Performa Announces Yvonne Rainer European Tour

Performa, the New York nonprofit dedicated to performance-based art, announced today that it is producing a European tour of Yvonne Rainer’s The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? The piece will be complemented by a series of lectures delivered by Rainer throughout France and Belgium.

The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? was first performed at the Museum of Modern Art last summer. The work is 45-minutes and uses seven dancers, alternating between dance and oration; the spoken segments (done by Rainer herself) draw on texts ranging from paleontology to assorted fragments of literary works, all focused around the theme of aging. In addition, the work contains an improvisational element, allowing the dancers to initiate, halt, alter, or transform their movements in time.

Performa’s founding director and curator, RoseLee Goldberg, described the choreographer in a statement as “A National Treasure… [who] changed the course of modern dance in [the United States] and abroad in the 1960s, and her influence remains as significant as ever, five decades later.”

Performa was founded in 2004. Since establishing the first performance biennial in New York in 2005, the organization has staged 592 works, collaborated with over 700 artists, and launched tours in 17 countries. Rainer’s tour, which begins October 13, will make stops at Musée de la Danse in Rennes, the Louvre in Paris, the Marseille Objectif Danse festival, Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations in Marseille, and the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.