Yvonne Rainer - Early Life

Early Life

Rainer was born in the Richmond district of San Francisco to parents, Joseph and Jeanette, who considered themselves radicals. As a child, she was sent to live at Sunnyside, a boarding institution in Palo Alto, with her older brother Ivan for several years. Her parents visited them each Sunday in their 1938 Pontiac Sedan. By 1941, she moved back with her parents at the age of seven to a new house in the Sunset that she describes as "an unfamiliar neighborhood of white protestant working class families." From the age of twelve, she had been "exposed to the heady commingling of poets, painters, writers, and Italian anarchists." She went to Lowell High, and after graduation, she attended San Francisco Junior College for a year, then Berkeley for a week. She dropped out of college by the end of September 1952.

At a very young age, her father introduced her to films, while her mother introduced her to ballet. While she was still at Sunnyside, her mother enrolled her in dance classes. Rainer writes,

I am five or six when my mother enrolls me in a dance school a few blocks from Sunnyside. After being taken to the school several times, I am expected to walk there by myself once a week...All the little girls are able to touch the backs of their heads with their toes. It seems to me that I am the only one who can't.

Rainer found herself hanging out at the Cellar around 1955, where she would listen to poets accompanied by cool jazz. It was here that she met Al Held, a painter. He introduced her to various artists whom were natives of New York. It was in August 1956, that she followed Al to New York at the age of twenty-two.

I remember walking down 5th Avenue past Madison Square Park, overwhelmed by an ineffable sense of infinite possibility. Someone else might have described it as a 'conquer-the-world' kind of feeling. For me it was simply pure open-minded excitement. Though I had no idea what the future held, it was already signaling with open arms.

It was Dolly Casella, a close friend, who introduced Rainer to the dance classes of Edith Stephen, a modern dancer. She went to her first adult dance class with Stephen who told her that she was not very "turned out." Rainer admits, "What she didn't say was something that I would gradually recognize in the next couple of years, that my lack of turn-out and limberness coupled with a long back and short legs would reduce my chances of performing with any established dance company." In 1959, she began studying at the Martha Graham School and later with James Waring and Merce Cunningham.