‘60s spirit still burns for Rainer, Forti

Anyone attending “An Evening of Dance With Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti” on Saturday at the Getty Center and expecting a pleasant trip down memory lane was in for quite a jolt. The eight works, almost all created in the 1960s, retained an astonishing immediacy and impact.

The dances were conceived in a period during which choreographers, composers and visual artists rejected traditions to find -- and redefine -- the basics of their art. For choreographers, that meant saying no to sets, costume dramas, familiar structures, trained bodies and a host of other things.

But saying no to one thing means saying yes to something else. So it was yes to new movements, structures, use of space, the idea of who could be a dancer, and the relationships not only between dancers but between dancer and audience.

It could have been a mess. One of the yet-to-be-digested lessons of the ‘60s is that not every act of destruction leads to progress. But Rainer, Forti and a number of their colleagues had luck and genius on their side.

A feeling of exhilaration in newfound freedom and boundless possibilities -- a cosmic Yes -- poured through their works, and continued to do so Saturday at the Getty.

But whatever meanings the works had in their time are not the meanings they have today. Rainer created “Trio A (Pressured),” she told the audience in a post-performance discussion, because a colleague had criticized her dancing “charisma.” So she decided to turn her expressive face away from the audience throughout the three-part piece, originally danced in 1966.

Yet it was precisely the face of Linda K. Johnson upon which we fixated as she worked in the second part to maintain eye contact with dancer Shelley Senter. Johnson was a planet circling the sun, or maybe just a dancer with a single task. Senter may have had the freedom, but Johnson was our focus.

Every one of the works could be discussed at length, whether Rainer’s joyful inventions or Forte’s distillations of movements to essences (“Zoo Mantras”) or political riffs (“New Animations”).

Both women are considered part of the Minimalist movement. But there was nothing minimal in their works.