Trio A

• Choreography: Yvonne Rainer

• Music: None (deliberately unsounded)

• Context: A landmark of postmodern dance, Trio A rejects spectacle, virtuosity, and theatricality. The dancer executes a continuous sequence of movements without repetition, climax, or acknowledgment of the audience—what Rainer called a “neutral” performance.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Trio A is not a dance in the conventional sense—it is an epistemological refusal. Through its deliberately anti-virtuosic, non-expressive aesthetic, Foucault would interpret this work as a withdrawal from the power of representation itself, a choreography that empties the subject, evades confession, and dissolves performance into the ethics of opacity.

Yvonne Rainer’s project in Trio A mirrors what Foucault articulated in his genealogical work: the desire to unmask the histories that shape visibility, knowledge, and the body. In Trio A, Rainer enacts a kind of “anti-ballet of knowledge”—not through shock or violence, but through soft subtraction. She subtracts music. She subtracts emotion. She subtracts eye contact. And in doing so, she subtracts the traditional sites of power’s address.

Foucault would note that this absence of address—no glance toward the audience, no dramatic buildup, no gesture of offering—represents a negation of the disciplinary gaze. The performer is not “on display,” not “confessing” herself as subject. Instead, she exists in parallel movement, traversing time without accumulation, without hierarchy, without teleology. This is not simply minimalism. It is resistance to the aesthetic regime of subjectivation.

Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality that the modern subject was shaped not by repression but by discursive incitement to confession—to speak one’s truth, to perform one’s authenticity, to offer oneself up for knowledge. Trio A denies this machinery. It is a dance that refuses to confess.

Each movement in Trio A is precisely rehearsed, but structured to appear undecorated, almost casual. There is no climax. No flourish. No anticipation. For Foucault, this resembles what he called technologies of the self without spectacle—bodily practices that aim not to reveal inner truth, but to exit the circuit of subject-producing visibility.

Even the nudity in some performances of Trio A (notably in Trio A with Flags, 1970) resists eroticization. The body is unadorned, unposed, moving in a sequence that denies seduction or commodification. Here, Foucault would observe a confrontation with biopolitical exposure—the nude body onstage not as ideal, but as non-compliant materiality.

In refusing repetition or symbolic emphasis, Trio A also refuses the temporality of narrative. Foucault, particularly in The Order of Things, recognized time as a key organizer of meaning in the modern episteme. Rainer offers no development, no arc, no catharsis. Her time is sequential but non-narrative—a kind of present-tense duration that offers no arrival.

This leads to perhaps the most Foucauldian dimension of Trio A: it is an ethics of withdrawal. A dance that does not “say,” but persistently does. A choreography of unavailability, where the performer is not a mirror, not an archetype, but a body doing what it does, refusing to stand in for anything else.

Rainer’s work is not a revolt. It is a disappearance in plain sight. The power of Trio A lies in its capacity to be neither subject nor object, neither eroticized nor expressive. It performs without revealing, without belonging, and without closure.

Thus, for Foucault, Trio A is not postmodern rebellion—it is choreographic noncompliance. Not a critique through speech, but a silent escape from the stage’s machinery of truth.

It is not dance as spectacle.

It is dance as ethical opacity.