute, see: Benoît Auclerc and Yannick Chevalier (eds.), Lire Monique Wittig aujourd’hui(Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2012).
[8] Yvonne Rainer Papers, Series I. Notebooks, appointment and address books, 1949-2012, undated, Special Collections, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
[9] Yvonne Rainer, “Don’t Give the Game Away,” Arts Magazine, no. 44 (April 1967).
[10] Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts, op. cit., p. 380.
[11] Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets (1965-2019), Statement, Performa, November 2019.
[12] Mauss is currently working on a publication about Parts of Some Sextets, co-published by Performa and Lenz Press, to be released by Fall 2022. The book will present archival and contemporary contributions by Yvonne Rainer, Lynne Tillman, David Thompson, Emily Coates, Soyoung Yoon, Jill Johnston, Peter Moore, Al Giese, Babette Mangolte, Paula Court, and Nick Mauss.
[13] Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets, (1965-2019), A Performa 19 Commission, text presentation, https://vimeo.com/429772761, consulted on May 14th, 2022.
Nick Mauss is an artist based in New York. His work continually challenges the boundaries of artistic practice, exhibition-making, writing, and publishing, and the distinctions between the applied, fine, and performing arts. In 2014 curator Célia Bernasconi initiated an ongoing collaboration with Mauss at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, inviting him to participate in the exhibition Portraits d’Intérieurs, followed by Designing Dreams: A Celebration of Léon Bakst(2016), for which Mauss devised the mise-en-scene and catalogue, and this year’s survey of Christian Bérard, Excentrique Bébe. Mauss’s interest in the repressed dynamics between histories of art and performance was animated by these opportunities to work intimately with the NMNM’s singular collections, many of which trace the interdependent histories of European vanguard painting and design for theater, opera, and ballet. In 2018, Mauss made a hybrid exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, titled Transmissions.Comprising archive documents, artworks, and live performances in which dancers processed these histories, the exhibition centered on the transposition of Diaghilev’s collaborative ballet paradigm to the United States in the early 20th century. Transmissions’ statement was to re-consider modernist ballet as a strikingly queer interdisciplinary art form that preceded (and sometimes foretold) the experimental developments in art and performance of the 1960s. Through this title in the plural form, the show explores the performer as a persona and the dancer acting as a transmitter and/or receiver in modern dance. Initiated after a canceled flight to New York in March 2020, this interview flows from the early days of the pandemic. Its major topic is to examine the archive’s role in the performing arts, this interview highlights Nick Mauss’s participation in the 2019 Performa Biennial’s commission of a revival of Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 dance Parts of Some Sextets. Thus it examines Mauss’s own move from the archive to the stage, his relationship to post-modern dance, and some of the questions and surprising deviations that emerge in processes of re-staging and historical reenactment.
Arlène Berceliot Courtin: You participated in the revival of Yvonne Rainer's crucial dance work Parts of Some Sextets (which had not been performed since 1966, due to its complexity), commissioned by Performa and realized as a collaboration between Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates for the 2019 Performa biennial. Prior to your participation in this process, what was your knowledge of Yvonne Rainer's work?
Nick Mauss: I thought I was completely “fluent” in Rainer’s work when I agreed to take part in this process. Over the past decades I had attended performances of the “late” dance works whenever I possibly could, sometimes repeatedly, in New York and elsewhere. I had seen some of her films as a student, and later, the first re-stagings of her dances from the 1960s by the White Oak Dance Project (with whom Emily Coates performed at the time). Rainer’s work blasted open and reconfigured ideas I had inherited about how art, dance, or queer personhood are constructed. I was seduced by the photographic documentation of Yvonne’s dance work (as it circulated in vintage and contemporary catalogues and journals), and by her very particular writing voice, and they made me curious about Judson and histories of “downtown performance” more generally, which led me to Jill Johnston’s experiments in art-and-dance-criticism-as-autobiography…the encounter with Rainer was like a domino effect. Her book Work 1961–73 and its images of the 1965 performances of Parts of Some Sextets (along with other performances we will never be able to see or fully grasp) have been on my mind for a long time (a primary reason being that Rainer’s casts of performers embody interdisciplinary and socially imbricated “scenes” that do not conform to the image we have of the 1960s’ NY art world, which has been simplified—perhaps this is an effect of the process of canonization—with art and dance generally pulled apart). Finally, Anna Chave’s devastating critique of the canonization of minimalism, particularly in her essay Minimalism and Biography, helped me realize how radical and influential the contributions of Rainer and her peers had been, and that even very recent art history is as much about writing people out as it is about writing people in.
