NEW YORK, NY-Dia Art Foundation is pleased to present dance works by renowned avant-garde choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, in Beacon, New York. Dia's retrospective, which began in October 2011, celebrates the depth of Rainer's contributions to dance and features her earliest works of choreography from the 1960s-including both iconic and lesser-known pieces-and three compositions created within the last twelve years.

The second of three distinct programs will be presented on February 25 and 26, 2012 at 12 pm and 2 pm. Tickets are on sale now: Dia members $24.50; general admission $35; students and seniors $28.

As co-founding member of the Judson Dance Theater group, Yvonne Rainer produced groundbreaking works that echoed ideas of time, space, and seriality that were being explored in the field of visual art at the time. Throughout the 1960s, Rainer and the other Judson choreographers-including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Steven Paxton, among others-developed a new vocabulary for dance that built upon nonexpressive techniques and chance procedures, while also incorporating task-oriented movements that brought attention to the physicality of the body.

The Yvonne Rainer retrospective at Dia:Beacon will highlight key works from this period, including the seminal piece, Trio A (1966); her first dance work, Three Satie Spoons (1961); and rarely seen performances such as Three Seascapes (1962), We Shall Run (1963), and Chair/Pillow, an excerpt from Continuous Project-Altered Daily (1969). Each program will also feature a recent composition by Rainer who returned to choreography in 2000 after a nearly 30-year hiatus from dance. Trio A: Pressured with 5 people (forward, retrograde, facing, in the midnight hour) (1999-2011), Spiraling Down (2008), and Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2011) will be performed over the course of the year.

Yvonne Rainer demonstrates Dia's ongoing commitment to presenting experimental performance and dance at Dia:Beacon through commissions and retrospectives of historical works. Previous presentations include Robert Whitman's Prune Flat and Light Touch (2003); Joan Jonas's The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2005-2006); Merce Cunningham Dance Company Beacon Events (2007-2009); Trisha Brown Dance Company (2009-2010); and most recently Robert Whitman's Passport and MoonRain (both 2011).

Program Schedule
Saturday, February 25, and Sunday, February 26, 2012
12 and 2 pm
Three Satie Spoons (1961)
Three Seascapes (1962)
Spiraling Down (2008)

Sunday, May 13, 2012
1 and 3 pm
We Shall Run (1963)
Trio A (1966)
Chair/Pillow (1969)
Assisted Living: Good Sports 2 (2011)

Funding
This program is made possible by Yoko Ono and Dia's Commissioning Committee: Jill and Peter Kraus, Leslie and Mac McQuown, Genny and Selmo Nissenbaum, and Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk August Radke.

About Yvonne Rainer
Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a dancer in New York at the Martha Graham Dance School and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and began to choreograph in 1960. She was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, a movement that began in 1962 and proved to be a vital force in redefining dance for the following decades. Starting in 1968, Rainer began to integrate short films into her live performances and, by 1975, had made a complete transition to filmmaking. She has since completed seven experimental feature films, and, in 1997, retrospectives of Rainer's films were held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

In 2000, Rainer returned to dance with a commission by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project titled, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000). Most recently, she choreographed AG Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M. (2006), a reinterpretation of George Balanchine's Agon; RoS Indexical (2007), after Vaslav Nijinsky's Rite of Spring; and Spiraling Down (2008), a meditation on soccer, aging, and war. In 2010, Yvonne Rainer: Dance and Film, the first major European survey of Rainer's work was presented at the Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland. A premiere collection of Yvonne Rainer's poetry, Poems is newly released by Badlands Unlimited (2011). Rainer is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, and 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990-95), and a Wexner Prize (1995). She currently lives and works in California and New York

Dia Art Foundation
A nonprofit institution founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River as the home for Dia's distinguished collection of art from the 1960s to the present. The museum, which occupies a former Nabisco printing factory, features major installations of works by a focused group of some of the most significant artists of the last half century, as well as special exhibitions, new commissions, and diverse public and education programs. Dia:Chelsea is located on West 22nd Street in the heart of New York City's gallery district, which it helped to pioneer. Currently open for artist lectures and readings, Dia is developing plans to expand its presence in Chelsea.

Dia also maintains long-term, site-specific projects. These include Walter De Maria's The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus's Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys's 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (1988), and Dan Flavin's untitled (1996), in Manhattan; The Dan Flavin Art Institute, in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria's Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977), in Quemado, New Mexico. For additional public information, visit www.diaart.org.