Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer tells the riveting story of one of America's
most important artists. In 1962, as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, Rainer
revolutionized modern dance by introducing everyday movements like walking and
running into the dance lexicon. Abandoning choreography in the '70s, Rainer introduced
narrative techniques into American avant-garde film, turning that genre on its head, too.
In Feelings Are Facts, we follow Rainer, now in her 80s and returned to choreography, as she continues to create vibrant, courageous, unpredictable dances that invite audiences to
question basic assumptions about art and performance.

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2 disc DVD set available for individual or institutional purchase.
Disk 1 consists of the 82-minute documentary featuring interviews with Rainer and her contemporaries Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, Carolee Schneemann, Lucinda Childs and Valda Setterfield, and scholars B. Ruby Rich, Douglas Crimp, Steve Anker and Patricia White.

Disk 2 includes additional interview material including an exclusive interview with Rainer scholar Carrie Lambert-Beatty PLUS the entire performance of Rainer's piece Spiraling Down.

"Covering both her experimental dances and her autobiographical-theoretical films, Feelings Are Facts celebrates the aesthetic and political value of an approach to making art that refuses easy categorization in favor of giving form to the particular, felt qualities of everyday life in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first-centuries. I could see using the film in my Trends in International Contemporary Art and History of Performance Art, 1900 to the Present courses."
Elise Archias, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago
Author of The Concrete Body: Rainer, Schneemann, Acconci

"With stunning, captivating footage of Rainer's dances and films, spanning decades, and with her own words and those of astute commentators to complement what we see, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer brings this vital part of the history of the modern arts alive. We are not likely to ever get a better account of this pioneering figure's enormous contribution."
Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary

"Reclaims Yvonne Rainer as a multidisciplinary feminist artist who re-calibrated dance, film, and art by juxtaposing the everyday with the unfamiliar ... astutely guides the viewer through over half a century of minimalist, conceptual, postmodern, and feminist debates that resolutely insist on the connection between art and politics ... A beautifully rendered, landmark film illuminating Rainer's constant shuffling between art, choreography, film and feminism ... deeply considered meta-conversation with one of the most important feminist conjurers of the last 60 years."
Patricia R. Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies, Ithaca College

"Yvonne Rainer's influence on postwar American dance and avant-garde cinema has been incalculable and Jack Walsh's documentary is a lively and accessible introduction to her life and work. The film expertly weaves Rainer's own stories and reflections on her colorful life, beginning in the Beat Era in San Francisco in the 1950s, through the NY avant-garde Art World of the 1960's, to the politically charged feminist art movements of the 1970's and 80's and Queer aesthetics in the present, with analysis of her prolific art practice by renowned collaborators, dance and cinema studies scholars and across a range of archival materials and excerpts from her dances and films ... gives a rare inside picture of the "why" and "how" of artistic innovation and experimentation and provides the perfect context for the study of Rainer's work in a range of upper level and graduate courses in avant-garde film and dance, women in cinema, performance studies and contemporary art history."
Jeffrey Skoller, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Awards: Honorable Mention, San Francisco Dance Film Festival; Jury Award, Special Mention, Wicked Queer: Boston LGBT Film Festival

Select Screenings: Berlin International Film Festival, Documentary Panorama (world premiere); Frameline39: San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival; Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival; San Francisco Dance Film Festival; Houston Cinema Arts Festival; DOC NYC Film Festival; Festival Mix Brasil - Sao Paulo; Australian Centre for the Moving Image - Melbourne; Dance on Camera Festival, New York; Calgary Underground Film Festival; Washington Jewish Film Festival; BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival; Wicked Queer: Boston LGBT Film Festival XXXII; National Gallery of Art; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art - Korea; Exploded View Gallery; Kyoto Art Center; Kuma Art Museum (Estonia)

Website: http://www.feelingsarefacts.com

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/125045519

Stills credits (top to bottom):
1 - (c) Al Giese
2 - (c) Jack Walsh
3 - Peter Moore, Performance view of Trio A (c) Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
4 - Peter Moore, Performance view of Continuous Project - Altered Daily (c) Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
2 - (c) Jack Walsh