Yvonne Rainer is internationally well-known and celebrated as a post-modern dancer and choreographer, but less as a theorist of dance, minimalism, feminist cinema, or even as an author and attentive reader. However, her writing voice offers the readers a rich introduction and even a large overview of the interrelation between her work and her life. How did this position influence your work as an artist/non-professional dancer?
Rainer’s interrogation of performance and spectatorship against a backdrop of historical conventions has been a key influence for me (though the degree to which my understanding [and misunderstanding] of Yvonne’s work had impacted my ways of reading only became fully apparent to me during the process of working with her and Emily). Not by coincidence, my focus of the past few years has been directly motivated by my interest in the status of documents and traces of performances, and the questions they pose for truly interdisciplinary art history and exhibition practices. How can historically specific time- and body-based works of art be re-presented for a contemporary audience, giving an accurate sense of context, without succumbing to the ideological imperatives, or the flattening, of historical reenactment? How can the museum, the archive, the collection, the viewer, and the performer interact in such presentations? How can some of the histories of the interrelationships (rather than oppositions) between art and dance be traced and formulated? On the heels of Transmissions, I was thrilled to be brought on as a performer to take part in a process that was both archival and embodied. I was curious to see how Emily and Yvonne would work together on something like this, having seen them perform together, and knowing that Emily is, in many ways, the primary archive of Yvonne. I was also curious to see how the problematic of reenactment would be addressed: i.e. how much fidelity would be shown to the unknowable “original.”
Yvonne Rainer initiated Parts of Some Sextets during a stay with Robert Morris in Düsseldorf. At that time, she worked mechanically and desperately on movement. In an essay, she wrote: "It was necessary to find a different way to move. I felt I could no longer call on the energy and hard-attack impulses that had characterized my work previously, nor did I want to explore any further the ’imitations-from-life’ kind of eccentric movement that someone once described as ‘goofy glamour.’"(…).[1]As a non-dancer, how did you experiment with this "different way to move"?[2]
As a non-dancer it is difficult for me to say how I experienced this “different way to move,” as I have nothing to gauge it against in terms of formal movement training—there was nothing for me to un-learn. I was cast inParts of Some Sextets to fulfill the obligations of one of two of the original artist-dancers who performed in it, meaning that the following was expected of me: some movement ability, willingness to interpret or improvise, and sufficient stamina to survive the nearly hour-long performance. That may seem straight-forward enough, but my experience—as someone who often collaborates with performers, makes work “through” histories of performance and spectatorship, but does not generally perform on a stage—was something of a role-reversal in addition to the fact that I now found myself performing for one of my favorite artists. in the role originally performed by Robert Morris, whose work I have an ambivalent relationship with, and whose intense romantic and creative partnership with Rainer added another layer to the looping psychology of all of this. It was interesting to be confronted with the difference between how I experienced (and sometimes projected on) Yvonne’s work as a student, and subsequently, as a spectator, as a reader, as an artist, and how the work operated from the inside. During the process of rehearsing/constructing/learning, I had to confront and distinguish between impulses and questions, such as what would it mean for me: to perform well, to follow instructions, to interpret instructions, to perform myself, to perform alienation from myself.
How much “new” was it for you?
