The Elliptical Character of Trio A

Trio A begins with a hesitation. Standing in profile, the dancer—who is choreographer Yvonne Rainer in the canonical 1978 film version—begins to turn her head toward the audience.Footnote ¹³ Nearly immediately, she retracts this movement and returns her gaze forward. This sidelong glance lasts just long enough to attract attention, but its brevity precludes accurate identification and renders Rainer's intention uncertain. Was it an incidental slip? A hesitation? A knowing nod? Or perhaps, an arrested appeal to the audience? Regardless of its intent, Rainer subsequently turns her head in the opposite direction, as if alluding to the choreography's compositional order, which restricts visual contact with its audience. Although such a reference would be consistent with its structure, Trio A consistently eludes clear formal distinctions. In this case, since the choreography does not follow a set spatial structure, the dancer's orientation to the audience is incidental. It is thus impossible to ascribe a particular purpose to her ostensible hesitation, which may have been a peculiarity particular to this performance, an unconscious equivocation, or even an outright error. The indecipherable nature of this gesture is consistent with the dance's quizzically inconclusive character. This hesitation—and the formal ambivalence to which it corresponds—keeps spectator and performer alike off-balance and bound to an “elliptical” way of moving that seems oddly incomplete.

At first, it can be difficult to detect the elliptical quality that characterizes Trio A. As if a purely formal exercise, this dance may seem devoid of emotion. It is short—only four and a half minutes long—and hardly seems to begin before it is over. Furthermore, these are four unremarkable minutes. In contrast to the exuberant excess and noise that characterized her preceding choreography, no words are spoken, no sound uttered.Footnote ¹⁴ The choreography is famously understated, an abstract amalgam of incomplete technical phrases and gestural idiosyncrasies. Following an unhurried pace, it impassively proceeds with perfunctory precision through a series of unimposing postures: she stands, squats, stretches her arms, and slouches to the floor. This blandly banal range of movement corresponds to its apathetic execution. Apparently unconcerned with technical rigor, Rainer allows her arms to sway and swing, never extending them to their full length, and rarely leaps or leaves the floor.

Trio A's stylistic detachment is often associated with 1960s American minimalism—whose history has been productively complicated by Ramsay Burt and Mark Franko.Footnote ¹⁵ As originally described by Rainer, minimalist sculpture provides a model for her attempt to neutralize dramatic expression in dance and inspires her to treat the body like a “thing” (Rainer Reference Rainer1999, 33). However, despite its impersonal style, Trio A is not rigidly mechanical. The choreography wavers, wobbles, and shakes, always unstable. Even when simply standing, a faint trembling undermines its equilibrium. In one telling gesture, Rainer inconspicuously unsettles a simple forward bend by holding one foot just above the ground. The choreography also employs preposterous physical feats that exaggerate her awkward imbalance. In one such movement, Rainer dumps herself into a handstand, legs flailing above her; in another, she unexpectedly bears her head down, clasps her hands behind her and blunders thunderously forward, heavily hopping on each foot. In yet another, she hoists a knee waist-high and pivots in a circle. Forced to shift while on a single leg, her pointlessly peculiar method of locomotion emphasizes the body's weight.

Were it not for the impervious detachment particular to Trio A, such displays of bodily excess might seem comic. Rainer had consciously pursued such comic clumsiness in her previous choreography to undermine the artistic elegance of classical dance. Hence, other gestures in Trio A—batting her hair, rolling on the floor, crouched rocking—recall Rainer's earlier affectations of socially aberrant behavior, for which she cites “the loony bin and the NY subways as sources of inspiration” (Rainer Reference Rainer1965, 169). In her earlier choreography, these imitations of regressive behavior were intentionally petulant acts of strategic transgression. By demeaning herself, Rainer staged an assault on meaning, or in her words, “hierarchical distinctions of meaning” (Rainer Reference Rainer1999, 94). Although Trio A did not include such overtly transgressive actions, it also disrupted the “hierarchical” structure of conventional dance by combining contrasting movement vocabularies into a single idiosyncratic idiom, consisting of balletic flourishes, modern contractions, ordinary gestures, and eccentric tics.

Given the conflicting nature of these movement vocabularies, it may seem that Rainer intended Trio A to disrupt the artistic conventions accepted in dance. However, conflict does not define its tone. On the contrary, a certain lightness, even grace, pervades its awkward physicality. This lightness manifests itself in peripherally passing accents, such as deft flicks of a foot, artfully arched palms, or several series of gentle tapping. These gestures primarily involve the hands and feet, which deflect attention from the body's core, the center of its weight. Although never en pointe nor airborne, Rainer frequently propels herself above the ground in relevé. Such balletic details introduce a trace of ethereal elegance into the dance, including its final image, in which Rainer punctuates a gentle sweep of her arms with a single step backward, her foot flexed and alertly poised, as if ready to begin again.

As this attitude indicates, Trio A never stops. Albeit far from frantic, it proceeds in an unerringly purposeful pattern, in which “one discrete thing follows another” (Rainer Reference Rainer1999, 34). This discretely singular pattern begins in the first moments of the dance. Its three initial gestures—bending her knees, turning her head, and swinging her arms—are each adjoined with a purposeful pause that emphasizes their independence or “discrete” value. Each movement is “discrete”—that is, separate and singular—because the choreography's construction consciously avoids repetition. As Rainer recounts, this renunciation was a conscious choice. She writes that “in a strict sense neither is there any repetition . . . this procedure was consciously pursued as a change from my previous work, which often had one identical thing following another” (Rainer Reference Rainer1999, 35). The absence of repetition in the dance prevents the development of particular themes or variations. Instead of mobilizing an ensemble of thematically related parts, each “discrete” movement eludes an incipient instant of narrative determination—the point at which representation takes recourse to reference.

