Anytime Yvonne Rainer takes the stage, it’s a momentous occasion. One of the pioneers of conceptual and minimalist choreography in the 1960s, Rainer, now 81 years old, rarely dances any more. In her latest work, “The Concept of Dust,” which she staged over three sold-out nights at the Kitchen this past weekend, she confronts aging, obsolescence, and the art of making history.The performance dives headfirst into its subject. To explain how it does this requires a spoiler, but since the production is over, I’ll go ahead reveal it here. A few minutes after 8 pm the lights dimmed, and Rainer, all in black, stepped onto the stage, her head bowed. She announced in a low, solemn voice that she had some very upsetting news. Pat Catterson, one of her veteran dancers — aka Raindears — would not be able to make it that night because, well, “I’ll just have to say it: Pat Catterson has died.”There was a gasp. Then wait! A voice from stage left: “Are you trying to get rid of me already?” Catterson shouted as she marched onto the stage. The audience laughed, and Catterson kicked into a tap routine. Rainer retreated to the sidelines, where she would remain for most of the show, with a microphone in hand, reciting passages from the New York Times, Christa Wolf’s novel “City of Angels,” and her own personal writings. Topics included the birth of the Muslim calendar, a wrongfully imprisoned man on Rikers Island, and John Cage. Some of her statements were sobering, such as the assertion that “I read the New York Times every day and find something to cry over.” Others were goofy, like Kingsley Amis’s aphorism “Religion and masturbation are alike in one regard: Feel free to practice them, but no one wants to hear about it.”While Rainer narrated — a vestige, perhaps, of the two and a half decades during which she abandoned dance for filmmaking — six dancers of various races and genders moved around her. They were of various ages, too, but their comfy shoes — Keds, Sauconys, Asics — and track pants gave them the look of retirees.As is typical in Rainer’s work, the choreography did not resemble any that most audience members would be familiar with. She rejects stunts and spectacle in favor of simple hops, finger snaps, and squats. The dancers circled each other, swayed, clustered like insects, and then scattered. The movements sometimes mimicked primitive acts, infantile and sexual — pelvic thrusts set to Giovanni Paisiello’s opera “Chi Vuol la Zingarella,” for instance, and, at one point, outright kissing. Other times they evoked labor, of both the Sisyphean and the going-through-the-motions kind. Near the end, some dancers lay their heads on pillows.The result was an archive of actions that together create the semblance of a lifetime. As mundane as they were individually, their cumulative effect was surprisingly energizing. Toward the end, some of the dancers leaned in and lifted one another to form shaky bridges. They were both tottering and balanced, a contradiction that Rainer amplified in the last line of her narration: Recalling a dream in which she was having dinner with John Cage, she intoned, “He was laughing, I was crying.” Then the lights went dark.The ending could be different next time — and there most likely will be a next time. Rainer has determined that the “Concept of Dust,” which originated at the Getty Center in 2014, is a work in progress, to be “altered annually.”
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