To me it all felt entirely new, and not only because I’m a non-performer. Of course, the technical and interpersonal dynamics of working with so many other performers, the duration, physical exhaustion, and inevitable injuries were all new to me. And though I constantly engage in collaborative processes with other artists, as well as curators, art historians, and writers, the way that dancers and choreographers work together in the construction of a piece is a completely different type of collaboration. There are just so many more levels of communication, including a very affecting tenderness and care among dancers for each other’s well-being, safety, and recovery from injury—I learned a lot of new stretches and how to protect myself and others when doing difficult movements. Within a few sessions of “rehearsal” (which was simultaneously a laboratory of reconstruction), it became clear that we were all involved in an open-ended process that was being invented: in that sense, it was very much a choreographic procedure. Much of the material, or even the approach to surviving/existing material was “new”, that is, it had to work in the present. The dynamic of rehearsals was guided by Emily and Yvonne’s intimate, intense, long-standing dialogue, and also provided a window into Yvonne’s ways of generating new material as well as “re-writing” the old. I had wondered how Yvonne was going to confront the idea of historical reenactment, which seems entirely against her ethos—too grandiose, too invested in the permanence associated with the myth of the masterpiece—but it just happened very naturally that the notion of reenactment, or of any “original,” evaporated. There were many reasons for this: It was a different time, we were different people, and, though this took a long time to understand, even if it’s very clear now, Yvonne was a very different artist from the “young artist” she had been in 1965. About a year before working on Parts, I had the experience of visiting Trisha Brown’s studio, in her loft on Broadway, where Cori Olinghouse had invited some people into the labor and thinking that went into her re-staging of an early work that Brown had made in collaboration with Sylvia Palacios Whitman, an artist whose work I had also performed in. And while I was in that loft watching Cori’s presentation and the rehearsal of the reenactment, I suddenly began to understand something about these New York dances of the ’60s and ’70s, why this particular kind of performance developed at this particular moment, in these spaces. I realized that these protagonists lived in spaces that were identical to, or even doubled as, the spaces in which they performed, and that they often performed what they lived, which helped me understand differently what we have by now taken for granted when we think of concepts such as “everyday” or “found” movement in postmodern dance. So, early on in rehearsal for Parts, I asked Yvonne if the dance was about that—about living in proximity to everyone, or even about their sex lives—and she didn’t even have to answer. But the question of Parts’ historical specificity kept on coming up for me: whether this kind of work could even be made anymore, or why it had a certain urgency at the time when it was made. It was evident that Yvonne also saw the huge distance between the contexts that enabled her early work and the crises of our current moment.
Parts of Some Sextets (1965–2019) refers to “sleep, sex, death, illness”.[3]It points to, on the one hand, her heterosexual life with Robert Morris and, on the other hand, to the difficult living and working conditions of avant-garde artists in New York City during the 1960s. It is a conceptual choreography founded on the ambiguity of an object, i.e., the mattress as a porosity between living/working space, private/public sphere, objects/bodies that are interchangeable, and rely on the mobility/immobility of one or the other(s). This ambiguous effect and the presence of 12 mattresses for ten people (11 in the last version) reinforces the displacement and delocalization of the dancing and the danced object. The dance extended to object (and vice versa) achieved by one desire to objectify the movement through repetition; an impression of “going nowhere”,[4]which resonates with the French new novel’s objective literature.[5]More recently, in the history of French literature, this reflection could even be extended to writings by Monique Wittig.[6]Indeed, Wittig is known as an attentive reader of the French new novel and admirer of Nathalie Sarraute's work.[7]Yvonne Rainer herself confirmed the influence on her of the French new novel. The first apparition of this reference occurs in the 1960s in her notebooks[8]and a review about Robert Morris’s sculptures,[9]then in her memoir in 2006,[10]and lately, on the occasion of Performa, in 2019.[11]Could you tell us more about your personal experience of the multiple ambiguities related to the object, for instance, the mattress and the movement expressions in the dance piece?
I should point out that the mattresses we used had to be custom-made to resemble the types of mattresses originally used in 1965. To us performers they looked (and felt) anachronistic, because hardly anyone has mattresses filled with horse-hair and covered in striped ticking and buttons anymore. They were stiff, heavy, unwieldy at first. We had to get used to lugging them around, piling them up, but within a few weeks we had beaten them into submission and they became more pliant, and we became stronger. The opening image of the dance—the full pile of mattresses—always reminded me of the fairytale The Princess and the Pea. Besides the allusions Yvonne refers to (sleep, sex, death, etc.), it was fascinating to see what the mattress could be and do, very much like the way children invest materials with meaning. We did so much building, erecting, destroying. The mattresses easily became a little stage, or an unruly mountain, or a pile of leaves, and we became familiar with them through use, both in and out of rehearsal, when we would just flop around, do our stretches, or take naps on them. From the point of view of being a performer in this work it’s hard to talk about ambiguity. In order for the work to function one must be completely absorbed in its world, as if all the tasks one was performing, and all the relationships that exist within the duration of the piece are very real, natural, and driven by purpose, that is to say, not over-thought, but specific. Otherwise we’d look lost on stage. Yvonne often used the word “workmanlike” to direct our movement. A sense of almost irrational drive is essential to the work (and for me, this concentration was the only way that I could survive the exposure of being on stage, as I am by nature a shy person). We spent the majority of our “rehearsal” time actually building the piece with Yvonne and Emily, and then trying to memorize the textual cues and sequences of movements so that each of us would be able to move correctly within this seemingly randomized but highly structured system. At the very beginning, one of the dancers who frequently performs with Yvonne assured me I had nothing to be nervous about because all of Yvonne’s dances are systems that you operate within and they tell you what needs to be done. As we internalized the timing, and the links between gestures and phrases in the soundtrack, the dance grew together, like neural pathways.
