Cover Photo: [Rehearsal] Yvonne Rainer, Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees? (2022). Performers L-R: David Thomson, Brittany Bailey, Vincent McCloskey, Patricia Hoffbauer. Photo by Paula Court.
We acknowledge and pay respect to Lenape people, elders, and ancestors past, present, and coming in the future. We acknowledge Indigenous people who may be present right now. We acknowledge and offer deep gratitude to Lenapehoking where we are now - the land, and waters of the Lenape homeland.
The above video consists of extracts from a dance I originally choreographed in 2000 for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, and excerpts from the writings of Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The idea for integrating this dance footage with printed texts came partly from the title, which both elegiacally and ironically invokes a passage through time and the end of a way of life in 1900 Vienna, or, more to the point, aristocratic life. Thus, the passage of Baryshnikov himself is also implicated—from danseur noble roles in classical ballet to his long standing interests in postmodern dance.
Beyond the resonance of the title, however, the 21st century dance footage can be read multifariously—and paradoxically—as both the beneficiary of a cultural and economic elite and as an extension of an avant-garde tradition that revels in attacking that elite and its illusions of order and permanency. Some may say the avant-garde has long been over. Be that as it may, the idea of it continues to inspire and motivate many of us with its inducement—in the words of playwright/director Richard Foreman—to ‘resist the present.’”
“After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” is the title of a Tennyson poem and a 1939 novel by Aldous Huxley.
HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees? (2022)
Concept and Direction by Yvonne Rainer, aided by research and input from the dancers
Assistant Director: Pat Catterson
Sound Collage: Quentin Chiappetta
Lighting Design: Les Dickert
Producer and Tour Manager: Sasha Okshteyn
Production Assistant: Cindy Tibazarwa
Performed by Emily Coates, Brittany Bailey, Brittany EngelAdams, Patricia Hoffbauer, Vincent McCloskey, Emmanuèle Phuon, David Thomson, Timothy Ward.
Guest Performer: Kathleen Chalfant
Movement Sources:
Hellzapoppin’ (film): directed by Henry C. Potter (1941)
Choreography: Frankie Manning
Dancers: Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, Frances “Mickey” Jones and William Downes, Norma Miller and Billy Ricker, Willa Mae Ricker and Al Minns, Ann Johnson and Frankie Manning
Zero for Conduct (film): directed by Jean Vigo (1933)
Way Out West (film): duet created by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (1937).
The Mind Is a Muscle, part 1 / Trio A: choreographed by Yvonne Rainer (1965-66)
Dances At a Gathering: choreographed by Jerome Robbins (1969)
The Dying Swan: choreographed by Michel Fokine for Anna Pavlova (1905)
Voice-over by David Thomson reading from Yvonne Rainer’s Revisions by Apollo Musagetes, including quotations from the writings of James Baldwin, Stuart Hall, Terence Hayes, Jill Lepore, Tracy Morgan, A.O. Scott, Moises Velasquez-Manoff, and Eric Williams.
Soundtrack:
Jumping at the Woodside by Count Basie.
Band: Slim and Slam
Slim Gaillard – piano, guitar
Slam Stewart – bass
Rex Stewart – cornet
Elmer Fane – clarinet
Jap Jones – trombone
C.P. Jonstone – drums
Enrico Caruso: “Je crois entendre encore” from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (1904)
Lily Pons: “Una Voce Poco Fa” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1936)
Marian Anderson: “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” sung at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., April 9, 1939.
Maurice Jaubert, composer: Zero for Conduct
Total running time: 1 hour 15 minutes
With much gratitude to RoseLee Goldberg, Esa Nickle, Kathy Noble, and Performa, Bill T. Jones and New York Live Arts.
Special thanks to Pat Catterson for her invaluable jitterbug research and support.
Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the NAACP, African American Burial Grounds and Remembering Project, and the Zion Cemetery Preservation and Maintenance Society, which also creates reparations, scholarships for African American families, and grants for Black entrepreneurs.
Co-commissioned by Performa, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Presented by Performa in partnership with New York Live Arts. Generous support is provided by Sarah Arison, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Performa Commissioning Fund. Future performances to be announced.
