4.8: Modern Dance in a Postmodern Era

Skeptical toward traditional values and assumptions of reality, postmodern philosophy challenges ideas that grew out of post-Renaissance, post-industrial modernity. This ideological conception of ‘after modernism’ is postmodernism, which heckles tradition and screams that absolute knowledge cannot exist. Like the 21st century debate about the binary chromosomal assignation of sex based on biology – is being challenged. Should transgendered men compete in sports against biological females? What is fair, what is right, what is truth? Postmodernism has forced a new and confusing relationship with the world, a collage of knowledge, beliefs, and non-beliefs where everything is questioned. Postmodernism even challenged, what is dance?

Definition: Postmodernism

Phenomenology, critical theory, and existentialism undergird a general skepticism about the truth and reality. Influenced by the writings of Foucault, Heidegger, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, theoretical postmodernism is a philosophical direction which questions life as we know it and is critical of the foundational assumptions of reality.

In 1967, French theorist and literary critic Roland Barthes wrote an essay “The Death of the Author”, in which he challenged the traditional methods of critiquing literature. Instead of trying to derive the ultimate meaning of a work by looking at the author’s biography or the author’s intentional meanings in creating the work, Barthes placed each individual reader's interpretation as paramount in the process of textual analysis. The death of the author was a notion that emphasized and elevated any observer’s viewpoint where the more subtle, indirect features of the work can be interpreted, illuminating multiple perspectives and insights. Dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) read this essay by Barthes and adopted this concept of multi-perspectivity in his choreographic creations.

Definition: Multi-perspectivity

The consideration of numerous interpretative insights about a cultural product, multiperspectivity reflects different views of a dance, historical event, or literary work. The impact of Roland Barthes (1967) essay echoes society’s increasing diversity and cultural pluralism, educators -- and by extension society -- has begun to question the validity of a singular one-sided, grand narrative.

In modernity, a choreographer’s intended narrative in dance -- outlined explicitly by Wigman in her notion of ‘authoring dance’-- was a project taken up by Graham who authored in prolific choreographic works, in the postmodern era, multiperspectivity became the lens to view dance. This was a significant admission by choreographers that creators, practitioners, and observers of dance come at a work with a multitude of experiences, understandings, differentiated knowledges, and worldviews. Cultivating an understanding of multiperspectivity is a precondition for informed citizenship for those who live in a multicultural society, where the notion of ‘walking in someone else’s’ shoes supersede a homogenized, singular, mandated, narrative that emerge from an unquestioned power structure.

Cunningham looked forward into the future – he decentered the power of the choreographer in postmodern dance and ushered in futurism. Pairing dance to technology, Cunningham’s last piece BIPED (1999) was a statement about the human species on two feet with an eerie foreshadowing to the primacy of the digitized human interaction, and perhaps even AI. This decentering process was the locus of Cunningham’s work and impact. It was perhaps his reading of Barthes that initiated his own ideas about dance. He countered the established narrative choreographic established by Wigman and Graham who had always aimed to author dance and send their audiences away with a very specific emotional response.

A former dancer with Graham’s company, Cunningham revolutionized modern dance into a postmodern art by introducing Chance Operations. The use of dice, I-Ching cards, or the flip of a coin, Cunningham’s technique innovated and elevated abstract choreography, non-narrative, non-linear and lacking a climactic moment. The observer was allowed to determine what the movement communicates. In viewing Cunningham’s work, authoring dance is no longer valid.

