The Ambulatory Aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer'sTrio A

This essay argues thatTrio Asuspends dramatic form and develops an autonomous aesthetic process, called ambulatory performance. To explain this concept, it turns to Michel de Certeau, who claims that walking eludes formal unity and makes “spaces” for phenomena excluded from representation: everyday life, which is composed of ceaselessly moving singular “footsteps.” In this way, ambulatory performance emulates cinema, whose successive motion also relays quotidian experience. In order to identify a common theoretical basis for dance and media, the essay then relates this successive motion to the concept of automatisms, which film scholars have used to challenge medium specificity in response to the rise of digital cinema.