Dance review: Yvonne Rainer - Dance and Film

YVONNE RAINER: DANCE AND FILMTramway, Glasgow *****

WHEN the choreographer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer was a young artist in New York, back in the late 1950s, she set out to train as an actress. She didn't last long, though; the ultra-naturalism of Method acting was in vogue, and her teachers complained that she was no good at it, because they could see her thinking all the time.

So it's a joyful thing to report that half a century on Yvonne Rainer, now 75, is at it still: thinking, creating, challenging, and making powerful, distinctive female work that ranges hungrily across art-form boundaries. Her work has just been celebrated in a unique week of film and performance at the Tramway; backed by a small but perfectly-chosen exhibition at the Sorcha Dallas Gallery, which runs until 29 October.

What emerges from this rich body of work is, first of all, an astonishing tribute to that American avant-garde moment of the 1960s and early 1970s that remains unrivalled as a radical source of ideas and experiment. Rainer's life in New York at that time left her with a matchless, courageous determination both to deconstruct traditional forms in art, and, through her films, to challenge traditional power-structures in society.

Beyond that, though, there is also the intensity, integrity and wit of Rainer's choreography, the live centrepiece of this celebration. In the latest version of her seminal 1970s piece Trio A Pressured, Rainer herself both delivers a powerful lecture about the sometimes necessary self-containment of the artist at work and plays the figure who runs in circles around the absorbed solo dancer.

In ROS Indexical (2007), she uses four mature female dancers to reimagine the uproarious first performance of The Rite Of Spring, in 1913, and to reflect on her connection with that earlier avant-garde generation. This is a theme also reflected in After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, her beautiful 2002 film about the aesthetic politics of Vienna 1900, and the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And in recent piece Spiraling Down, she shows her four women at play to the strains of Ravel's Bolero; the physical vocabulary more sporting than balletic, full of a superb, relaxed concentration on the potential of everyday movement.

Her style is vigorous, feminine, sometimes erotic, always intelligent and witty, in a way that still disrupts stereotypes. The Tramway audience rose to give her a rare standing ovation, not only for the length and richness of her career, but for the magnificent late flowering that makes it still a work in progress.