For the sake of rhetorical convenience, people tend to misname as Modern dance anything that isn't classical ballet. Similarly, they tend to misname any random non-ballet dance in today's catchall postmodern era as Postmodern dance. Postmodern dance is, in fact, a... [more]

For the sake of rhetorical convenience, people tend to misname as Modern dance anything that isn't classical ballet. Similarly, they tend to misname any random non-ballet dance in today's catchall postmodern era as Postmodern dance. Postmodern dance is, in fact, a specific movement that occurred in New York in the 1960s and '70s. But since the U.S. had no grand old ballet tradition of which to speak, Modern dance was the classical tradition against which the Postmodernists of the '60s and '70s rebelled. In her definitive book on the subject, "Terpsichore in Sneakers," Sally Banes says, "In dance, the confusion the term 'postmodern' creates is further complicated by the fact that historical Modern dance was never really Modernist. Often it has been in the arena of Postmodern dance that issues of Modernism have arisen." Indeed, the beginnings of Postmodernism can be traced back into the guts of its precursor. The chance experiments Merce Cunningham began in the '40s touched on the important questions (What is dance? Where is it performed? What is it about?), and set down a precedent for some of the most radical notions in Postmodern dance. But since Cunningham stayed in the dance-technical idiom, using trained dancers and precise technique, one cannot regard him as part of the Postmodern dance movement. Making the old Judson Church in Greenwich Village their movement's home, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and others redefined the entire artistic language they were to use to analyze concepts of time, space, and motion. Dance, our postmodern forebears found, could be anything, and moreover, anyone could do it. All of the body's movements may constitute dance if placed in the context that deems it so. One sits at a table and eats breakfast: it is a dance. To the Postmodern dance artist, the sheer miracle of our biped existence is the basis of dance. Their legacy insures that never again will we see walking as "just walking." [show less]