Figure 4.12. Merce Cunningham and company dancers at the Shiraz Festival in 1972. Photo courtesy Cunningham Dance Foundation archive

(File:CunninghamDunnBrownShiraz1972.jpg - Wikimedia Commons, Source: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon.2007.40.1.20)

In 1986, Cunningham created Points in Space, a filmed work for BBC. The ever-shifting perspective of the camera was an “exploration of the spatial decentering that he’s used on the stage since the 1950’s… By moving the camera, this suggests there is no single fixed focus or front” (Davidson, 1984). For example, depending on where you are standing when viewing the stars at night, if you’re in Morocco, Argentina, Iceland, or Thailand, every human has a different perspective. For Cunningham, depending on the perspectives of the individuals in an audience, or their interpersonal dispositions they bring to the moment, a dance might take on numerous different meanings. Cunningham disregarded the single point perspective and utilized the idea of collage where the eye of the spectator was not automatically guided upstage center. Instead, his choreography displaced form and moved in a “collagelike” fashion between shifting points in space welcoming asymmetry, gravity, spatiality, and repetition. Similar to entering a modernist Hans Hoffman (Figure 4.13), Wassily Kandinsky, or Jackson Pollock painting, anywhere is everywhere, and the pastiche of shifting color gives the impression of movement going on forever.

Figure 4.13. Modernist artist Hans Hoffman (1880 – 1966) exhibited a dripped paint style, where repetition and displacement of form was texturally expressed in his The Nature of Abstraction exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum (PEM)

(David Adam Kess (2019, Nov 29). Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction - pem.org. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hans_Hofmann_(1880%E2%80%931966)_The_Nature_of_Abstraction_-_PEM,_Peabody_Essex_Museum,_(pic.)g5.jpg)

Interactive Classroom Activity: Martha Graham vs. Yvonne Rainer

Graham structured a choreographic style that emphasized narrative:

Narrative
Dramatic
Costumes
Flashy / Spectacle
Props
Proscenium Stage
Traditional Gender Roles
Star System Hierarchy (Principle dancers, Soloists, Ensemble)
Performance Quality
Communicative to Audience

Rainer challenged those authoritative structures and narratives:

Narrative-NO!
Dramatic-NO!
Costumes-NO!
Flashy / Spectacle-NO!
Props-NO!
Proscenium Stage - NO!
Traditional Gender Roles-NO!
Star System Hierarchy (Principle dancers, Soloists, Ensemble) -NO!
Performance Quality-NO!
Communicative to Audience-NO!

Activity #l: Sticky Hands

• With a partner, stand in 4th position plié position plié facing each other.
• Link your wrists while the rest of your body is not connected to your partner.
• Begin to move organically, like your wrists are "stuck" to each other.
• Rules of the Dance Game: You are trying to un-center/off balance the other person...
• BUT! You cannot move or lift your feet from the spot they are planted.
• Nor can you lose wrist contact.
• Find Movement: Now, while executing "Sticky Hands Activity", find movement that is organic, interesting, exciting, risky and potential material for choreography!

Activity #2: Yes No Game

• With a partner, stand in 4th position plié facing each other - connect wrists to start
• Rules of the Dance Game: You are trying to un-center, or push off balance the other person... and GET THEM TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM!
• You are not allowed to detach from physical contact.
• Find Movement: Now, while executing "Yes No Game", find movement that is organic, interesting, exciting, risky, and potential material for choreography!

Moving through space in an improvised response to gravity, contact improvisation was first proposed in 1972 by Steve Paxton (Loeffler-Gladstone, 2019). An interplay of listening, trusting, and reflexive action, contact improvisation is performed between two or more dancers responding to impulse, weight, momentum, fall, and release all while maintaining physical connection. Crucial to successful contact improvisation is suspending control and a specificity of aesthetic but is instead an act of widening the senses to access potential new movement. Contact improvisation integrates chance-generated techniques following Cunningham’s contribution to the postmodern dance movement. Paxton (1979) wrote:

“The exigencies of the form dictate a mode of movement which is relaxed, constantly aware and prepared, and onflowing. As a basic focus, the dancers remain in physical touch, mutually supportive and innovative, meditating upon the physical laws relating to their masses: gravity, momentum, inertia, and friction. They do not strive to achieve results, but rather, to meet the constantly changing physical reality with appropriate placement and energy” (Paxton, 1979, p. 26).

Definition: Contact Improvisation

An interplay of listening, trusting, and reflexive action, contact improvisation is performed between two or more dancers responding to awareness, onflowing impulse, weight, momentum, fall, and release all while maintaining physical connection.