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New York Live Arts produces and presents dance, music and theater performances in its 20,000 square-foot home, including a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square-foot studios. New York Live Arts offers an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people; it supports the continuing professional development of performing artists. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; it is the company’s sole producer, providing support and the environment to originate innovative and challenging new work for the Company and New York’s creative community.
Founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, Performa is the leading organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twentyfirst century. Since launching New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, the organization has solidified its identity as a commissioning and producing entity. Performa contributes important art-historical heft to the field by showing the development of live art in all its forms from many different cultural perspectives. In the past seventeen years, Performa has presented six hundred works, engaged more than seven hundred artists, and toured commissioned performances in twenty countries. Performa also produces exhibitions, an online magazine, conferences, lectures, and standalone programming that foster learning, critical discourse, and deeper engagement with performance.
In 2006, Performa invited Yvonne Rainer to conceive a new work for the 2007 edition of the Performa Biennial. Rainer responded to the prompt with RoS Indexical, a reimagining of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which reflected on the ballet’s controversial 1913 premiere in Paris. Since then, Performa has produced and toured all Rainer’s new works, including Spiraling Down (2008), Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2010), Assisted Living: Do You Have Any Money? (2013), The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (2015), Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 (2019), and HELLZAPOPPIN’: What about the bees? (2022).
Katherine Bishop, Richard Chang, Rashid Johnson, Wendy Fisher, RoseLee Goldberg, Ronald Guttman, Barbara Hoffman, Toby Devan Lewis, Joyce Liu, Shirin Neshat, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Roya Sachs, Neil Wenman.
Yvonne Rainer, one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater (1962), made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteenyear career as a choreographer/ dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental featurelength films, she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan). Her dances and films have been seen throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia in concert halls and museum retrospectives. Rainer’s publications include Feelings Are Facts: a Life; Work: 196173; The Films of Yvonne Rainer; A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts, Moving and Being Moved; and Revisions. Her awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, a U.S.A Fellowship, and a Yoko Ono Courage Award.
Brittany Bailey has trained with Merce Cunningham as well as whirled with the dervishes of the Mevlevi Order. Bailey has performed at MoMA with Yvonne Rainer in the exhibition, Judson
Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done (2018) and in Marina Abramović’s retrospective, The Artist is Present (2010). In 2011, Bailey was a member of the Michael Clark Company for performances at the Tate Modern. Bailey currently studies at Columbia University and is an official transmitter of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A.
Pat Catterson is working on Tremor, her 115th dance, and hoping to publish her memoir, I Said Yes. The recipient of a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the NEA, the CAPS Program, the Harkness Foundation, and the Fulbright Program, she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, UCLA, the Juilliard School, and the Merce Cunningham Studio. Her writing has been published in Ballet Review, JOPERD, Attitude Magazine, Dance Magazine Online, the Getty Iris, and the Dance Research Journal. She first performed Yvonne Rainer’s work in 1969 and since 1999 has worked as her dancer, assistant, and stager of her early works.
Kathleen Chalfant is a Tony nominated & Drama Desk winning actress best known for starring in Angels in America on Broadway and Wit offBroadway. Select Broadway and off-Broadway credits include: Racing Demon, Dance With Me, Four Quartets, A Woman of the World, Wit, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, Talking Heads (Obie Award). Select recurring Television roles include The Affair, Bull, The Americans, House of Cards, Elementary. Select film credits include Isn’t It Delicious, Lackawanna Blues, and most recently, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. She received the 2004 Lortel Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance and the 2018 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement. Quentin Chiappetta enjoys a wide-ranging creative career as a composer and sound designer. He has created music and soundscapes for everything from film and television to theater, multimedia experimental installations and dance. Upcoming projects include a large-scale permanent sound installation for the Smithsonian
Museum of American History, the sound design for Christian Marclay’s latest work at the Pompidou Center and the original score for the documentary Terrible Children.
