Nine Art Practitioners Interview Cherrie Yu about Translating Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A

Performers: Cherrie Yu (left), Tony Rodriguez (right)

Film still from "Trio A Translation Project”

These interviews were pursued in-part due to the 2020-2021 Co-MISSION Residency at Links Hall. 

Note from Cherrie Yu: In May 2020, about a year ago, I embarked on a project translating the American choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 dance “Trio A.” I invited a series of individuals to perform, some of them strangers, others my family members. Each performer invited a loved person to watch Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, captured on film in 1978. That person in turn described the movements that they saw with words and produced a verbal score. The performer and I used the verbal score to devise a new solo. By May 2021, there were five translated versions of Trio A, by the performers Enid Smith, Ignacio Morales, Melinda Wilson, Tony Rodriguez, and Dongmei Wong. 

I invited nine art practitioners to peek into the choreographic process, and to each contribute a question to me regarding the project. The project was presented as a film at [Links Hall’s Co-MISSION Festival of New Works] in Chicago in May 2021. 

The Nine Art Practitioners (in order of appearance):

Gabriel Chalfin-Piney

Darling Shear

Bryan Saner

James Elkins

Stacy Spence

Lori Waxman

Erica Cardwell

Tirtza Even

Vishal Kumaraswamy

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Gabriel Chalfin-Piney: Having followed your work for a number of years, I see that formal training is not a requirement for participating in rehearsals. How do you choose who you work with? 

Cherrie Yu: In my projects that involve both trained dancers and non dancers, I often found these binaric categories unhelpful. Everybody who agrees to participate in the project agrees to become a performer, and they bring their knowledge and expertise in that becoming. So at the end of the day, I am not looking at who has dance training and who doesn't. I am trying to map out different histories of labor, from the Cunningham technique, to firefighting, to homemaking, to public maintenance work. So in this particular project I was looking for people who carry these different trainings in their bodies. And of course I choose people to choose to work with me. The willingness comes from both ends. 

Darling Shear: Where did the prompts for the narratives in the film come from? 

Cherrie Yu: I started translating Trio A with Enid and Ignacio, the first two performers, as a choreographic exercise. We soon realized that it would be a labor intensive process that would take months to complete. So I decided we would take it slow, and spend 15 minutes of each rehearsal doing writing. I would bring in 3-4 prompts, and give the performers 4 minutes to write for each prompt. The rule was to write without stopping. There were three types of prompts. First type has set beginnings of sentences, such as “I began the day” or “I remember seeing.” I had borrowed this structure from the writer Renee Gladman’s book “Calamities.” The second type of prompts is descriptive writings. I would ask the performers to describe something specific to them, for example, the technique of polishing stainless steel, or the doorknob of their childhood home. The third category of prompts are reflective writings on the project of translating “Trio A,” the experience of devising movements, and the sensation of practicing the movements. 

Performer: Enid Smith

Film still from "Trio A Translation Project"

Bryan Saner: You have created a small community around Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. More specifically around Sally Bane’s 1978 film documentation of Trio A. Sally Banes was significant to the New York and Chicago dance community. She helped start the MoMing Dance and Arts Center, which was located on Barry Street, a short walk from Links Hall. She died in June 2020, during the time you were working on the translation project. What do you see is the contribution of your project to contemporary dance and performance? 

Cherrie Yu: When I showed you the project in December 2020, you had said the performers appeared to be in some sort of collective; the collective did not choose to be together, but somehow are together. I loved this nuanced description of the performers as a group. I recently read an essay by Iris Marion Young called “The Ideal Community and the Politics of Difference,” in which she explains that “liberal individualism denies difference by positing the self as a solid, self-sufficient unity.” I am certain that the Trio A Translation Project works against this notion of the self as autonomous and isolated. But I am unsure whether partaking in the task of translating a dance archive coheres the individuals into a community. 

