May 1–31, 2025
e-flux Film is pleased to feature Five Easy Pieces by Yvonne Rainer for our May 2025 edition of Staff Picks.
Shot between 1966 and 1969, Five Easy Pieces represents Yvonne Rainer’s transition from her influential movement work with the Judson Dance Theater into the moving image, revealing an artistic practice equally as attuned to the body’s relation to time and frame as to the dynamics of performance.
In these works—Hand Movie (1966), Volleyball (Foot Film) (1967), Rhode Island Red (1968), Trio Film (1968), and Knife Film (1969)—Rainer turns simple actions into concentrated sites of observation. The camera does not merely record; it choreographs, framing the smallest articulations as events. Five Easy Pieces distills Rainer’s ongoing preoccupations: the deconstruction of spectacle, the primacy of the everyday, and the latent drama of minimal gestures echoing the words of her 1965 “No Manifesto”: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity.”
This program is presented in collaboration with Video Data Bank.
The works will stream on e-flux Film from May 1–31, 2025. View them here.
Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker whose pioneering work has reshaped the fields of dance, experimental film, and performance art. A founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, Rainer rejected virtuosity and theatricality in favor of ordinary movement and task-based actions. Between 1962 and 1975 Rainer presented her choreography throughout the U.S. and Europe. Since 1972, Rainer has completed seven feature-length films, beginning with Lives of Performers (1972) and more recently The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). In 2000 and 2001 Rainer returned to dance via commissions from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation to choreograph work for the White Oak Dance Project, including a 35-minute piece called After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Rainer has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990-95), and a Wexner Prize (1995), as well as four Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees. Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961-73 was published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press in 1974; The Films of Yvonne Rainer, a collection of her film scripts, was published by Indiana University Press in 1989; and A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999. Rainer’s latest choreographic work, based on Balanchine’s AGON, was presented at Dance Theater Workshop, April 2006, subsequently traveling to the Getty Museum. A memoir, Feelings are Facts: A Life, was published by MIT Press in 2006.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.