A sometimes lazy, sometimes inspired version of "art for art's sake," Pure Movement reacts against constraints of intellectual and political meaning. Its practitioners keep a remnant of focus on shape and concern themselves with kinetic drive rather than content. Despite the... [more]

A sometimes lazy, sometimes inspired version of "art for art's sake," Pure Movement reacts against constraints of intellectual and political meaning. Its practitioners keep a remnant of focus on shape and concern themselves with kinetic drive rather than content. Despite the fact that, in the wake of Postmodern theory, even a lack of content can be read as a text, dance of this milieu resists definition. Pure Movement doesn't span a time period so much as a piece of ideological territory. That it is a time-based, visual medium only dramatizes the case for movement itself as the ideological essence of dance. Dance is seen but also felt. In Pure Movement, it is from the visual experience of velocity and flow that the dance audience really receives its meaning. For Pure Movement pioneers, music was the vehicle that propelled dance toward its fullness of expression. Balanchine's revolutionary "plotless ballets" (emerging in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s) aimed to embody the music itself, rather than any kind of sentiment. That Balanchine worked most often with Stravinsky demonstrates the particular musical concerns that his dances strove to realize: extreme dynamic change, atonality, and syncopation. Twyla Tharp examined these same concerns in the 1970s, eschewing expression for a sort of dizzy, free-wheeling connection to Pop-musicality. In the early 1980s, Molissa Fenley (New York), Karole Armitage (New York), and Michael Clark (London) turned their attention back to ballet technique, gave it a shot of speed to enhance its wound-up white angularity, and made it dance to Punk and New Wave. Mark Morris, who came onto the scene in the late 1980s and '90s, had more in common with balletic Balanchine than with his closer relatives (ironically, he once booed a Tharp performance for its irresponsible treatment of women). After the Postmodernists had all but exhausted musical experimentation, Morris received staunch criticism for his blatant reliance on musicality from those who had made Cage and Cunningham their own personal saviors. His use of seriously overexposed classical pieces shocked some, but endeared him to most. Ultimately, by conceiving dances as musical scores, Mark Morris used Pure Movement to secure his position as the great hope of contemporary dance. And in turn, Pure Movement continues to win over audiences by sparing them the intellectual discourse of Postmodernism, instead serving up defiant assertions of form in motion. [show less]