I am glad you brought up Sally Banes. I wrote in my notebook a few days ago, after watching her memorial online, “what is the white avant grade to do with all these archives?”. I think there is wonderful knowledge in these works, but they are not accessible to the people who are not in that world, whether it is non artists, or artists of color. My work is concerned about these gaps, and how to pull them closer. 

James Elkins: The translation process wasn’t continuous, but, as you said, took time. After you told me the dancers hadn’t seen [the original film,] I was struck by the fact that they all moved at Rainer’s speed. To me it suggests the once-removed influence of the original. 

Cherrie Yu: The translation process took time indeed. I got together with Ignacio Morales in April 2021 to edit his writings and film his movements. One piece of writing was about his father’s last trip from Mexico to the US in 2020. His father had passed away between the time that he did the writing, and when we got together and filmed his movement. How does a dance hold all this time passing and transformations? and how does a person memorize a movement sequence and remember one’s own father? 

The question regarding speed is a good one. I introduced the concept of pacing to each performer. This concept came from an essay called “I Promised Myself I Would Never Let It Leave My Body’s Memories” by the dancer Pat Catterson. Pat is a long term performer with Rainer, and is the custodian of Trio A. Pat defined pacing as finding each movement but not stopping between moves, so there is a constant without emphasis. So actually in our translated versions, the performers did move at different speeds, according to their bodies’ natural ability and sense of ease. However, everybody was able to connect one movement to the next with a similar sense of pacing. 

Stacy Spence: How does the process you have instigated differ from the experience of doing Trio A? 

Cherrie Yu: A few months before starting the project, I read an essay by the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson called “Practicing Trio A.” Her area of expertise is art since the 1960s in the U.S and Europe, so she is familiar with the artistic milieu that Trio A was born out of. In 2008 Bryan-Wilson was able to take a course with Rainer at the University of California, Irving, and learned Trio A throughout the course of six months. In the essay she wrote about how learning to do the dance subverted what she had learned about it in the narratives of art history. 

Bryan-Wilson’s essay no doubt planted a little seed for my translation project. An immediate difference I think of between doing Trio A and translating Trio A is the performer’s relationship to the original movements. When one learns the original dance, efforts are put into learning the exact movements and the method of pacing. It is about turning one’s body to the task of the dance, and getting it right. In the translation project, the performers and I design the movements according to the written script, without referring to the original movements. The movements are tailored to the performers’ bodies. The work was to find clarity in one’s own way, instead of mimicking or enacting a preset score. 

Lori Waxman: Dear cherrie, how can repetition be meaningful? 

Cherrie Yu: Here is a piece of writing from the performer Ignacio Morales from [June 2, 2020,] in the early stage of our rehearsal process: “ right now I feel relaxed. After doing a little exercise I feel great. I feel energetic and my body is ready to start the work day. Since I am used to working night shifts, my body feels phenomenal with rehearsals during the day.” 

The more joyful moments in the project are these little moments of swerve between one pattern of repetition and another. If the night shifts are a repetition, and translating Trio A is another repetition, the meaningful moments seem to be when Ignacio was transitioning from one to another. 

Performer: Ignacio Morales

Film still from "Trio A Translation Project"

Erica Cardwell: The narration of the writings in your film creates a powerful sense of intimate mediation. It is a feeling often experienced when one sees performance in person. What are some of your other methods to convey this “closeness” and emotional texture? 

Cherrie Yu: The wide frontal shot is something I have been exploring for a few years. I see these shots a lot in early cinema where editing and camera movements were really minimal, and the filmmakers were really trying to show things as they were without much manipulation, even in fiction films like “The Great Train Robbery.” As I started making performances, I have noticed that the way live performances are documented often resemble this logic of early cinema. When it comes to dance on film, I always have the suspicion that when the product is too visually dominant, it starts to lose the ability to communicate hapticly and emotionally. So I decided to create a distance between the performer and the viewer in order to achieve the “closeness.” It is a counter-intuitive move. I do think it creates more of a demand on the viewer to give attention and follow closely. 

