Trio A workshop

What can be learned today from Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 influential work TRIO A?

In this workshop we will examine TRIO A’s philosophical, physical and historical relevance through learning a portion of the dance, composition exercises around its projects and discussion. Although Rainer’s famous “No Manifesto” was not written about this dance, the dance itself is a manifesto. Its form, vocabulary, and performing stance challenge traditional choreographic methods and modes of presentation. Almost fifty years later, the impact of Rainer’s and fellow Judsonites’ revolutionary ideas and work is still evident in the current choreographic scene.

Pat Catterson first worked with Rainer and performed TRIO A in 1969 and have assisted and danced for her since she returned to choreography in 1999. Catterson have taught and performed TRIO A countless times in the past forty years and have found that learning it is the best way to understand the aesthetic shift it represented.

Despite its look of weighted ease and casual effort, and its reputation as a dance the untrained can learn and do, for it has been performed by both dancers and non dancers, TRIO A is not without technical demand. Dancing TRIO A requires coordination, spatial awareness, control, balance, concentration, movement memory and range of motion. As anyone who has learned it can attest, TRIO A is not easy to do.

Rainer and many of her Judson era cohorts studied and/or danced with Merce Cunningham. One can clearly see the influence of Cunningham technique on TRIO A in its shaping of the lower against the upper body, in the clarity of its movement destinations, the intricacy of coordination, its use of the spine and spatial complexity. Catterson have studied Cunningham for forty years and have taught at the Cunningham Studio.

Note: Participants in the workshop must wear sneakers or leather soled street shoes that one can easily move in.