In this way, Trio A suspends the arrival of significant events. Nothing happens, save the passing of oddly ephemeral gestures that incessantly elude meaningful order. In the choreography, this elusive motion induces a slight shudder that informs its principal characteristics: its disconcerting disequilibrium, odd rocking, wobbling, and even its initial hesitation. As such, its initial hesitation does refer to a fundamental compositional rule: the perpetual passage of singular movements, whose motion defers the emergence of dramatic form.

As a sequence of formal deferrals, Trio A seems to lapse into detours and digressions. In fact, numerous critics have commented on its elusive appearance, which is “difficult to follow” (Foster Reference Foster1986, 175).Footnote ¹⁶ In its choreography, these detours produce a perpetual process of turning. Banes describes that “the body constantly revolves, circling back on itself” (Banes Reference Banes1987, 51). Constantly “circling back,” this turning never completes a full revolution, unlike a “pirouette,” which traces a perfect circle (51). Rather than a full circle, the choreography follows a spiral, whose unending—or more pertinently, undivided—motion issues from a single point. Despite being in plain view, this continuous curve produces the dance's “elliptical” appearance. Its movements appear, but do not progress toward a final goal, as if perpetually regressing or disappearing. Like an ellipsis, it employs a series of omissions that avoid clear syntax and render meaning incomplete.

Ambulatory Performance: Everyday Movement According to Michel de Certeau

Due to its elliptical character, Trio A appears to be missing something. In fact, something is absent from this dance: a finite representational structure. Instead of a unified dramatic structure with a beginning, middle, and end, Trio A deploys a continuous sequence of singular elements whose motion precludes the arrival of significant events. Unmoored from a teleological trajectory, this apparently aimless motion corresponds to the theory of walking proposed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. As a historian, de Certeau situates walking in opposition to linear models of progress and profit, which he associates with the sublime view from the top of the World Trade Center (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984, 91). However, unlike overtly oppositional acts of walking, he proposes that all pedestrian movement undermines normative urban order. According to de Certeau, walking participates in a field of unconscious creative activity that incessantly reroutes and reinvents social systems. On this basis, I read “Walking in the City” to provide a conceptual basis for the special mode of pedestrian motion in Trio A, which I have named ambulatory performance. In this context, Rainer's phrase for the dance's constant motion—“one discrete thing following another”—could be rephrased as one foot following another. Applied to Trio A, de Certeau's theory of walking demonstrates that ambulatory motion constitutes a formal process that suspends and supersedes dramatic unity, which is the conventional predicate for theatrical representation.

Although “Walking in the City” does not mention theater, it addresses the representation of place, which de Certeau contrasts to space. Unlike a place, which is organized according to “the law of the ‘proper,’” situating “each [element] in its ... own distinct location,” space is a dynamically fluid network of incessantly changing constellations (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984, 117). De Certeau refers to these constellations as “mobile elements,” writing that space is “composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.... In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (117). Like the practice of everyday life, walking responds to incalculably variable conditions. The pedestrian begins, but invariably breaks off, improvising en route, ready to adjust, appropriate obstacles, or adopt a different direction altogether. Walking is at once ingenious and ingenuous, a routine activity that demands incessantly renewed resourcefulness.

Such unconscious cunning relates to the ruses used by ordinary individuals to undermine institutional regulation, which de Certeau calls “tactics.” Tactics turn social order against itself in playful ways that make space for individual agency from within institutionally prescribed places. Many readers of de Certeau maintain that tactics have the power to renew collective political action. In an essay notable for examining the relevance of “Walking in the City” for dance studies, Susan Leigh Foster observes that tactics might provide a new model for mass politics “in the wake of May ’68” (Foster Reference Foster2002, 131).Footnote ¹⁷ Unlike the mass protests during this period—a form of unified action—tactics do not require external direction. According to this model, the creative disobedience of dispersed city dwellers moving in unpredictable patterns through the streets can “signal the potential for a rhetoric of resistance” (129). In other words, it is possible to regard walking as a revolutionary exercise.

However, de Certeau did not expressly attribute direct political potential to tactics. Indeed, as cultural theorist Ben Highmore notes, all too often “a theory of strategy and tactics is simply what de Certeau stands for” (Reference Highmore2006, 177). Foster too states that The Practice of Everyday Life leaves the possible structure of political movements undefined: “de Certeau never envisioned how the tactical might amass sufficient momentum to instigate a social movement” (Reference Foster2002, 131). Rather than serving political goals, she emphasizes that tactics are unpredictable and act as “momentary disruptions to the coercive power of strategic structures. Tactics have no goal beyond the sometimes playful, always critical exposure of ... the normative” (130). Since tactics such as walking have “no goal,” they seem relevant to Trio A, which also suspends the progressive development of dramatic form, at least so long as it avoids repetition. As if constantly adjusting to incessantly changing circumstances, this carefully—or rather, tactically—choreographed sequence of non-repeating movements stays in constant motion. Like tactics, this artistic approach is “always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’ Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events . . .” (de Certeau Reference Foster1984, xix). Even if not improvised, such constant manipulation permeates Trio A, whose execution requires “many different degrees of effort” (Rainer Reference Rainer1999, 35). These varying degrees of effort literally inform its steps, which include moving on tip-toe, sliding a foot flat along the floor, and various hops, skips, and one short jump. As an additional variable, this footwork incorporates balletic turnout that inflects her gait with unpredictable lines of internal rotation.

