Movements for a Couch, 2020, Digital video, 4:42 min

I’ve been interested in Yvonne Rainer’s ability to make everyday movements into a form of dance through simple choreography and scores—this has been at the core of my own artistic inquiry for a long time. When I saw her D.I.Y. Dance for Your Home in the New York Times, I was excited to try to make my own score, especially because making art at home has been challenging for me. 

Repetition is an important element in Rainer’s work and in D.I.Y. Dance for Your Home—one which I’ve adapted in my work, Walking a Floor Plan. For Rainer, repetition creates “uninflected continuity.” For me, it materializes proximity. But when I tried to come up with a score for the couch, I found myself wanting to test out the different ways my partner, Max, and I could move with or on the piece of furniture. So we went into the frame without clear instructions, and tried different ways of interacting with the couch while trying to anticipate what the other would do. The couch became a structure on a playground, where the rules of the game were constantly changing. The video turned out to be a compilation of playful experiments, in which we sit, stand, and walk on the couch in different variations. 

For Rainer, establishing rules for this dance is essential. I have also found rule-making to be helpful in other contexts, but taking an improvisational approach has provided a level of frustration, curiosity, intimacy and playfulness that I found to be quite generative.

(Posted on Experiments in Performance, an online program on Mana Contemporary’s website)