In the final section of Lives of Performers, Rainer stages thirty-five tableaux vivants. These dramatic scenarios—romantic, violent, ironic—feature dancers in a living still life, except that she keeps the performers' twitches, shifts in balance, and facial tics until they finally break their poses and move on to the next scene. This physical disruption from the expected reflects Rainer's own cinematic écriture féminin, the French feminist literary theory that stresses the ties between women's experience and their expression of language and…