Yvonne Rainer, Trio A review: watching this thrilling performance for free feels like an enormous privilege
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- Yvonne Rainer's Trio A is being staged in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall as a looping performance over several hours each day, with each rendition lasting about five minutes.
- The Tate staging marks the 60th anniversary of the work's first recital in 1966, when it was performed by Rainer alongside David Gordon and Steve Paxton, and Rainer continues to instruct new dancers in the piece.
- Rainer's innovation was to introduce everyday movements into choreography and strip dance of its traditional theatricality, with dancers licensed to execute the same sequence at a tempo that feels appropriate to them, causing them to fall out of sync.
- The choreography removes psychological drama by requiring performers to disregard the audience and each other, with no build to a climax or sense of dramatic arc — the reviewer compares the hypnotic effect to the trancelike music of Philip Glass.
- The performance is free to view without the entrance fees the reviewer says are 'elsewhere transforming museums into leisure centres for the rich.'
- Audience members drift in and out during the two-hour viewing window, including art school students, babies in pushchairs, and schoolchildren heckling from the mezzanine.
Why it matters: By staging Trio A as a free, hours-long looping performance, Tate Modern makes one of the most influential works of postwar dance accessible to any London visitor — a counterpoint to the trend of museums charging fees that price out casual audiences. The 60th-anniversary recreation also affirms Rainer's continued role instructing new performers, keeping the choreography's improvisational tempo live rather than frozen as museum artifact.