The dance collective experimenting with contact improvisation was not exclusive to Steve Paxton, as there were several dancer/choreographers of the 1960s who had worked in similar experimental mode utilizing release, gravity, site specific and inertia as the premise for their movement. Some postmodern pioneers working in this way include Anna Halprin’s San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, Yvonne Rainer, and Trisha Brown.

Figure 4.14. Contact improvisation is a key feature of postmodern dance

(Koyaanisqatsi12 (17 January 2017). This image of a Contact Improvisation trio was taken in Florence (MA) during a workshop held by Nancy Stark Smith, in January 2017. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Contact_Improvisation_Trio_Dojo_Florence.jpg)

Anna Halprin (1920-1921) had been an early member of the Humphrey-Weidman Dance Company, but also trained under Hanya Holm (mentored by Mary Wigman) and Martha Graham. Halprin came to be equated with the avant-garde dance movement and viewed “dance not only as a theatrical art but also as a means of promoting psychological development” (Anderson, 2021, para. 20). She frequently juxtaposed movement to dialogue in the Dadaist theater tradition leading the experimental San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. Among her early students Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer, all of whom challenged conventionality, societal norms, and politics through dance.

Hosting dance workshops in urban ghettos, Halprin brought dance to many who may not have otherwise had the chance to move in such exploratory ways. She formed a multi-racial company to create pieces that were about racial inequality, and when she was diagnosed with cancer in the 1970s, her work then began to focus on concepts of healing. She founded the Tamalpa Institute, which was a program for those suffering with cancer and AIDS to come together and use dance as healing (Tsioulcas, 2021). By redefining what is considered dance, making it available to everyone, Halprin and her comrades used dance to address social, political, and individual needs. In this way, Halprin’s work was both culturally reflective and culturally impactful. She expanded the dance process by developing the concept of task movement, in which dancers repeat a simple task many times. Her focus on impulse and self-awareness vis-à-vis spontaneous movement lead to task movement, where dancers repeated tasks given to them over and over again. She also worked with Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls and John Rinn to develop healing dances and codified a method called the Life/Art Process.

Friend of Paxton and Halprin was Yvonne Rainer. Born in San Francisco in 1934, Rainer's parents were self-declared political radicals. Her mother, a stenographer, was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, and her father, a stonemason and house painter, was born in northern Italy. Rainer moved to New York in 1956 at the age of 21 to study dance at the Graham School and at Cunningham Studios. The Judson Memorial Church was a rendezvous location for the emergence of contact improvisation, developed by Rainer, and her friends Steve Paxton and Ruth Emerson at a small church on Judson Street.

In 1962, they approached the presiding pastor at the Judson Memorial Church to ask if they could use the space during off hours as a performance venue. The Church already had a reputation for radical artists such as the Judson Poets' Theater and Judson Art Gallery, so Rainer and her friends made Judson Church a focal point for vanguard dance, as well. While dance pioneers had worked hard to “Author Dance” with a specific emotion (Wigman) or narrative (Graham), Rainer’s approach to dance drew from Laban, Cunningham, and Halprin’s ideas using everyday pedestrian movement, chance, and improvisation. For Rainer, the body was viewed as a source for infinite varieties of movement rather than as the purveyor of plot or drama. She countered the concept of authoring dance, though the occurrences in the 1960’s influenced Rainer’s work in creative movement explorations using an egalitarian social construct, as well as pedestrian (accessible to all) movement. Many of the elements she employed—such as repetition, tasks, and indeterminacy—later became standard features of modern dance.

In 1965, she wrote the No Manifesto (Rainer, 1965), declaring what she and her contact improvisation friends felt should be the new direction for modern dance.

No Manifesto No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

Please ask yourself… What is spectacle? What is virtuosity? Read the No Manifesto with critical thinking… know what each of her points really means. This is how you will understand and come to see her success moving modern dance forward in dance history into the postmodern condition. What was happening in the United States in the 1960s? Knowing something about this history (Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, Free Love, Hippies, Flower Children, Challenge Authority, Protest War) really sheds some light on how and why Rainer created her No Manifesto. Revolution and resistance themed, Rainer questioned structures of authority, emblematic of the 1960s counterculture.

