YVONNE RAINER AG INDEXICAL with a little help from H.M.
Digital Beta PAL & NTSC Master
Tape 44 minutes
The film is reflecting on the choreography of Yvonne Rainer’s postmodern strategies and her revisionist look at George Balanchine’s seminal choreography AGON. The dance AG Indexical proposes three women trained in modern dance interacting with one ballerina. The film looks at it from two different vantage points, at first in a rehearsal set-up then in the first public performance of the piece premiered in New York City at Dance Theater Workshop in April 2006.
Choreographed by Yvonne Rainer (after George Balanchine’s Agon)
Music is by Igor Stravinsky and Henry Mancini.
Choreographic Assistants: Pat Catterson &Taisha Paggett,
Music Consultant: Pat Catterson,
A film by Babette Mangolte ?2007 BM
Dancers from left to right Pat Hoffbauer, Emily Coates, Sally Silvers and Pat Catterson.
Text written by Yvonne Rainer published in 2006
How many post modern choreographers does it take to partner one ballerina? The answer is three, according to choreographer/filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, who has created a re-vision of, or spin-off from, the Balanchine/ Stravinsky 1957 classic, AGON. Initially commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop in New York and further supported during a Getty Research Institute fellowship in Los Angeles, AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M. is performed by four women: dancers/choreographers Pat Catterson, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers, and classically trained ballerina Emily Coates.
One of the purposes of using a heterogeneous group of performers with varying abilities and histories — they range in age from 30 to 60 — brought to bear on classical material, is not to create a conventional hierarchy of technical expertise, but rather to demonstrate and legitimize alternative standards of competence and accomplishment. Y.R.’s twenty-minute re-vision at once pays tribute, parodies, and analyzes its classical/modernist antecedent. Skirting the realm of dance archeology and reconstruction, AGIndexical elicits flashes of recognition while turning Mr. B. over in his grave.