Due to the need to avoid repetition, Rainer resorts to these multiple movement idioms as a tactical necessity. In this sense, Trio A employs the practice of braconnage, which translates as “poaching.” As proposed by de Certeau, poaching appropriates and repurposes objects for personal pleasure and diversion. Walking produces an equivalent in “the art of composing a path,” which “combines styles and uses” (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984, 100). Like the combination of dance idioms in Trio A, walking orders its elements in “bric-a-brac” fashion without conscious effort or expressly oppositional intent. As a process of poaching and creative reappropriation, walking occurs naturally—a routine affair conducted in a state of distraction.

Such adept distraction aptly describes Rainer's “neutral” attitude in Trio A, whose emotional distance and relaxed limbs contrast its efficient execution. As some critics have noted, this neutral attitude is at odds with dramatic conventions of dance and could thus conceivably constitute a symbolic act of political resistance. Nevertheless, Trio A does not lend itself to political ends, despite having been occasionally put to use for protests, such as an infamous version performed in 1970 by dancers clad only in flags. Likewise, recent critical approaches to The Practice of Everyday Life have also downplayed its immediate political utility. As Highmore argues, the prevailing emphasis on tactics and “daily practices of subversive and guerilla-like opposition” has caused readers to overlook the ordinary nature of quotidian life “that connect[s] with memory, stubborness, and inertia” (Highmore 2006, 103). Drawing on an important essay by Meghan Morris (Reference Morris and Mellencamp1990), “Banality in Cultural Studies,” he foregrounds the fact that everyday routines are the products of innumerable repetitions and often seem unremarkable, if not insipid.

Likewise, the neutral efficiency of the dancer's execution in Trio A resembles the result of endlessly repeated tasks or daily chores. In fact, Rainer describes her choreography in terms of domestic tasks. She states that “the demands made on the body's (actual) energy resources appear to be commensurate with the task—be it getting up from the floor, raising an arm, tilting the pelvis, etc.—much as one would get out of a chair, reach for a high shelf, or walk down stairs when one is not in a hurry” (Rainer Reference Rainer1999, 34). As befits such ubiquitously ordinary activities, Rainer designed Trio A to be performed by professional dancers and unskilled amateurs, even if its elliptical logic challenges both. As noted by Pat Catterson, a dancer and choreographic assistant to Rainer, “just because nondancers are able to learn it does not mean it is easy by any means” (Reference Catterson2009, 5). Nevertheless, despite such difficulties, the dance does not depend on knowledge, and as Rainer insists, “you just do it” (Rainer Reference Rainer1965, 170). Severed from any imperative upon knowledge in action, or even the eventual arrival of self-knowledge, “task performance” in Trio A implies that Rainer's “neutral doer” need not be aware of his or her part in a unified whole in order to adhere to an encompassing pattern. On the contrary, the production of structural continuity only requires the routine performance of ambulatory motion: putting one foot in front of the other.

In Trio A, this constant succession of singular footsteps relieves and replaces unity—and conscious expression—as the ground for aesthetic production. This shift follows the formal logic established in “Walking in the City.” According to de Certeau, in lieu of the unity of place, the spaces generated by pedestrian movement have a “polyvalent unity” (1984, 117). Instead of reducing and removing discontinuous elements, this “polyvalent unity” mobilizes heterogeneous idioms and extraneous articulations, including diversions, digressions, and unexplained lapses. De Certeau delights in such erratic tumult, writing that “walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects.... All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities, which vary according to the time, the path taken, and the walker” (1984, 99). De Certeau evidently admires the “unlimited diversity” of the pedestrian's proliferating syntax. Literally evoking song, his descriptive language resonates with the irrepressibly joy of a “chorus,” whose harmonic confluence exceeds representation, at least if tied to a unified concept of place.

However, in the context of Rainer's elliptical choreography, it is necessary to qualify that this chorus of footsteps eludes—rather than exceeds—representational unity. Like Trio A, de Certeau states that the multifarious complexity of walking cannot be contained within a series: “their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series” (1984, 99). Since they do not form a series, the pedestrian's footsteps remain disparately singular: “their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (99). In this regard, de Certeau's theory of walking corresponds to the movements in Trio A, which are also non-repeating, singular elements.

As developed in Trio A, singularities are the fundamental component of ambulatory performance. They are also crucial to de Certeau's general subject, the quotidian. In fact, de Certeau calls his critical approach to everyday life a “science of singularity” (1984, ix). Like the pedestrian's endlessly shifting steps, the quotidian is a formal field that consists of “an innumerable collection of singularities” whose vast number and variability exceed regimes of representation restricted to a particular place, including theater.Footnote ¹⁸ As an aesthetic activity that resists the production of place, walking—that is, ambulatory performance—produces a continuous sequence of singularities whose motion makes it possible to perceive everyday phenomena that are ordinarily excluded from theatrical representation.

It is a common critical response to celebrate de Certeau's theory of the everyday as an affirmation of individual agency. The prospect of such individual redemption seems to inspire the delightfully ludic lyricism of de Certeau's prose, whose tone conveys a vision of the world, in which nothing is lost and no step, no matter how errant, is wrong.Footnote ¹⁹ Unfortunately, the ebullient optimism of this redemptive vision may be misleading. In this regard, Highmore argues that The Practice of Everyday Life contains strangely somber elements that undermine its affirmation of quotidian creativity and tactics. For instance, de Certeau acknowledges that the routines of everyday life preserve collective history, but also make it “an opaque, stubborn life buried in everyday gestures” (Highmore Reference Highmore2006, 104). As an example of this “opaque, stubborn life,” Highmore considers cooking, in which “each gesture, each smell . . . is thick with the condensation of memory” amassed over the course of an extended cultural tradition (111). As part of a cultural tradition, historical experiences embedded in such daily practices resist immediate comprehension and thus appear “thick” and dense—or as de Certeau would have it, “opaque.”

