Postmodern dance

Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance form. A reaction to the compositional and presentation constraints of modern dance, postmodern dance hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocated novel methods of dance composition.

Claiming that any movement was dance, and any person was a dancer (with or without training) early postmodern dance was more closely aligned with ideology of modernism rather than the architectural, literary and design movements of postmodernism. However, the postmodern dance movement rapidly developed to embrace the ideology of postmodernism which was reflected in the wide variety of dance works emerging from Judson Dance Theater, the home of postmodern dance.

Lasting from the 1960s to the 1970s the main thrust of Postmodern dance was relatively short lived but its legacy lives on in contemporary dance (a blend of modernism and postmodernism) and the rise of postmodernist choreographic processes that have produced a wide range of dance works in varying styles.

Influence

Postmodern dance led to:

• contemporary dance
• dance improvisation
• contact improvisation
• dance for camera
• the concept of all movement as dance
• the postmodern choreographic process

Process

The postmodern choreographic process may reflect the following elements:

• post-structuralism / deconstructivism
• parody
• irony
• jouissance
• hyperreality
• Death of the Author

Founders

The founders of postmodern dance are

• Merce Cunningham (who came before postmodern dance per se but used a postmodern choreographic process)
• Robert Ellis Dunn (who taught composition at the Cunningham school)
• Simone Forti
• Anna Halprin
• the members of the Judson Dance Theater
• Murray Louis
• Alwin Nikolais
• Yvonne Rainer
• Lucinda Childs
• Trisha Brown

See also

• Judson Dance Theater
• 20th century concert dance
• Modern dance
• List of dance style categories
• Dance
• Postmodernism

References

Notes

Further reading

• Banes, S (1987) Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6160-6
• Banes, S (Ed) (1993) Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1391-X
• Banes, S (Ed) (2003) Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-18014-X
• Bremser, M. (Ed) (1999) Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-10364-9
• Carter, A. (1998) The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-16447-8
• Copeland, R. (2004) Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-96575-6
• Denby, Edwin "Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets".(1965) Curtis Books. ASIN B0007DSWJQ
• Reynolds, N. and McCormick, M. (2003) No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09366-7