The dash joins and the dash moves along. For the Dash column, Mariana Fernández peels back the split screen of Yvonne Rainer’s final piece—a stark exploration of racism, freedom, and the institution—to find the institution in good health.
Yvonne Rainer, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?, October 5–8, 2022. Presented and Produced by Performa with New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Yvonne Rainer frequently borrows Susan Sontag’s term “radical juxtaposition” to describe her way of generating disjunction and friction. In her words, she likes “putting things together that don’t fit.” Her new (and apparently final) work, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What About the Bees?, which premiered at New York Live Arts on October 5, opens with silent fragments of two films. On the left screen is the iconic sequence from the 1941 film HELLZAPOPPIN’ in which Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, dressed as cooks, delivery men, and domestic workers, break free from their characters’ duties to dance the Lindy Hop to Count Basie’s “Jumping at the Woodside.” On the right is the famous slow-motion pillow fight from Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933) portraying young boys in a French boarding school dorm overturning mattresses and throwing pillows in a moment of blissful rebellion against authority.
Both films represent moments of liberation from the social orders in which they are set. The Lindy Hop sequence, featuring a dance born out of the improvisation of jazz, was one of the first times Black dancers performed in a Hollywood film (even if the dancers are dressed as laborers for the film’s white characters, even if the scene was shot so that it could be easily edited out of the film for racist audiences in the South). The French boys perform a fleeting emancipation from the education system amidst their insurrection of feathers, even if they are not really free at all.
Yvonne Rainer, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?, October 5–8, 2022. Presented and Produced by Performa with New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova.
Rainer takes these two moments of apparent chaos and exhilaration, framed and controlled by the institution, and deconstructs them into a choreography collaged with everyday movements and material from previous works. The eight dancers onstage perform the energetic flips and lifts of the historically Black dance as controlled, factual movements in signature Rainer style, to a prerecorded monologue about systemic racism in America—spoken by the Greek god Apollo, Leader of the Muses and a recurring figure in Rainer’s recent works. Some of this material is culled from Rainer’s diaries and sessions with her therapist, including an appalling anecdote in which the character Jane—a “permanently recovering racist” like Rainer—refers to a Black coworker as a “brown cow.” Other parts borrow texts by Black thinkers like James Baldwin and Terrance Hayes.
The work concludes with actress Kathleen Chalfant performing an excerpt of Molly Bloom’s speech at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Yes, Rainer wants to propose, dance can be an inescapably freeing antidote to the institution. Yes, movement is a political act in and of itself. Rainer’s emphatic “yes” is affecting, especially because she is famous for saying “no.” But it neglects the fact that, even in moments of relative freedom, the moving, dancing body is not autonomous.
Yvonne Rainer, HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees?, October 5–8, 2022. Presented and Produced by Performa with New York Live Arts. Photo: Maria Baranova.
In a brutally candid Q&A with choreographer Bill T. Jones following the second night of the performance, Rainer responded to a question from the audience with this: “It was easy to be rebellious in the 1960s.”
Jones, a Black male choreographer, responded: “No, it wasn’t.”
Voices of color didn’t, and don’t, enjoy the same avant-garde freedom that Rainer did, and does. She is not wrong to use that freedom, which has resulted in incredible, enduring works. But her legend is very much a product of the institutions surrounding her. The shortcomings and overcompensations of HELLZAPOPPIN’—too many layers of mediation, of texts and bodies and temporalities—similarly point to the artifice of escaping the institution altogether. But by opening space for examining the institutionalized aspect of avant-garde dance, the work, perhaps more dramatically than any performance in recent memory, made issues of race and privilege visible. x
Mariana Fernández is a writer and curator living in New York.