Ambulatory performance also produces opacity. In Trio A, ambulatory motion incessantly evades readily recognizable patterns of meaning and induces a sense of confusion. Likewise, de Certeau uses the term “equivocalness” to describe the confusing effect produced by the incessant motion of everyday phenomena (1984, 100). He first compares this equivocalness to literal footsteps, whose fleeting passage resembles “a tremulous image”: “footsteps” create equivocalness “in the way a tremulous image confuses and multiplies the photographed object” (100). More importantly, this equivocal effect has a formal cause. In contrast to the “univocity” of place, “equivocalness” relates to the incessantly circulating singularities that suffuse quotidian space. These heterogeneous singularities belong to “different temporalities that exist together in the present” and cannot be reduced to “a single rhythm” or unified form, which is at odds with theatrical order (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984, 114). Instead of being fused into one, quotidian phenomena remain in a disorganized state of flux whose commotion is literally confusing.

Like de Certeau's concept of walking, Trio A also remains inscrutably equivocal and enigmatic. Its muted emotional character is a manifestation of this disorderly commotion and indicates the presence of quotidian phenomena, whose singular nature is incompatible with theatrical representation. The action of ambulatory motion in Trio A—the ceaseless succession of one thing after another—requires tactical innovation and creates a space in which it is possible to transmit the presence of these phenomena. Even if real, these phenomena nevertheless remain “opaque,” especially since Trio A is ultimately theatrical, even if its theatricality is “unavowed,” as Franko notes (1997, 299). Unlike de Certeau's city strolls, Rainer restricts her choreography to a limited range, which lends its performance to the theater. As instantiated in Trio A, ambulatory performance suspends, but does not transcend, theater's site or the separation between audience and performer. Its motion instead cultivates a consciousness of this separation—that is, the necessity of aesthetic mediation, which representation normally tries to conceal.

Dance and Media: Photography's Indexical Process of Signification

Is not cinema, in a sense, like a stroll? In contrast to the stage, cinema proposes a previously unimaginable horizon: access to actual events from the world, including the phenomena described by Michel de Certeau. In this section, I intend to show that ambulatory performance formally emulates mechanical processes of mediation—in particular, cinema—and therefore mediates these phenomena. But what is cinema? As D. N. Rodowick observes in The Virtual Life of Film (Reference Rodowick2007), this question has provoked controversy since the inception of its history. Cinema encompasses a diverse range of artistic genres, representational practices, and related theoretical claims. It also refers to the material basis of its medium, which historically consisted of light-sensitive film animated by the action of movement through a mechanical projector. As this description suggests, it is difficult to define the essential element in this assemblage, whose mechanical apparatus combines many disparate parts. In this way, cinema defies ontological definitions and needs to be understood as a historically contingent set of practices, whose material nature speaks to the changing status of media and technology.

In order to understand these changes, Rodowick stresses that it is important to first examine critical conceptions of cinema from its classical period, which often liken cinematic experience to an affirmative encounter with the world. In The Virtual Life of Film, he observes that Siegfried Kracauer believes that cinema allows its audience to perceive “the flow of life” proceeding from “the Lebenswelt: the global accumulation of the events, actions, activities, and contingencies of everyday life” (Rodowick Reference Rodowick2007, 77). As a sphere of everyday life “overwhelming individual perception and consciousness,” this “lifeworld” resembles de Certeau's concept of the quotidian, which also consists of an immeasurable profusion of ordinary events, action, and activities (77). Like de Certeau's pedestrian, the cinematic spectator experiences this quotidian diversity in a semi-conscious state of distraction similar to a “subjective reverie” or “interior wandering” (77). Ultimately, this apparent air of distraction indicates a form of heightened attention to events from elsewhere, including beyond the immediate purview of the present.

This absent-minded attention shared by the pedestrian and cinematic spectator also informs the execution and effect of Trio A. It would, nevertheless, be inaccurate to relate Trio A to cinema on the basis of this resemblance, especially since it does not incorporate technology. Unlike most multimedia performances, I contend that Trio A formally emulates cinema. In particular, the choreography's ceaseless succession of singular gestures—its ambulatory motion—approximates the cinematic sequencing of individual images. Instead of a visual semblance of the outside world, ambulatory motion reproduces the cinematic experience of time, which consists of continuously successive instants. According to Rodowick, this continuity establishes “film's particular relation to duration” and enables Kracauer's spectator to perceive “the world” (2007, 77). Unlike a photograph, which always relates to past time, this ceaseless succession of filmic images animates the temporal passage that sustains “the flux of becoming characteristic of the Lebenswelt, or flow of everyday life” (77). As initiated by the ambulatory, Trio A also conveys this perpetual passage of time and thus provides a connection to singular events circulating in the “flow of everyday life.”

However, it is important to note that the quotidian phenomena described by de Certeau are never fully present before a spectator, even from an ideal perspective. As previously stated, the absence of unity or “univocity” in everyday life produces an ambiguous sense of “equivocalness” that conflicts with Kracauer's theory of film. In this regard, it is significant that the main subject of The Virtual Life of Film is a more recent work of film theory, Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed (Reference Cavell1979). As its title suggests, Cavell links cinema to the experience of the world, but unlike Kracauer, he maintains that it also imposes an aesthetic separation, a “division that the subject longs to overcome in its perceptions of the world” (77). Cavell's emphasis on this division reflects the ambivalence inherent to walking in the city, which cannot unite the diverse phenomena that suffuse the everyday. Likewise, Trio A does not literally depict or dramatize these phenomena, but instead uses its cinematic mode of motion to relay their perpetually passing presence. As a result of this ceaseless recess, the presence of these remote events remains diffused and distant, as if muted—or mediated.

