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Trio A at Sixty

When Yvonne Rainer choreographed “Trio A” on herself in 1965, it took six months to work out the four-and-half-minute solo. But for many early audience members, its effect was immediate and electric. On a panel hosted by the Tate Modern on July 11th, dancer Pat Catterson remembered how when she first saw the work in 1969, it radically expanded her idea of what dance could be. “Trio A”, said Catterson, revealed the differences between a dancer showing a movement and simply doing it, and between a dancer being onstage as a performer and onstage as a self.  After that 1969 performance ended Catterson watched three audience members climb up on stage and start repeating Rainer’s choreography. She understood their impulse: “You saw, you felt, you wanted to do . . . it felt like ours.” But sixty years later, is “Trio A” part of dance’s history, or can it speak to its present?

Performance

“Trio A” by Yvonne Rainer

Place

Tate Modern, London, UK, July 10 and 11, 2026

Words

Anna Eastman

Rehearsals of “Trio A” at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. July 2026 Transmission: Sara Wookey. Dancers: Fred Gehrig, Bibi Dória, Oluwaseun Olayiwola. “Trio A” © Yvonne Rainer 2026. Photograph courtesy of Tate Photography (Reece Straw).

Three dancers emerged from a door at the back of the Tate Modern museum’s vast Turbine Hall and walked towards a black square marked on its floor. Two stood on its sideline; the other walked out onto the square and bent her knees, turned her head, and swung her arms loosely, in silence that would last for the duration of the performance. Thirty seconds or so later, a second dancer followed her onto the square and bent her knees, turned her head, and swung her arms. Then, the third. Along with twelve other dancers, they’d perform “Trio A” in shifts of three for the next six hours, as the Tate Modern marked sixty years of “Trio A” with two days of performances, a panel with a Zoom appearance from Rainer herself, and a display of a 1978 film of Rainer performing the solo.

Each trio danced the piece three times through before a pause, after which the next trio began.  Just a few feet, and a discreet cordon, separated them from the audience, who stood or leaned or sat on stools, on the same level as the dancers. The Turbine Hall is the Tate’s atrium, filled with museum-goers taking a break between the Frida Kahlo exhibit and the Tracey Emin show, waiting for friends, or just getting out of the sun. Presented in the Turbine Hall, “Trio A” could be encountered casually or with intent, engaged with briefly or for hours.  

This format invited audience members to watch, leave, return, repeat, and to see the choreography inhabited by different artists. It was fitting for a work whose key is, in its creator’s own words, its “uninflected continuity.” “Trio A” flows: there are no phrases, there is no narrative or climax, and each movement is given equal emphasis and gravity to the ones that precede and follow it. None of its movements are showy. Many are familiar: head shakes, crouching, rolling on the floor. Yet even though the movements are simple, “Trio A” commands attention. Nothing in the piece is framed as more important than anything else, so everything comes to feel important.  

Still from Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1978 © Yvonne Rainer

Still from Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1978 © Yvonne Rainer

Some movements in “Trio A” require much more skill than others, Rainer noted during the panel, but the dancers must ensure that all the movements look alike in effort and impact. That’s not easy, though the dancers in the Tate Modern performances pulled it off. This is a central paradox of “Trio A:” the unassuming, minimalist work with its twists and skips and shimmies is actually very, very hard to learn and perform. “It doesn’t tell us it’s difficult,” observed Martin Hargreaves, who co-staged the work with transmitter Sarah Wookey and support from Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections, because the choreography doesn’t announce itself as challenging. There are no pirouettes, or jumps, or balances, no displays of flexibility or speed. But “Trio A” has inspired whole essays about how difficult it is to do: John Haskell wrote several thousand words for The Yale Review on his frustrated attempt to learn the piece (subtitle: “What failing dance class taught me about writing”).  

It’s this aspect of “Trio A” that continues to feel fresh: the way it refuses obvious virtuosity and entertainment, to achieve something more subtly compelling. Much more so now than when Rainer proclaimed “No to virtuosity” and “No to spectacle” in her 1965 “No Manifesto” (“Purpose: To revolutionize dance”), virtuosity and spectacle are everywhere.  Our various screens are full of dance highlight reels—all thriller, no filler. I’ve seen TikToks of teen ballet students whirling through pirouettes with as many as twenty consecutive revolutions; maybe you are one of the seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand people who’ve watched the Instagram video of Fangqi Li balancing en pointe for a full minute in à la seconde. This fall, dancers and celebrities will one-up each other again on season thirty-five of Dancing With the Stars.  Spoiled with so many displays of dance bravado, it’s all too easy to feel jaded, and to zone out in between the big “wow!” moments. But when I was watching “Trio A” at the Tate Modern, I couldn’t look away. The work is part of a larger Rainer series titled “The Mind Is a Muscle,” and “Trio A” exercises this muscle for both audience and performers.

Rehearsals of “Trio A” at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. July 2026 Transmission: Sara Wookey. Dancer:Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Trio A © Yvonne Rainer 2026. Photo © Tate Photography (Reece Straw).

Rehearsals of “Trio A” at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. July 2026 Transmission: Sara Wookey. Dancer:Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Trio A © Yvonne Rainer 2026. Photo © Tate Photography (Reece Straw).

Pat Catterson described the challenge of the choreography as, above all, a mental one: how completely present it requires dancers to be. “To do it, I have to be in each moment separately,” she explained, “I can’t think ahead.” Watching it, I felt like I was witnessing a meditation enacted through movement rather than stillness. The dancers weren’t looking at one another, or at the audience, nor orienting themselves towards those of us watching. They were just doing, one thing after another. They manifested an inwardness as they performed that, in another paradox, drew me in. Watching them in the Turbine Hall, I recalled Catterson’s earlier description of her first experience seeing “Trio A”: “You saw, you felt, you wanted to do.” I wanted that focus, that full inhabitation of the present—the opposite of scrolling through highlight reels, of chasing the next dopamine burst—and in watching, I felt some of it for myself.

In 2008, Rainer revised her “No Manifesto” for the Serpentine Gallery’s “Manifesto Marathon.” In 1965, she’d concluded it with “No to moving or being moved.” “Unavoidable,” she amended. Unavoidable, indeed. Sixty years later, “Trio A” still moves.

Anna Eastman

Anna Eastman is a writer based in New York City. She is currently an MFA candidate in Columbia's nonfiction writing program.  

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