Yvonne Rainer has, since the early 1960s, forged a choreographic language that carries everyday gesture, task-based structures, and serial procedures onto the stage.

Her much-cited No Manifesto (1965) rejects virtuosity and spectacle, sharpening attention to economy of means, refusals of display, and non-hierarchical organization of material. Works such as Trio A exemplify these principles: movement unfolds as a precisely articulated sequence without ornamental climax, attentive to breath, weight, direction, and duration. From the mid-1970s onward, Rainer shifted her focus to film. In rigorously composed, essayistic works—marked by montage, voice-over, intertitles, and autobiographical insertions—she interrogates gender, power, publicness, and memory. The films produced between 1976 and 1996 are now recognized as key contributions to a feminist and structural practice in which form operates as analysis.

Since 2000, Rainer has returned to dance, extending earlier scores with aging bodies, choral groupings, and gestures drawn from popular culture, sport, and everyday life. Reconstruction becomes method; the archive turns into moving material. This monograph traces that development across media. Bringing together choreographic notations and scores, film stills, working notes, and conversations, it unfolds Rainer’s core principles—task, repetition, duration, and collective intelligence—showing a practice in which forms do not merely represent but think: precise, resistant, and political.