Granted, even if one accepts that ambulatory performance is a process of aesthetic mediation, it may seem improbable that Trio A emulates media. As such, it is significant that several scholars have made similar claims, including Carrie Lambert-Beatty, who relates the dance to photography. Like ambulatory performance, Lambert-Beatty establishes this correlation through a reading of its choreography's “special continuity of motion,” which prevents the development of structural divisions (2008, 157). Lambert-Beatty argues that the “lack of division” in Trio A fundamentally alters its process of signification (157). In contrast to a conventional semiotic structure, which deploys discrete referential units, she maintains that Trio A operates according to an unusual type of sign, the index. As originally proposed by C. S. Peirce, the index is one of three types of signs including icons—whose relationship to its referent is based on pictorial resemblance—and symbols, which are representational substitutes for a referent. Unlike icons and symbols, the index defies succinct definition. Peirce compares it to a series of eclectic examples: “a footprint, a weathervane, thunder, the word ‘this,’ a pointing finger, and a photographic image” (quoted in Doane Reference Doane2007, 2). In addition to serving as literal examples, this group suggests that indexical signs resemble clues, such as footprints, photos, and pointing fingers. Like weathervanes or thunder, these clues gesture towards their causes, which are actual objects or events that have passed, but whose impression remains as a trace.

Accordingly, indexical signs signify differently than icons and symbols, which both convey referential meaning. As traces of past events, indexical signs establish meaning with their referent on the basis of having had continuous physical contact with an object, even be it solely by means of light, as in the case of photography. In Peirce's words, the index “refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object” (quoted in Lambert-Beatty Reference Lambert-Beatty2008, 157). This definition requires Peirce's readers to adopt an unusual attitude toward photography. As an indexical sign, the content depicted in a given photograph means less than its material presence embedded in light-sensitive paper. For theories of photography, this physical connection matters because it introduces the possibility of a mode of signification that is real rather than representational.

Needless to say, the potential consequences of this non-representational mode of signification are far-reaching. The first critic to realize this potential was the renowned art historian Rosalind Krauss, whose seminal essay, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America Part 2” (Reference Krauss1977), provides the theoretical groundwork for Carrie Lambert-Beatty's analysis of Trio A. In this essay, Krauss uses indexicality in order to examine sculptural developments during the 1970s that diverged from conventional ways of conveying artistic meaning. According to her argument, these artists “act systematically to transmute … pictorial convention” of “encoding reality” by producing works that resemble traces, such as rubbings and cut-outs, which bear a physical relationship to their referential object and thus engage the indexical function of photography (Krauss Reference Krauss1977, 64).

Of course, Krauss does not rely on mere resemblance to prove that these artists take photography as its model. As a point of formal affinity, she argues that these sculptures share a “logic” that alters their process of signification, which “involves the reduction of the conventional sign to a trace” (1977, 59). In order to explain this abstract claim, Krauss turns to an example of special interest to dance scholars, a 1976 solo by Deborah Hay, in which she renounces visible movement and instead directs her audience towards another type of motion, “the movement of every cell in her body” (58).Footnote ²⁰ For Krauss's purposes, this solo demonstrates the logic at work in 1970s art. In contrast to “the conventions of dance,” in which “signs are produced by movement,” Hay replaces actual movements—and thus signs—with a profusion of physical traces—the incessant movement of the body's cells (59). Moreover, as is consistent with Peirce's concept of the index, these cells are not representational signs: Hay's body indisputably consists of many moving cells and is “a literal manifestation of presence” (Krauss Reference Krauss1977, 59). This shift from representation to real traces also effects the signifying process of Hay's dance, which no longer employs a symbolic structure. As Krauss notes, since this movement takes place “on” or “within” the body, it “ceases to function symbolically”—that is, as representation—“and takes on the character of an index” (59).

In this regard, Krauss's concept of photographic indexicality corresponds to ambulatory performance, which also suspends symbolic representation. Like her examples of 1970s art, the ambulatory's ceaseless succession of singular movements resists the “internal necessity of segmentation” that produces “the most elementary units of meaning”: representational signs, such as icons and symbols (Krauss Reference Krauss1977, 64). Instead of referential or representational signs, these works produce traces that function as indexical signs. Trio A, too, produces traces, albeit of a different sort than the literal traces in Hay's solo. Above all, the sequence of singular movements initiated by ambulatory motion also resembles traces that incessantly recede, as if fading away. On account of their continual recess, these traces produce an intriguing image of absence that resembles one of Peirce's main examples: the word “this,” which points, but only toward its mysteriously missing referent.

As the result of this absence, indexical signification gestures toward the presence of phenomena otherwise excluded from representation. In Hay's dance, the absence of manifest movement makes it possible to contemplate cellular motion, which Krauss characterizes as “a literal manifestation of presence” based on “the trace of this body's life” (Reference Krauss1977, 59). Hay's statement affirms the plenitude of life itself, whose ubiquitous, incessant activity exceeds representation, but is nonetheless always present. As Krauss would have it, this irrepressible plenitude is not organized according to a referential “code.” Like photography, it is “a message without a code” and thus resembles photography, which establishes contact with “the world itself” rather than its representation (Krauss Reference Krauss1977, 60). Given that photography relays the presence of “the world itself”—a claim that recalls Kracauer's theory of film—the indexical function of Hay's solo appears to coincide with ambulatory performance, which also provides an affirmative connection to life, everyday life. Like Hay's cellular motion, quotidian life consists of innumerably circulating singularities whose excess resists representation. As an alternative to symbolic representation, ambulatory performance likewise relays the presence of these remote but real events that are often forgotten in theater and dance.

