When Yvonne Rainer made the switch from choreographer to film-maker she had no intention of abandoning her role as a provocateur. In her first feature, Lives of Performers (1972), she was a briskly quizzical presence, issuing instructions to the cast and questioning them about their personal concerns. During the opening of Privilege (1990), she smeared her mouth with bright-red lipstick and delivered a lecture about menopause. In Murder and Murder (1996), a film about lesbianism, ageing and breast cancer, she inserted herself into key scenes, analysed her characters’ feelings, and revealed her mastectomy scars.

Iconoclasm and a witty scepticism were the hallmarks of Rainer’s work when she was choreographing in the 1960s. She published a manifesto declaring an end to “virtuosity, transformation, magic and make-believe”, and created very spare, minimalist dances that interrogated the ways in which choreography was made and performed. “It was an exhilarating time,” she recalled of the era, when every painter, composer, film-maker and choreographer in downtown Manhattan seemed to be storming the bastions of establishment culture. But by the end of the decade Rainer was becoming frustrated. She was searching for a more political voice in her work, and the radical rigour of her dance-making felt like a constraint.

In film she saw “a much wider spectrum of possibilities”, and having already experimented with the medium – creating a five-minute “hand movie” while convalescing from surgery – she graduated into making full-length features.

With Lives of Performers (subtitled “a melodrama”), she also plunged into narrative – or, more accurately, into the question of narrative. At its centre was a triangular love affair, and as Rainer portrayed her characters’ tangle of emotions, she explored the conventions by which those emotions could be shown. The result was a delirious, disconcerting mix of forms that moved between theatrically staged conversations, mime, off-camera dialogue, pure dance and tableaux vivants in which the characters stood frozen in stylised poses of desire, rejection, complicity and pain.

In the films that followed, Rainer moved into more overtly political terrain, dealing with overlapping issues of patriarchy, ageing, race, terrorism and power. But her subject was also, always, the medium of film. A retrospective season shortly to be screened in London illuminates what a playground of possibilities she discovered, what a determinedly questioning, teasing dynamic she created between herself, her viewer and the screen.

Typically Rainer will overlap two, three, even four storylines within a single film and narrate them through a mix of drama, dream imagery, documentary and archive footage. Individual characters are often split between several performers – the psychoanalyst who features in Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980) is played by a man, a woman and a small boy who barks like a dog. Some scenes feel like a polemical torrent of words; others are played in silence, like the sequence in Film About a Woman Who… (1974) where Rainer sits mutely in front of the camera with the text of her script on bits of paper stuck on her face.

As liberated as Rainer was by film, she didn’t leave dance behind. Her cast of characters included figures from the dance world; more significantly, she also brought many of her former choreographic skills to directing – repeating and counterpointing individual images in the same way she might phrase a sequence of movement, and paying rigorous attention to actors’ body language. One breakfast scene in Film About a Woman Who… has the feel of a silent duet, focusing on the studiedly slow, disdainful rhythm with which a woman turns the pages of her magazine while the man beside her butters his toast with irritating briskness. Rainer said her films took months to rehearse: “Every gesture was choreographed down to the blink of an eye”.

Eventually, Rainer returned to pure choreography. By the end of the 1990s the cost of film-making had become prohibitive, and she recognised that while she loved scriptwriting and editing, she found the tortuous pace of making films a nightmare. In 2000 when Mikhail Baryshnikov invited her to create a work for his White Oak Dance Project, she felt a sense of homecoming. Now in her 80s, she continues to be prolific, reviving past dances and choreographing new ones.

“Once a dancer, always a dancer,” Rainer has shrugged. But in the same period that she’s been enjoying her return to live dance, others are on a reverse trajectory. London Contemporary Dance School’s new Screendance MA and Northern Ballet’s forthcoming film and dance workshop season are just two indications of the increasing number of choreographers who, if not abandoning dance altogether, are seeking out the creative and practical advantages of working with film.

For Siobhan Davies, an admirer of Rainer, film has become a way to focus choreographic attention on the small, subtle details of physical expression that interest her most. The two films she has created with director David Hinton are not strictly dance, but her observation of the human body as it moves through different cinematic landscapes and different atmospheres has the exquisite and inventive sensibility of a great dance-maker.

Charlotte Vincent, choreographer and director of Vincent Dance Theatre, says film has become not an alternative medium but a parallel one: she is now choosing to make each new work in two versions, for stage and screen. She admits it’s a challenging, intensive approach requiring a sort of dual thought process: “How would I stage this? How would I film this?” But it’s also hugely enriched the work’s potential. The film installation of Virgin Territory (a 2016 piece in which she addressed the premature sexualisation of girls) has been created to play across five screens, allowing Vincent to counterpoint the original choreography with additional documentary footage and more purely cinematic imagery.

The practical benefits are as important as the political and poetic: a screen installation is far cheaper and more versatile to tour than a staged production, it has a longer shelf life and it can reach a far more diverse audience. Most crucially it can also be formatted to go online, the dominant medium through which we consume our culture.

It’s striking how many ways the dance world has been accommodating this trend, from the Royal Ballet’s live cinema broadcasts to YouTube’s growing archives of dance. The majority of choreographers might retain a profound attachment to the visceral here-and-now of a live performance and many audience members might still prefer to be part of a live, communal experience. But while Rainer in 1972 could turn to film as a fascinating alternative to dance, for choreographers in today’s digital world it’s become part of a cultural reality – impossible to ignore.

• Yvonne Rainer: The Choreography of Film is at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, from 27 February to 10 April.