Tirtza Even: The thing that struck me most was the many levels in which the off-frame was engaged. The off-frame is a location that has been extremely interesting and close to me for years. I am interested in how to make it detailed and nuanced while keeping it as such — off frame, unseen and unspoken. 

You say that the original dance is translated into language by a loved one, before it gets translated again, from language, into dance. That stood out for me, in part because I couldn't find a tangible manifestation of it in the translated movement. In some way it became the off-frame of the translated dance's off frame. 

How does love and intimate knowledge leak into the translation? Where do [you] see it and how? 

Cherrie Yu: I found myself taking on many roles in the project - the choreographer, the dramaturg, the cinematographer, the ethnographer. All these roles have to do with assembling, curating, and presenting information. As the movements and conversations accumulate, I arrive at multiple points where I decide which parts of the process become the “product,” and which remains the “process.” Your question about the off frame reminds me of the dailiness of the project. A dance never is, it arrives. I think of love when I think about the arrival of a dance. That is, love as a physical practice, love as self-knowledge, love as perseverance and repetition. 

The idea to have the performer invite a loved one to transcribe Trio A had been inspired by a piece of writing by the art historian Elise Archias from her book “The Concrete Body.” Archias writes about the performance persona that Trio A demands, referring to the aloof and neutral movement style, and the decision to never meet the audiences’ eyes. She concludes that “the version of embodiment on display is… glaringly un-virtuosic and unspectacular. On the heels of our ‘why should I care’ moment, we might feel the work of art asking us to recall any other times when we attended to someone doing something ordinary… In this case, the answer might be, watching a loved one or a child.”

Performer: Dongmei Wong

Film still from "Trio A Translation Project"

Vishal Kumaraswamy: I was intrigued by the way language, both vocal and movement, flows between these spaces. I found this transgressive to my South Asian cultural sensibilities, almost as if I was intruding upon somebody else's space without an invitation. Towards the end as I watched your mum, I unconsciously dropped the slippers I was wearing even though I was watching a video of a performer. Being inside the space of a home and in the presence of an elder, for a brief moment I was unable to separate the medium of the film and was completely immersed. 

Do you feel this way sometimes when we slip back into our natural cultural body, one that inadvertently activates somatic memories? 

Cherrie Yu: I love the phrase “natural cultural bodies,” because the natural body and the cultural body really can’t be talked about in such separate terms. Trio A was made in the mid 60s in the height of minimalism. The notion of the performing body as a neutral doer was a popular idea at that time. I have certainly found that neutrality is rarely the case as different “natural cultural bodies'' take on the task of translating this dance. Two examples come to mind. There are multiple sections of the dance where the performer goes to the floor. This proved to be a huge challenge for my mother. Before every rehearsal she prepares the floor to be spotlessly clean so that she can roll on it for a brief second. If we have a disagreement about a movement and cannot continue, her reflex reaction is to get the mop and clean the floor, before getting back to rehearsal. 

The performer Ignacio Morales is from Mexico. He is an amateur dancer in Latin partner dancing such as bachata, merengue and cumbia. Lots of movements that he came up with when we translated Trio A had a circular pattern, in the wrists, arms, shoulders and upper back. When I showed Ignacio’s translated dance to Pat Catterson, the custodian of the Trio A, she commented that his movements had too many accents. I think these are two examples that the “natural cultural bodies” overflow the parameters of the original dance.

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Cherrie Yu is a 25 year old artist born in Xi’an, China. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She holds a Bachelor's degree in English Literature at the College of William and Mary and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown work at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Links Hall, and Mana Contemporary Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at ACRE, Contemporary Calgary Museum, and a visiting artist at Emory University. Her films have been screened at Satellite Art Show, Helena Anrather Gallery, Heaven Gallery, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the awardee of the 2020 Kala Art Institute Media Award Fellowship and will be an artist-in-residence at Yaddo Foundation in 2021.