Feelings Are Facts

If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in
difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a
club sandwich and other meals -- including breakfast -- have remained in the memory of the present
writer, 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-time
psychotherapist) 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 in
postwar America.

Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed
out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San
Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance
world. 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 Robert
Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became
involved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she
constructed her dances -- including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section,
Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the
Swan -- and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about
meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.