Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Autobiography)

If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested indifficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that aclub sandwich and other meals -- including breakfast -- have remained in the memory of the presentwriter, keep reading. -- from Feelings Are Facts In this memoir, dancer,choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age.Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-timepsychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots,and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman inpostwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmedout by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in SanFrancisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City danceworld. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s,cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including RobertRauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and becameinvolved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how sheconstructed her dances -- including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section,Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies theSwan -- and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes aboutmeeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life. Read more