In this respect, ambulatory performance coincides with Krauss's theory of indexical signification on a key point unmentioned by Lambert-Beatty: the ability to transmit experience normally lost in representation. However, it is important to remember that the transmission enabled by ambulatory motion depends on a signifying process that emulates photographic and cinematic mediation. As such, these diverse phenomena can never be fully present and instead seem distant, as if sent from elsewhere, but without ever arriving at a destination. In recognition of the mediated presence of “the world,” Krauss states that photography produces “distance,” which she likens to a “mute presence” (Reference Krauss1977, 60). Krauss therefore criticizes Hay—correctly, in my opinion—for neglecting the necessity of aesthetic mediation and dismisses her vision of cellular being as “a fantasy of total self-presence” (58). Like ambulatory performance, indexical signification cannot relay a “total” or unmediated experience of its elements, which are never unified or fully manifest in the present, but remain at a distance.

Unlike Hay's dance, the sculptures studied in Krauss's essay do not contribute to this fantasy of “self-presence.”Footnote ²¹ As fading traces, they instead evoke the presence of the past, which produces a paradoxical effect: “the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote” (Krauss Reference Krauss1977, 65). Krauss points out that this “temporal distance” is essential to photography and cites Barthes's famous dictum, which holds that photography does not convey being, but rather “that-has-been” (Barthes Reference Barthes1981, 100). The presence of this past inherent to photography contributes to the peculiar character of Trio A, whose mediated content is never fully manifest. As previously noted, Lambert-Beatty attributes this quality to its compositional style, which draws on the “traces” of many dance genres and is thus “profoundly historical” (2008, 158). In response to photography's paradoxical presence, she also observes that Trio A reflects the social circumstances of its historical moment, during which the rise of media culture generated new possibilities and ethical ambiguities—ambiguities that she argues are epitomized by photographs from the Vietnam War.

Although this social history includes a valuable account of Rainer's anti-war activity, ambulatory performance relates to history in a different way. As a formal process of aesthetic mediation, ambulatory performance uses motion—the perpetual passage of singular elements—in order to transmit the presence of past events and histories foreclosed from dramatic form, including actual events from everyday life. Ambulatory performance thus has a powerfully personal appeal, despite the distance imposed by the process of mediation. Due to this distance, it can be difficult to discern the ambulatory's emotional force, especially in Trio A, which is intentionally abstract and impersonal.

In this regard, it is helpful to consider Convalescent Dance, a version of Trio A performed by Rainer in 1967 shortly after a serious illness. By appearing in this weakened state, Rainer literally staged the fragility of human life. Arguably, the vulnerability evident in Convalescent Dance also informs Trio A, whose elliptical quality induces a literal hesitation or trembling into the dance. Nevertheless, the emotional poignancy of Convalescent Dance is at best muted in Trio A, which suppresses the dramatic expression of personal emotion and lacks a direct connection to Rainer's physical history. In this regard, Trio A does not conform to the indexical function of photography, which depends on real physical contact with its referent. Accordingly, it would be more precise to examine Trio A in relation to a more elliptical form of media whose “referent slips [glisse],” according to Barthes—cinema (Barthes Reference Barthes2002, 861).

Dance and Media: Automatism, or the Medium After Cinema

To a certain degree, it is an inopportune moment to turn to cinema as a model. As many film scholars have observed, cinema is disappearing. In fact, Rodowick states that “the question is not whether cinema will die, but rather just how long ago it ceased to be” (2007, 26). The cause behind this crisis is the rise of digital cinema, which lacks an actual physical substance and thus does not adhere to the traditional definition of film, which assumes that literal contact between an image and its referent has taken place, thus establishing its “indexical” status. Moreover, as Mary Anne Doane has noted, the absence of photographic indexicality in digital cinema threatens to sever its link to the subject of classical film, “life itself” (2007, 129). The threat of new technologies to life is also present in Convalescent Dance, which foregrounds the vulnerability of the human body. As it concerns the body, this threat to the human applies to dance in general, which traditionally consists of movements executed by a live performer, even be it a machine.Footnote ²²

In dance studies, there have been relatively few attempts to examine the relationship between technology and the body.Footnote ²³ One prominent exception is Erin Brannigan's book Dancefilm, which examines a new “modality” of performance that she names “dancefilm” (2011, vii). As used by Brannigan, the term dancefilm designates an experimental genre of “filmic performance” that depicts dance on screen (vii). However, as a “modality,” it does not necessarily produce a literal combination—such as a multimedia performance—but instead connects these disciplines through a shared “key element”: “movement,” which “links the two forms of dance and film” (viii). By focusing on movement, Brannigan's argument departs from the oppositional logic that characterizes conventional critical approaches to live performance and technologies of mechanical reproduction. Rather than advocating a new hybrid form of cinematically enhanced dance, dancefilm challenges both disciplines to shift from “a discussion of hybridity to one of transformation” (viii).

In this regard, there is an important parallel between dancefilm and the ambulatory, whose relationship to media is also based on cinematic motion. Like dancefilm, the ambulatory does not produce a new interdisciplinary synthesis between dance and film, but instead uses cinematic motion as a process of aesthetic mediation that relays events from beyond the immediate boundaries of representation, be it on screen or in a theater. As proposed by Brannigan, dancefilm also uses cinematic movement as a formal device: it directs its audience away from the actions of a moving body and towards a sphere of motion that she calls “the pre-movement zone” (2011, 133).

According to Brannigan, the activity pertaining to the “pre-movement zone” produces an endless flow of experience that is not subject to division—in particular, spatial division. In support of this claim, she cites Deleuze's Cinema 1, which opposes “false movement,” the representation of time as finite units (Brannigan Reference Brannigan2011, 26). Deleuze claims this false movement manifests itself in cinema's predominant technique: “the abstract idea of succession,” which imposes “immobile sections” into film and perpetuates a concept of “time which is mechanical homogeneous, universal” (quoted in Brannigan Reference Brannigan2011, 26). On this basis, Brannigan argues that dances like Trio A overcome this “mechanical” order and introduce a “new kinesthetic force” that facilitates the exchange of embodied experiences prior to representational determination (28).

