Lives of Performers

The genre-defying debut feature of legendary choreographer Yvonne Rainer, which heralded an experimental new cinematic voice.

Shot by cinematographer Babette Mangolte – who would also begin a long collaboration with Chantal Akerman that year, starting with La chambre – Rainer’s first foray into feature filmmaking traverses the worlds of dance and cinema. Opening with a scene of performers rehearsing the director’s performance piece Walk, She Said, the audience is introduced to the four credited ‘protagonists’ of the film, including dancer Valda Setterfield, known for her work as a soloist with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Subtitled a melodrama, Lives of Performers plays with the convention of romance stories, introducing a love triangle between a man and two women that is disrupted by still images, intertitle cards in the style of a silent film, and a final sequence of 35 tableaux vivants inspired by G.S. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929). The director’s voice is a constant presence, interchangeably instructing choreography or asking intimate questions, as she blurs documentary and dance, fact and fiction.

“A fascinating immersion in radical art practice in all its meta-narrative incoherence and mess … Mesmeric.” – The Guardian