yvonne rainer

Nawshin Nazat April 25th, 2014 Postmodern dance was a dance movement that took place during the 1960s and 1970s. It was a rebellion against traditional ideas and assumptions of structured dance. Although the movement was short-lived, it allowed new genres of dance levels and performance art to bloom. Postmodern dance claimed that any movement was dance, and any individual was a dancer, with or without training. It allowed everyday movement to become a legitimate performance art. Postmodernists were known to question structured dancing and push dance and art to new levels. Among these postmodernists was Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne Rainer was born on November 24, 1934 and is now 79 years old, she is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker. Her work is often known to be experimental and challenging. She was born to parents Joseph and Jeanette Rainer. Her mother was of Polish and Jewish descent and her father was Italian. Rainer spent her childhood and adolescence in the Richmond district of San Francisco. As a child, Rainer attended a boarding institute with her older brother Ivan. She moved back to live with her parents at the age of seven. At the age of twelve she had already been exposed to poets, painters, writers and Italian anarchists from her paternal side. Rainer was introduced to films from her father and ballet from her mother, and enrolled in dance classes at a very young age. Rainer stated that “I am five or six when my mother enrolls me in a dance school a few blocks from Sunnyside...All the little girls are able to touch the backs of their heads with their toes. It seems to me that I am the only one who can't.” Rainer attended Lowell High School, and attended San Francisco Junior college after graduation; she then transferred to Berkeley College for a week and eventually dropped out of college by the end of September 1952. In 1955,