November 22, 2002

The Hybrid Yvonne Rainer: Avant-Garde Aesthete, Utopian Activist

By ANN DALY

You don't hear much about the avant-garde anymore. Identity politics and globalization have changed how art is made in the past few decades, and the avant-garde -- a product of 20th-century modernism -- has been downgraded from moral imperative to historical category. For the filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, however, the concept of the avant-garde, despite its disappointments, still inspires.

Rainer has come to represent the last surge of the dance avant-garde. Born

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