ABC: Did you personally notice/feel her desire to create an "objectification of the movement"?
NM: Yvonne’s directions can appear like riddles in that they force you to ask yourself questions and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. For example, during my audition, I was asked to perform the cue “bird run” with very little direction, and apparently my idea of a bird run was quite bizarre, but interesting. Of course Yvonne is aiming for a razor-sharp clarity that is different for each performer. It took many rehearsals for everyone to come into focus in the way that Yvonne intended. I think there is an “objectification of the movement” but there is also (and perhaps you can judge this better as a spectator) a distribution of affect across the field of the stage, a very particular kind of balance and evenness that is intermittently ruptured. One thing that surprised me to see in action was Yvonne’s use of images in the building of smaller phrases or tableaux. In Parts there was an art historical image (Laocoön), and images cut out from I-don’t-know-where that must have caught Yvonne’s eye, and these were used as a kind of scaffolding, they gave us a base-line for certain formations of bodies. Then Yvonne asked me to make drawings of these formations so that she could take them home and think about them before our subsequent rehearsal, and also use them as aide-memoires when we tried to reconstruct them again.
In a conversation between you, Yvonne Rainer, and Emily Coates, which will be published by Performa shortly,[12]you report that half of the original score and the audio recording were missing. Then the original score was fortuitously rediscovered in Rauschenberg's foundation archive during the rehearsals for Performa. The last version of Parts of Some Sextets is composed of 5/8 of the original.[13]Could you tell me more about the recreation process during the rehearsal? How was the articulation organized between the various archive materials sourced from her papers at the Getty Research Institute, her personal memory, and writings and original photographs by Al Giese and Peter Moore?
We began the rehearsals by studying extant photographs of the 1965 performances, identifying performers in the photographs, getting our “roles” assigned, and stringing together movements based on the remaining half of the score (the other half is lost). All of this material had been painstakingly researched and brought together by Emily Coates, who initiated this revival of Parts in the first place because she recognized it as a kind of paradox in Yvonne’s repertoire—a major work that continued to be the subject of much curiosity and analysis even though it had essentially been lost to time—no one had seen the dance in over half a century. In this rehearsal/reconstruction process, the idea was that by the time we got through the first half of the score it would become clearer how to invent the second half. During this part of the process we learned more or less all of the movement vocabulary, even if we ultimately weren’t going to perform certain prompts, and that allowed Yvonne to notice things she liked in certain performers’ execution of the movement, as well as what she didn’t like, to get us to a place where we could all understand the language of the dance, and how each prompt was to be executed. This process quickly absorbed accidents, involuntary movements, new ideas, jokes, things that come up when so many people are in a room together trying to figure something out. One thing I haven’t yet mentioned is that all the performers developed double names. I was Nick, but also Bob, and Shayla was also Yvonne. This was purely a matter of expediency, so that we could locate “ourselves” (the roles we had been assigned, originally created for/by and performed by others) on the score, but it was also interesting, if even for a moment, to try to overlay whatever we knew about these former performers with the performers we were now working with. Once the names lost their historical character, they just became empty signs bobbing around, which somehow fitted into the way we were swimming through this onslaught of language and the inventorying of a world that sometimes corresponded with our actions.
Yvonne Rainer stated during the original rehearsal process of Parts of Some Sextets herwell-known No Manifesto. According to your knowledge and personal experience of Rainer’s work, how did the dance announce her refusal of the modern-dance normative paradigms, and her masterpiece Trio A, produced one year later?
The so-called “No Manifesto” is an interesting object lesson in historical revisionism—one could even go so far as to call it a fiction. There is no such thing as the “No Manifesto.” The litany of “no’s” that is now taken for granted as a stand-alone text is in fact part of a postscript to a long essay Rainer published in 1965 in the Tulane Drama Review about Parts of Some Sextets. Over the years this excerpt has been consistently misconstrued as a monolithic statement, rather than as part of an attempt “to define more stringently the rules and boundaries of my own artistic game at the moment.” Yvonne herself has said of this decontextualized fragment, “I wish it could be buried,” and has found numerous ways to counteract and respond to this distortion of her own language, including a revision of the manifesto in 2008. Emily’s motivation to revive this particular dance came in part from a desire to make viewers aware of the situatedness of Yvonne’s statement(s), and this will be reflected in a forthcoming publication with Performa and Lenz Press, which will span the entire “life” of this dance between 1965 and 2019. As for Trio A, it could be read, at least in terms of gestural vocabulary and tone, as a distillation of Parts, but I’m not sure that’s a satisfying analysis, especially since the dissonant engagement with spoken language is not present.
