In 1968, toward the end of a decade that witnessed civil rights protests, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and an expanded notion of artistic practice, Yvonne Rainer presented her evening-length work, The Mind is a Muscle, a multipart performance for seven dancers interspersed with film and text. Catherine Wood examines the political and media context in which Rainer chose to use the dance-theatre situation and analyses her radical approach to image-making in live form. For Wood, The Mind is a Muscle proposed a new model of artwork that presents a dynamic tension between materiality and idea.