After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid

Yvonne Rainer uses a series of literary excerpts concerned with the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Vienna, and sets them against a dance commisioned from her by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation in 2000. Theseelements are juxtaposed in order to highlight the current state of the avant-garde - a period of art-making with all its complex relations to aprolonged historical crisis.