PARIS.- The exhibition « Lives of Permorferms » is a tribute to the legendary American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Born in 1934 and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theatre, Rainer has been a major influence on subsequent generations of artists. After applying to choreography the results of her research into everyday interplay between the private and the political, she then transposed them into her film work.

The exhibition title « Lives of Performers » was originally that of Rainer’s first full-length film, made in 1972 at the time of her transition to the cinema. Between 1966 and 1969 she had already made five short films : Hand Movie, Volleyball, Rhode Island Red, Trio Film and Line.

Structured around continuous screening of these six films, the exhibition also includes contributions from artists invited to create or present works marked by their affinities with Rainer. It opens with a selection from the choreographer/filmmaker’s archives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles : working notes, diary, scores, photographs of rehearsals and performances, posters, publications and sound recordings.

As its title suggests, the project addresses the question of «liveness» in performance. What is the relationship between presence and representation ? How does quotation, or what is now called re- enactment, impinge on reality, presence and the present time ? What are the issues in performativity ? How are these issues played out politically, and in the sphere of matters of genre ?

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz are presenting the film installation Salomania, a dialogue in which Rainer and Wu Ingrid Tsang explore the questions of transvestism and reenactment. The machine of the contemporary body is put on display and contrasted with the historical body.

In L’Opérateur (The Cameraman) Julien Crépieux films a woman dancer and a pianist in a studio rehearsal of a curious choreography in which the camera held by the dancer becomes a participant and the processes of perception and cognition blur.

Yael Davids’s new performative installation involves sculptural elements – rope, sheets of glass, pieces of wood – which are left in place and evoke different temporalities: those of the performance’s past and present, and those of the artist’s personal experience.

Carole Douillard’s The Waiting Room confronts us with a group of men who spend several hours waiting in the exhibition space. Waiting and latency, and what emerges from a temporal parenthesis in which, in theory, nothing happens, are the core of an approach based on microgestures and the meeting of gazes. In her photographic series Man of His Word and The Artillery, Maria Loboda looks into the questions of posture and attitude, exploring the tropes of cultural history through a formal twinning of conceptual contractions: gestures from the Hindu tradition and black leather gloves, and a heraldic lioness approached from behind.

Mai-Thu Perret presents her very first puppet La Fée idéologie and a number of wall drawings as fragments of a fictive world centering on community, femininity and the tenuous boundaries between the body and sculpture, the everyday and ritual.

Alert to these matters of life – of liveness – Émilie Pitoiset creates fictional interplays of equilibrium in which the image and the sculptural or painted object harbour a convex narrative summoning the spectator into a role game whose plot has not yet been revealed.

Noé Soulier performs Mouvement sur Mouvement, a dance piece about the very essence of movement and the complex relations between gesture and discourse.

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the genesis of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Some of her better known early dances and theatre pieces are Terrain (1963), The Mind Is a Muscle (1968), Continuous Project-Altered Daily (1971), and This is the story of a woman who… (1973).

Between 1972 and 1996 Rainer completed seven feature-length films, beginning with « Lives of Performers » and more recently Privilege (1990), winner of the Filmmakers’ Trophy at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the 1991 International Documentary Film Festival in Munich; and MURDER and murder (1996), winner of the Teddy Award at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival and Special Jury Award at the 1999 Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Her films deal with a number of aesthetic and social issues, such as melodrama, menopause, racism, political violence, sexual identity, and notions of disease.

In 2000 Rainer returned to dance with After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation. Since then she has choreographed five more dances, including RoS Indexical, Spiraling Down, and Assisted Living : Do you have any money ?. She regularly presents her performances under the auspices of Performa. Rainer’s publications include Work: 1961-73 (1974) ; The Films of Y.R. (1989) ; A Woman Who… : Essays, Interviews, Scripts (1999) ; Feelings Are Facts : a Life (2006) ; and Poems (2011).

In 2002 the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in Philadelphia mounted a Rainer exhibition consisting of video installations, film screenings, and dance photos and memorabilia. In 2013 Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne mounted similar exhibitions. Rainer is the recipient of a number of awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, several National Endowment awards, and a Yoko Ono Award. Her archive is housed in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Yvonne Rainer is one of today’s most influential figures for artists concerned with the possibilities of the moving image, human potential and relational aesthetics.