“Yvonne Rainer, one of America's leading dancers/choreographers, founded the Judson Dance Workshop in New York.... Her films show dancers in practice, still and motion pictures of dance productions, and dancers as actors playing out an elaborate and repetitive drama of interpersonal relations. Both the sound track and visual track serve to further, counterpoint, repeat with variations, interrupt, and comment on each other. Technically, the film is an elaborate exploration of basic dance elements generalized to the uniquely cinematographic: stasis vs. movement, silence vs. sound, black vs. white, life vs. art, flat vs. plastic, ritual vs. natural, natural vs. cultural. Lives of Performers has three recurrent interrelated themes: performer/performance, human interrelationship, and cliché.... It is (or can be, for a sympathetic viewer) an intensely personal experience, for an elaborate and multiple drama of human interaction runs parallel to the performer/performance theme. The film is subtitled, ‘a melodrama'; the melodrama consists of reenactments of (apparently) personal experiences from the dancers' lives....' --Chuck Kleinhans