If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals -- including breakfast -- have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading. -- from Feelings Are Facts In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances -- including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan -- and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.

Product Description: From her work in dance and choreography to her films and writings, Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) has established herself as one of the America's greatest living artists. This first collection of her poems, which were written from the late 1990s onwards and have never before been published, affirms her ability to endow words with corporeality, propulsion and swift-moving narrative...read more

Product Description: Radical Juxtapositions is the first book to present both artistic facets of Yvonne Rainer, dance innovator and award-winning filmmaker. One of the most respected artists of the twentieth century, Rainer broke new ground as part of the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, where she created choreography that connected directly to life and utilized everyday movements--very much in sync with the contemporaneous aesthetics of Happenings, Pop art and Minimalism...read more

Product Description: This volume, which includes three dozen illustrations, is a wide-ranging collection of Yvonne Rainer’s personal writings and interviews on such topics as cultural politics, lesbianism, violence, breast cancer, and many of her dances and films...read more

Brings together the film scripts of a filmmaker known for her avant-garde feminist approach to the genre