Although this reading may apply to Brannigan's other examples in Dancefilm, it misinterprets several aspects of Trio A.Footnote ²⁴ First of all, Trio A is, strictly speaking, theatrical. It achieves the uninflected continuum of movement that Brannigan calls “anarchic phrasing” through an act of theatrical artifice (2011, 126). As Franko observes, the dancer's uninflected, neutral attitude is a performance and attests to “its unavowed (yet performed) theatricality” (1997, 299). Furthermore, far from being an undivided spatial continuum, Rainer's choreography adheres to a rule that ensures that these phrases remain separate and singular: the performance of ambulatory motion, which dictates that “one discrete thing follows another” in ceaseless succession. As a form of “false movement,” this successive motion cannot convey experience that precedes representational determination, even if its singular mode of motion delays the development of dramatic form. On the contrary, ambulatory performance relays the distant presence of diversely singular phenomena that are incompatible with theatrical representation. Being incompatible, they are never fully present or unified, but instead remain “discrete,” separate, and disconcertingly diffused. As such, ambulatory motion induces a sense of separation from events on stage, which contrasts Brannigan's insistence on “a new sensorial and affective relationship in the moving body” (2011, 139). Instead of an intense kinesthetic exchange with a live performer, ambulatory motion attunes its audience to elements from beyond the stage, which are always mediated and thus seem distant, as if kept apart.

Despite such differences, my reading of Trio A maintains an essential aspect of Brannigan's analysis: the continuous motion of its choreography approximates a mechanical process, cinematic succession. As a mechanical principle, the presence of this motion might seem antithetical to dance, if not an outright threat. This technological threat appears in a 1999 variation on Trio A, Trio A Pressured. In this version of the dance, a male dancer shadows a female soloist while training an intensely unblinking stare on her face. This menacing stare reveals a previously veiled threat: the male gaze, which is associated with the immobilizing force of cinematic technology and surveillance.

However, this intrusive gaze does not appear to hinder the dancer in Trio A Pressured, and her male partner is relegated to following her motion, always on the edge of falling hopelessly behind. In the original Trio A, this intrusive gaze is scarcely discernible and only remains as a by-product of its restless motion and trembling vulnerability. The absence of such discomfort in Trio A relates to its engagement with technology, which is not present in a literal form, such as an object or tool. On the contrary, Trio A incorporates technology into its choreography by initiating a mechanically automated process: ambulatory performance, which, like cinematic motion, cannot stop and occurs incessantly.

In this regard, ambulatory motion resembles a process identified by Rodowick in The Virtual Life of Film (Reference Rodowick2007), Stanley Cavell's concept of automatisms. On an elementary level, the term “automatism” refers to mechanical means of reproduction that function without human intervention, such as the components in a camera triggered by the shutter release or the filmstrip's succession in cinema. Rodowick argues that these automated processes inform all artistic disciplines, not just those based on technology. This claim is crucial to Rodowick's study of film, which uses automatisms in order to redefine the concept of a medium in the age of digital cinema.Footnote ²⁵ Since digital cinema operates in the absence of film, it challenges the conventional notion of a medium as a material substrate. As Rodowick states, “a medium is not simply a passive material or substance,” nor does it provide “an integral identity or essence” that moulds multiple “elements into a whole” (2007, 42). On the contrary, a medium combines multiple elements and requires creative intervention in artistic applications—i.e., the invention of automatisms, which establish a relationship between “existing materials and material conditions of given art practices” (42). In contrast to its modernist definition as a material essence, automatisms redefine a medium as a continual process that develops “new variants or instantiations of its concept,” but not according to a teleological progression (44). Like the mechanical motion of cinematic succession, it functions as an endless sequence or “series”: “Automatisms are iterative; they function in series.”

As a series of endless iterations, the historical trajectory of automatisms reflects the singular succession of ambulatory performance. In addition to being non-teleological, automatisms coincide with another aspect of ambulatory performance, which circumscribes the expressive agency of individual artists. Automatisms follow a continuum of artistic development, which leads Rodowick to state that “creation is never free, then, nor can originality be identified without the background of repetitive automatism” (2007, 43). Likewise in Trio A, the automated action of ambulatory motion supplants the dancer's physical presence and produces a distracting sense of separation, which is formed by the incessant interruption of passing singularities. The dancer's absent-minded attention and emotional distance typifies this automated process and relieves the performer of the imperative placed on dramatic self-expression in modern dance.

Instead of artistic self-expression—or as Rainer would have it, narcissistic self-display—the automated process of ambulatory performance approximates the experience of everyday life. Indeed, Rodowick observes that automatisms also function on a “quotidian level” as practices and routines: “On a more quotidian level, every practice has automatisms in the sense of working distractedly from routine or unquestioningly following norms and conventions. Call these habits or even codes if you will, but no act of creation occurs in perfect freedom” (2007, 43). In Trio A, these automated routines appear in the dancer's everyday demeanor and ordinary movement vocabulary, which both diminish its expressive qualities. Of course, critics of Trio A and Judson have long since established that pedestrian performance opposes individual virtuosity. However, the intersection between Rodowick's analysis of automatism with de Certeau's theory of the everyday demonstrates that pedestrian performance in Trio A amounts to more than stylistic opposition. On the contrary, it coincides with the emergence of automatisms, a concept that redefines a medium as a set of processes that successively produces new combinations and instantiations of itself, thus superseding individual expression. Like machines, task performance assigns dancers to the execution of routine actions that are virtually interchangeable with amateurs, even the audience. Rather than great feats, automatisms emphasize the performance of ordinary acts, including the routine motion championed by de Certeau, walking.

