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Yvonne Rainer is considered by many to be the most important choreographer of the 1960s. More than Lucinda Childs or Trisha Brown, she is the one who renewed dance and inspired countless visual artists. Her famous choreographies have recently been performed by a new generation of artists. Rainer herself has directed performances in New York and Kassel.At the beginning of Catherine Wood’s book on Yvonne Rainer’s dance production, The Mind is a Muscle, she describes what is required for this evening-long performance: an empty stage, stripped bare, with only a large, reflecting back wall, props, including projectors, tape recorder, a trapeze and mattresses, and seven dancers dressed in ordinary clothes of the day. It was the 1960s, so that meant T-shirts, jeans and sneakers. The ‘acting’ is described as ‘factual’. And, not to be forgotten, throughout all eight scenes, all the dancers remain on stage, even when they are not part of the performance. This summary is the only actual concrete information given on The Mind is a Muscle. The rest of the book is interpretation. In a hundred pages, Catherine Wood goes all out to crawl behind the dance and expose its meaning, not just for the time when it was created, but for today. Wood describes Rainer as a brilliant innovator who, in the spirit of the age, created an œuvre that is only recently beingfully appreciated. Relatively recent observations by such theorists as Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler are referred to in support of her argument. So too are the relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud. Rainer stands alone as the puritan, the ultimate minimalist amongst choreographers. Her performances, or at least those of the 1960s, were barer than bare, down to the bones. This was not only true of the setting, which was reduced to practically nothing, but also to the movements themselves, equally stripped of all embellishment. In The Mind is a Muscle, Rainer formulated a kind of zero degrees of dance. Wood speaks of a ‘ready-made aesthetic’ and of ‘movements taken straight from the street’. ‘Rainer’s choreography of primary gestures and interrelations transposed elements of New York City’s complex network of pedestrian activity into the theatre frame and so dramatised the question of individual agency and society – on a personal level by positing mind as muscle, and on a public one by investigating relations between the self and the group or crowd.’ Yet The Mind is a Muscle offered no representation of the streets. There was a certain self-supporting dynamic in the gestures and movements, as though they were a self-generating phenomenon from which any dramatic continuation had been cut off. In some scenes, dancers move as if they were wild men, linking strange movements only to those of the others, apparently without any system or higher objective. Stripped of purpose or productivity, the movement becomes aestheticized and, it seems, aimed only at itself. The body thus becomes more objective, and is no longer the carrier of an individual expression, but a grammatical element in a subtle syntax of movement. It is the interaction that gives the whole its meaning. Wood pays considerable attention to the context within which Yvonne Rainer arrived at her vision, to her background with the Judson Dance Theater, a group associated with famous choreographers, to her connections with the art world and the social engagement in the art circles of the day. According to Wood, Rainer was immersed in the spirit of the day, in minimal art, the rejection of all decorum, glorification of the worker, audience participation, sensitivity to location and the primacy of the physical. Indeed, reading Rainer’s own NO manifesto, written in 1965, it does not get more minimal: ‘No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to glamour and transcendence of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.’If dance is to be seen as a complex of directives that the dancers must obey, then Rainer’s choreography is a social experiment that, according to Wood, has no equal in the arts, with perhaps the exception of the Situationists’ dérives. A group of dancers, often passers-by in Rainer’s case, is extracted from the culture of production and consumption, in order to engage in another kind of relationship: freed, aesthetic. Wood writes that Rainer ‘created complex images of social relationships that challenged other images that serve consumerism (advertising)’. According to Wood, we had to wait until the relational aesthetics of the 1990s for a social investigation at a comparable level to take place.After years of Rainer primarily working as a filmmaker, she has been back for some time now, as a choreographer, and in force. Her productions are being performed around the world, recently in Kassel and New York. This is to the great joy of Catherine Wood, who considers Yvonne Rainer the most important artist to have emerged from the 1960s. Catherine Wood, The Mind is a Muscle, MIT Press/Afterall, Cambridge, MA, USA/London 2007. ISBN 978-1-84638-037-2