In spring 2019, when I was in New York for the beginning of my research, I had the chance to attend the Trio A With Flags (1970/2019) at the Printed Matter Benefit Gala at Judson Church. Apart from the emotion of being in the same place almost sixty years later, I felt that the political charge ofTrio A and especially Trio A With Flags was intact and even reinforced in Donald Trump’s presidency. Do you share this opinion?
The correlation between art and politics in the current American situation can be very limiting. There is a desire for art to directly correspond to the political reality in a way that often results in illustrative kitsch. With regard toTrio A with Flags, it can bring to mind Trump’s phony hysteria around the sanctity of the American flag and other hallowed nationalist symbols perceived to be undermined by the agonisms of BLM, but I don’t think that the equation of flag=politics is the dance’s most interesting effect. I am more curious about the context in which the dance was first performed (“The People’s Flag Show” at Judson Church in 1970), when it was one of over a hundred gestures of anti-war sentiment and civil disobedience via imaginative mis-uses of the flag, and in the question: What kinds of meanings does this dance produce today? The same question you ask about Trio A with Flags can be asked about Parts, which by 2019 gained in degrees of problematic political urgency (due to the nature of the diary soundtrack and its narration of the biopolitics of 18th-century settler-colonial, slave-holding New England) that were clearly not part of the work’s original resonance. With regard to historical context and reception, it is interesting to think of Jill Johnston’s rather dismissive take on Parts in 1965 in light of the fact that audience members were weeping when we performed it in 2019.
[1] Yvonne Rainer, Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called "Parts of Some Sextets," performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March 1965, The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965), pp. 168-78.
[2] For further reading on this topic, see Marcella Lista, A Different Way to Move, Minimalismes, New York, 1960-1980, exhibition catalog (Nîmes: Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, 2017).
[3] Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts, A Life, chapter 12 Implosions, pp. 262, 400 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), new ed. 2013.
[4] “The dance ‘went nowhere,’ did not develop, progressed as though on a treadmill or like a 10-ton truck stuck on a hill: it shifts gears, groans, sweats, farts, but doesn’t move an inch.” Rainer, Some Retrospective Notes, op. cit.
[5] The term “objective literature” attributed by Roland Barthes to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writings appeared for the first time in the USA in: Roland Barthes, “Literature Objective Alain Robbe-Grillet,” Evergreen Revue, no. 5 (1958). For further reading on this topic, see: Johanna Renard, “Un arrangement d’objets et de personnes : étude de Parts of Some Sextets d’Yvonne Rainer,” Agôn, Dossiers n°4, L’objet, le corps : de la symbiose à la confrontation, ENS Lyon (2011).
[6] How are Yvonne Rainer and the French feminist writer and activist Monique Wittig related, and how do their feminisms resonate? This is the major topic of my research residency in New York as a Villa Albertine laureate. I hope to address this point in the near future.
[7] See: Monique Wittig, Le chantier littéraire, published posthumously (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2010). Please note that Annabel L. Kim, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, is currently working on its translation into English. For further reading on Monique Wittig’s relation to Nathalie Sarraute, see: Benoît Auclerc and Yannick Chevalier (eds.), Lire Monique Wittig aujourd’hui(Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2012).
[8] Yvonne Rainer Papers, Series I. Notebooks, appointment and address books, 1949-2012, undated, Special Collections, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
[9] Yvonne Rainer, “Don’t Give the Game Away,” Arts Magazine, no. 44 (April 1967).
[10] Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts, op. cit., p. 380.
[11] Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets (1965-2019), Statement, Performa, November 2019.
[12] Mauss is currently working on a publication about Parts of Some Sextets, co-published by Performa and Lenz Press, to be released by Fall 2022. The book will present archival and contemporary contributions by Yvonne Rainer, Lynne Tillman, David Thompson, Emily Coates, Soyoung Yoon, Jill Johnston, Peter Moore, Al Giese, Babette Mangolte, Paula Court, and Nick Mauss.
[13] Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets, (1965-2019), A Performa 19 Commission, text presentation, https://vimeo.com/429772761, consulted on May 14th, 2022.