In contrast to dance, almost anyone and everyone can walk. Given that it defines the species, walking provides a potential basis for human experience, which is associated with conscious thought and self-determination. However, as David Wills argues in Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics, walking is not a conscious act, but an automatism that deploys a mechanically automated process of motion or the “automatic advance of ambulation” (Reference Wills2008, 4). In contrast to conventional definitions of walking, he asserts that the “automatic advance” of ambulatory motion is mechanical and thus conflicts with the human, at least as conventionally conceived in opposition to technology. As an alternative to this instrumental definition, Wills proposes a concept of technology as “a certain mechanicity or automaticity” (3). Automaticity is “something that cannot but occur, has already occurred, occurs automatically, is itself already in the service of a machine” (3). In this respect, automaticity corresponds to Cavell's concept of automatisms, which also proceed in a “series” whose succession resembles mechanical motion (Rodowick Reference Rodowick2007, 44). Furthermore, mechanicity applies to more than inanimate objects—it animates human life itself. According to Wills, animate life exhibits such technological traits from its first instants during the automatic “self-division of a cell” and continues to inform every step en route to becoming human, literally including one's first step (Reference Wills2008, 4).

Understood in this way, walking designates the point at which life becomes human and mechanical—a point that Wills calls the “technological turn” (2008, 3). As a “turn” instead of a tool, technology ceases to be an instrument that can provide a means of control, but rather initiates an automated process that is unfinished and ongoing. Wills thus states that walking impairs the ability to “foresee” events, which become unpredictable surprises or “the chance of what cannot be foreseen, the surprise … that appears to come from behind, from out of range or outside the field of vision” (7). In a similar fashion, ambulatory performance in Trio A prevents the development of established patterns, which causes its content to be continually surprising, albeit never shocking or revelatory. In contrast to such grand gestures, its singular movements incessantly slip out-of-view and beyond the spectrum of the visible. Likewise, the technological turn impedes “the field of vision,” which causes its unforeseeable events to emerge “from behind” a literal separation, the back. Like the ambulatory, Wills's “dorsal” turn occurs incessantly and remains unfinished, never reaching a destination, but always moving back, away from “forward linearity” (Reference Wills2008, 5). This backward movement literally informs walking, which is not truly straight, but, like the elliptical motion of Trio A, consists of perpetual detours and deviations, “turning one way then the other in order to advance” (5).

Ambulatory Performance and the Afterlife of Trio A

The interminable turning of ambulatory performance begins, but does not end, in the unusual choreographic structure of Trio A—a continuous sequence in which one nonrepeating or “discrete” movement follows another. In the absence of repetition, these movements cannot establish progressive patterns of meaning and remain “discrete” or singular, albeit in continual motion. Based on a reading of Michel de Certeau's “Walking in the City,” I have argued that this motion makes it possible to sense the passing presence of singular phenomena from everyday life, whose diversity exceeds unified representation, notably including dramatic form. Without formal unity, these diverse phenomena are not organized according to distinct categories and seem diffusely undefined and difficult to understand. Literally and figuratively, they become opaque, a quality that results from the continuous motion of singular movements.

As in cinema, the ceaselessly automated succession of this motion maintains the structural continuity of ambulatory performance. However, unlike cinema, ambulatory performance interferes with the perception of immediately manifest events. Whether on stage or screen, its motion distracts audiences and redirects their attention to remote phenomena from beyond the “scene” and “seen.” In this way, ambulatory performance alters media-based disciplines and dance, which both typically foreground events taking place within the immediate boundaries of the visual field. By introducing opacity into visual representation, ambulatory performance challenges the presumption that a medium is a transparent vessel for the communication of particular content. This shift relates to objections in dance and film theory against the concept of medium specificity, whose logic reinforces a teleological view of history: the goal to reduce a medium to its essence—such as “pure motion”—aspires to a perfect correspondence between idea and expression. In contrast to this goal, ambulatory performance foregrounds the materiality of aesthetic mediation and redefines technology in non-instrumental terms as a mechanically automated process identified by D. N. Rodowick and David Wills, an automatism.

Like the technological turn proposed by Wills, ambulatory performance creates opportunities for unforeseen events, whose future may be not be predicted or controlled. Whatever this future may hold, it certainly ceases to adhere to systems of difference based on categorical oppositions that have informed the construction of disciplines, signifying processes, and artistic traditions in modernism, such as the “adversarial legacy” and transgressive strategies employed by Rainer and her peers in Judson Dance Theatre. Admittedly, Trio A cannot be fully extricated from this artistic tradition, which uses pedestrian movement—epitomized by walking—to oppose the dramatic conventions of modern dance. As such, Mark Franko situates Trio A on the cusp between modernism and its “aftermath” (1997, 299). In contrast to the linear historical determinism inherent to the concept of postmodern dance, Franko's term gestures toward an unforeseeable future that may only be approached by returning to the ruins of modernism, its “aftermath.” As begun in Trio A, ambulatory performance provides one such route of return whose turning motion makes space for the passage of lives and events marginalized in modernist regimes of representation. Trio A initiates this passage, and its choreography lives on in other works, disciplines, and discourses that engage emergent modes of mobility, such as the relationship between prosthetics and disability in Merce Cunningham's Biped, the gestural history and queer affect produced on the catwalk in Trajal Harrell's Paris Is Burning at Judson Church, or the migratory motion of politically displaced populations depicted in experimental documentaries by Chantal Akerman and The Otolith Group. As promised by this diverse range of subjects, the afterlife of Trio A will likely follow many unpredictable turns, requiring only that its successors heed the cardinal rule of ambulatory performance: the deceptively simple act of putting one thing—or foot—in front of the other at a time.