In Rainer’s piece Trio A (1978), one characteristic feature of this five-minute dance is that the performer never makes eye contact with spectators. The instance in which movement might require the dancer to face the audience, her eyes are closed, or the head is involved in movement such as shaking out her hair. Rainer’s Trio A attempted to erase energy investment within both a given phrase and the transition. There was an absence of the classical appearance of “attack” at the beginning of a phrase, nor was there a “recovery” at the end, with energy arrested somewhere in the middle, as in a low level grand jeté.

Interactive Classroom Activity: Martha Graham vs. Yvonne Rainer

Graham structured a choreographic style that emphasized narrative:

Narrative
Dramatic
Costumes
Flashy / Spectacle
Props
Proscenium Stage
Traditional Gender Roles
Star System Hierarchy (Principle dancers, Soloists, Ensemble)
Performance Quality
Communicative to Audience

Rainer challenged those authoritative structures and narratives:

Narrative-NO!
Dramatic-NO!
Costumes-NO!
Flashy / Spectacle-NO!
Props-NO!
Proscenium Stage - NO!
Traditional Gender Roles-NO!
Star System Hierarchy (Principle dancers, Soloists, Ensemble) -NO!
Performance Quality-NO!
Communicative to Audience-NO!

Activity #l: Sticky Hands

• With a partner, stand in 4th position plié facing each other.
• Link your wrists while the rest of your body is not connected to your partner.
• Begin to move organically, like your wrists are "stuck" to each other.
• Rules of the Dance Game: You are trying to un-center/off balance the other person...
• BUT! You cannot move or lift your feet from the spot they are planted.
• Nor can you lose wrist contact.
• Find Movement: Now, while executing "Sticky Hands Activity", find movement that is organic, interesting, exciting, risky and potential material for choreography!

Activity #2: Yes No Game

• With a partner, stand in 4th position plié facing each other - connect wrists to start

Pushing the limits of dance experimentation, postmodern dancer Trisha Brown said, “I like to know the limits of my space, and I like to push it… I like to go to boundaries and stand on them — breach them” (Langer, 2017). Continuing danced explorations in improvisational indeterminacy (not pre-determined), the next postmodern dancer/choreographer pioneered the concept of ‘found movement’ in improvisation converted to choreography that could be reused over and over. Brown employed ‘intentional improvisations’ that required visioning, planning, and revision, all of which was documented in sketches and drawings (Walker, 2024). 

Brown used unorthodox venues as performance spaces such as exterior architecture to support abstract movement and defied what was thought possible with dance. She used illusions, technology, and harnesses in her pieces to suspend choreography from high rise buildings, performing vertically suspended movement on walls. Having graduated from Mills College dance program in 1958, Brown then attended the American Dance Festival (1958-1961) and eventually moved to New York in 1961. She had been a student of Anna Halprin, José Limón, and Merce Cunningham. And Trisha Brown assisted in the establishment of Judson Dance Theatre, the avant-garde experimental collective (Macaulay, 2017). Later, Brown founded her own postmodern dance company called the Trisha Brown Company in 1970. She was inspired by the postmodern composer John Cage (Merce Cunningham’s life partner), with early pieces set to Cage’s music often filled with silence, breath, and footfalls (Trisha Brown, 2023). Her work started as purely improvised, inviting postmodernist multiperspectivity aiming to prompt her audiences to ask questions (Perron, 2017). Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970) required that the audience crouch down to see what was being performed, and Walking on a Wall (1971) gave the illusion of dancers looking upon the audience from above.

