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TWO DAYS BEFORE WE WERE SCHEDULED TO MEET, Yvonne Rainer walked into the gallery I was looking after for a friend and caught me leafing through her autobiography When I met the great dancer, choreographer and film-maker in her Manhattan apartment I was too shy to ask whether or not she had noticed what I was reading I hesitated to ask because Feelings Are Facts is so sincere that it makes you feel you know Rainer intimately Her writing is as direct as her dance In the introduction to the first chapter, she approaches the reader: ‘If you’re interested in Plato, you’re reading the wrong book If you’re interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals – including breakfast – have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading’   That straightforward approach is evident in the way Rainer speaks When we meet she says, ‘My syntax when I speak is not to my liking I don’t finish sentences or I interrupt them’ As I transcribed the recording of our conversation, I marvelled not only at Rainer’s honesty, but also at how exacting she is: she remembers every detail, and has a penchant for storytelling As she describes her relationships, work, ambitions and memories, I am struck by how appreciative she is of her contemporaries: Rainer studied with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, lived with Robert Morris, danced with Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton That history comes alive whenever Rainer talks: widely credited as one of the central figures of contemporary dance, she complements accounts of her own practice by delineating that of her contemporaries We talk a lot about her early work, the focus of her recent solo exhibition at London’s Raven Row, and many of those accounts go back to the flurry of activity of the Judson Dance Theater at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s     2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first dance performances at Judson It was celebrated with a burst of conferences, screenings of the