Omschrijving Andrea.

After Trio A  is based on  Yvonne Rainer’s minimal dance piece Trio A (1966) and the No Manifesto (1965) written alongside of it. Trio A reduced dance to its essentials and is considered one of the beginnings of postmodern dance. It was originally a part of the whole evening called The Mind Is A Muscle. A Judson Church member, Rainer turned the current conventions of dance and the perception of body upside down, saying ‘dance is hard to see’: ‘If my rage at the impoverishment of ideas, narcissism, and disguised sexual exhibitionism of most dancing can be considered puritan moralizing, it is also true that I love the body – it’s actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality. It is my overall concern to reveal people as they are engaged in various kinds of activities – alone, with each other, with objects...’ (Yvonne Rainer, Statement, 1968)

After Trio A is not a re-staging of Trio A but a dialogue with it. Two dancers are asked to learn a part of the original Trio A phrase live on stage, without any previous knowledge of it. They do it in front of the audience, learning from a recording of the original piece played on a TV monitor, within the course of one hour. They may not stop, ask questions or leave. The two dancers are placed in different conditions in respect to each other and to the original Trio A material. The audience observes the learning process: watching becomes learning, learning becomes virtuosity, task-like activity becomes a dance, knowledge becomes power, history becomes present, body becomes political, the non-spectacular becomes strangely spectacular.