Emily Coates has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp and Yvonne Rainer. Highlights include duets with Baryshnikov in works by Erick Hawkins, Mark Morris, and Karole Armitage, and performing in Rainer’s work for over twenty years. Her choreographic projects have been commissioned and presented by Baryshnikov Arts Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hopkins Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, and Danspace Project (NYT Critic’s Pick), among others. Coates collaborated with Rainer to revive her 1965 Parts of Some
Sextets for Performa 19 (NYT Best Dance of 2019). She is director of dance at Yale University, where she created the dance studies curriculum. With physicist Sarah Demers, she co-authored Physics and Dance
Les Dickert designs for a diverse range of live performance, spanning contemporary and Shakespearean theater, modern dance, classical ballet, and international performance art. Broadway: Wrong Mountain (Assistant), High Society (Assistant). Off-Broadway: Bedlam, Atlantic Theater, Rattlestick Theater, P73, Theater Row, Ensemble Studio Theater, others. Regional: Shakespeare and Company, Great Lakes Theater Festival, Geva Theater, Perseverance Theater, Syracuse Stage, others. Dance: White Oak Dance Project, San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Joffrey Ballet. International: Centre Pompidou, La Scala, Staatsballet Berlin, Bayerische Staatsballet, and the National Ballets of England, Denmark, Australia, Belgium, Canada and Russia. He has collaborated with Yvonne Rainer since 2000.
Brittany Engel-Adams is an artist working at the intersection of dance and technology. Her
work is usually live, and uses online data and software to consider the role of bodies in our collective future. Brittany’s work has been presented at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris, Guggenheim museum NY, Movement Research Performance Journal, and other venues. Forthcoming: Future Bodies Symposium (Fall 2022) at Virginia Tech; the cell residency program (Spring 2023) in the heart of Chelsea, NY. Brittany teaches in the dance department at Rutgers University. Patricia Hoffbauer, a Brazilianborn/New York-based dance artist, has been creating dance and performance work for a long time and in collaboration with many artists. Highlights: her work Para-Dice was presented twice by Danspace Project. She was a Gibney Dance Center DIP artist and created/presented Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People in their studios and Getting Away with murder was presented at La Mama. She teaches at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a founding member of the “The Raindears.”
Vincent McCloskey began dancing at the Washington Ballet School. He has performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group, Lucinda Childs Dance Company, and Pam Tanowitz Dance. He currently performs in works by Patricia Hoffbauer, and assists her and Pam Tanowitz in staging their work, and teaches dance at Barnard College and NYU’s Tisch Open Arts.
Emmanuèle Phuon has performed internationally with the Elisa Monte Dance Company, Martha Clarke, Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, and Yvonne Rainer. Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas, Spoleto Dance Festival in Charleston, Guggenheim Works and Process, Singapore Da:ns festival, Danspace Project in New York, Hopkins Center for the Arts and has toured internationally. She is the recipient of grants from Fondation de France, Un Monde par Tous, Asian Cultural Council; fellowships include a Richard Porter Leach fellowship, Baryshnikov Arts
Center’s Martha Duffy Memorial Fellowship, and a 2019 Dance Research Fellowship, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
David Thomson is a collaborative interdisciplinary artist who has worked with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Deborah Hay, Kaneza Schaal, Meg Stuart, Alain Buffard, Okwui Okpokwasili and Matthew Barney among many others, he joined Yvonne’s Raindears in 2015. Awards and fellowships include US Artist, NYFA, LMCC, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg and FCA. Thomson is currently a Mabou Mines Associate Artist and Danspace Research Fellow. Thomson’s current artistic practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity. He founded The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment. Timothy Ward grew up in Abita Springs, Louisiana. He graduated from the New Orleans Center
for the Creative Arts and earned a BFA in dance at The Juilliard School. He then worked as one of the last members of the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group. Tim continues to engage in Cunningham work and dances for Douglas Dunn, Molissa Fenley, Pat Catterson, Julia Gleich, Fadi J Koury, and Yvonne Rainer. Additionally, Tim works at Live Live & Organic, Barracuda Lounge, and is a Woods Method Colon Hydrotherapist.
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