Everywhere and all at once: Performa 07, the second installment of the new biennial, brought a staggering range of live events to venues large and small throughout New York City

Art in America, March, 2008

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Yvonne Rainer, RoS Indexical, at the Hudson Theater

One of Performa's strengths is its historical reach, here twofold: back to The Rite of Spring (1913) and to Yvoune Rainer's pioneering choreography developed in the 1960s. A small, cozy Broadway theater provided an agreeably dissonant setting for both Performa and Rainer. Rainer's RoS Indexical (2007) was one of several instances during this year's series that stretched the definition of performance art, as understood in the art world, to include theater and dance.

In this commissioned work, Rainer's intellectual, Minimalist-inflected choreography made an interestingly odd fit with the notorious Rite of Spring, one of the early 20th century's major cultural scandals when it was performed in Paris in 1913 at the Thattre des Champs Elysees, to howls of outrage and, in the end, a riot. A collaboration among Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Nijinsky, the piece, with the exception of Stravinsky's score, is lost, known only through contemporary accounts and fragmentary documentation, although many choreographers have done their own versions in the years since.

While early modernists sought out primitivism in various guises and to multifarious ends, and while canonical paintings such as the Demoiselles d'Avignon have, over time, lost some of their rawness, the Rite of Spring, with its theme of a pagan fertility ceremony that builds to an act of human sacrifice--that of a young virgin--retains unsavory implications to this day, underlined by the relentlessly aggressive Stravinsky score. Rainer, however, approached the piece at a remove, having adapted part of the soundtrack of a BBC TV dramatization (Riot at the Rite, 2005) to frame her own presentation.

Rainer's piece opened with an off-stage male voice issuing an ominous directive: "No matter what happens, don't stop the performance!" Four women dancers entered at stage left and sat at a table, humming (unaccompanied) the pastoral introductory notes of the score. Soon the table was removed, the music came up, and the dancers got down to business--which consisted of invigorating, nonstop sequences of deceptively simple movements. They were clad in loose, mismatched gym clothes. Rainer's complicated and as always visually riveting and fast-paced patterns employed the entire expanse of the small stage (plus, at one side, an upholstered couch).

Activity built, propelled by Stravinsky's music, as did the sounds (courtesy of the BBC) of audience unrest. Not long into the piece, the recorded protest escalated into shouted insults, and Rainer's dancers suddenly stopped and pantomimed actions of catching and pitching--presumably they were being bombarded with missiles from the imaginary, outraged crowd, which they hurled back. Shortly thereafter, the Hudson Theater crowd (docile and appreciative as it had been) was itself treated to a simulated disruption, as some pre-selected "rioters" rose from their seats, moved down the darkened aisles and jumped onto the stage in a brief disorderly interlude. Then the dance resumed