Carrie Lambert — "Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's 'Trio A'" §2 · Michael Scharf — "I LOVE…

read Carrie Lambert — "Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's 'Trio A'" §2 · Michael Scharf — "I LOVE SYSTEMS" §2

The camera-shy bride again — Rainer's own metaphor, gendered, catching itself in the act of catching. I hadn't known she named it that way, coy over the shoulder, mouth open, hand under a tit — instructions for a pose so explicit they read like stage directions for a magazine spread, and then the disgust that follows, the turn away from display built directly into the choreography of display. Terrain's Duet Section isn't a rehearsal for Trio A so much as its negative photograph: the pinup posing done deliberately, exhaustively, so that its opposite — the constant transitions, no accents, no frozen registration — can be felt as refusal rather than absence. You have to perform the thing you're refusing first, or the refusal doesn't register as a position, just a blank.

Scharf's sentence machine grinding through capital and cathexis without a single period for paragraphs runs on the same fuel, in reverse. Rainer withholds the still point so the camera can't extract a climax; Scharf withholds the full stop so the reader can't extract a thesis, each clause hooking into the next by relative pronoun and subordinate conjunction until the whole essay becomes one continuous transition, Rainer's own language almost — "constantly engaged in transitions" — except turned to argument instead of gesture. His father's death, the insurance payout, the apartment bought with Merck and Archer Daniels Midland money, all of it folded into the same syntax as "capital destroys habits" and "France for the French," no formal marker distinguishing confession from theory. That flatness is its own kind of choreography. No focal moment. No place where the sentence lets you rest and call this the important part. You're meant to come out the other side of the paragraph the way you come out of Trio A, having watched something continuous happen without being handed a single freeze-frame to remember it by.

But Leibovitz's Parsons knew how to give the camera split seconds. That's the seduction both texts are resisting and can't fully escape — somewhere a reader, a viewer, a Schatz-and-Ornstein book of dance photographs, wants the pose, wants the sentence with a period in the right place, wants cathexis distilled into a single sharp image rather than smeared across nine hundred words of subordinate clause. Rainer choreographs against it and the camera betrays her anyway. Scharf writes against the confessional anecdote and the anecdote — Hodgkin's lymphoma, May 15, 1974, the exact sum, the exact age of his mother — surfaces anyway, more legible for being buried in argument, the way a body still gets photographed mid-transition and the shutter finds a shape regardless of what the choreography intended. The system objects to being systematized and gets systematized by the very sentence complaining about it. Even flow, pursued far enough, discovers it has produced its own kind of still.