Brown won both European and American acclaim for her most iconic work, Set and Reset (1983) performed at the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York, and from there Brown and her company of dancers started performing in large theatres such as Sadler’s Wells in London. Her choreography has been called dartingly quick but fluid (Kisselgoff, 1987), Fellow dancer Doug Elkins noted that Brown “was a tsunami and a tea ceremony all at the same moment” (Perron, 2017). In her 40-year career, Brown established three dance companies, created 100 works and six operas, Brown expanded upon Cunningham’s multiperspectivity and Rainer’s call for ‘no’ to anything resembling traditional movement, Brown eliminated bravura, academic technique, narrative acting, and musicality ushering in a new era of dance (Macaulay, 2017). Provoking, inspiring, and intellectually challenging in its simplicity, Brown’s legacy firmly rooted postmodern dance was firmly rooted.

Figure 4.15. The asymmetry of modern dance was innovated in the 20th century

(Sigurd Leeder. (1975). Sigurd Leeders "Mobile" getanzt von Ueli Kohler, 1975. Nachlass von Sigurd Leeder im Schweizer Tanzarchiv. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1027-6-8-13-1_Ueli_Koller.jpg)

Of Fungi and Veal Calves

Born and raised on a dairy farm in Vermont, Moses Pendelton from a young age was infused with an affinity for the natural world, where animals, plants, minerals, and systems of interplay between farm equipment and human facilitation laid the foundation for his worldview and creativity. He attended Dartmouth University and graduated in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and though Pendelton was not a trained dancer, he founded his first company, Pilobolus, during his senior year as a collaborative experimental movement group.  Named after a genus of fungi that Pendelton knew from his farm life upbringing, Pilobolus grows on herbivore dung. Even from his earliest work, Pendelton is known to be a choreographer of ‘dance sculptures’, and in doing so, actively contributed to the reshaping of contemporary critical discourse about the nature of the visual and performing arts as an authored craft versus a collaborative craft, and further, dance as a concert form, as much as a commercial enterprise.

Pilobolus was presented on Broadway in 1977. The collaborative organization he had invested almost a decade to cultivating, when Pilobolos morphed into more of a theatrical troupe, rather than a dance/movement company (Sowerby, 2017), Pendelton began researching new ideas and inspiration points, eventually invited to stage his dance ideas on The Paris Opera Ballet dancers. They toured with a mixed bill of short pieces featuring inventive ballet and modern choreography, Pendelton’s work became popular while one tour in Italy, Spain, and France (Dunning, 1989). After this success, Pendelton left Pilobolus to start his new venture, Momix.

Momix is considered to be group of dance illusionists where bodies are used as props with the incorporation of vaudeville, film, and dance imagery (Dunning, 1989). This admixture is able to capture parts of Pendelton’s passions by integrating his sense of creativity and humor, as well as a creative rejection of conventional dance movement (Kissellgoff, 1987). Momix got its name originally from a pieces Moses Pendleton created called “MO is in Moses” that he created for the 1980 Winter Olympics. It was also derived from a milk supplement fed to veal calves which Pendelton fed to his father's cattle as a young boy. The intention of the title Momix is to be read as ‘Moses’ Mix’ (Shapiro, 2014). Pendelton’s extension of postmodern dance into larger-than-life imagery employs light, props, shadow, humor, and the human body performing acrobatics, gymnastics, dance, and mime, comedy, emotion, and storytelling.

On television, MOMIX has appeared on the Helene Fischer Show, Good Morning Dallas, PB’s Dance in America Series, Table Talk, and the 3-D film Imagine and White Window, while commercial work for Target, Hanes, Mercedes Benz, Fiat, BMW, Kohler, MAC Cosmetics and Walmart.Concert work includes Alchemia, Botanica, Opus Cactus, Passion, Lunar Sea, and Baseball, to name a few. Technically intriguing and visually captivating, Opus Cactus (originally a 20-minute piece set on the Arizona Ballet) was recreated in 2011 for Momix honoring the United States’ Southwestern Desert.

The lasting impact of Momix is their inventiveness embedded within the beauty of physical possibility (Oklahoma, 2017). Momix succeeded in changing audience expectations from the early years of modern dance of pure movement to a creative integration of technical dance movement, props to extend the body of the dancer, paired to technological staging. Momix (and Pilobolus before them) pushes the boundaries of how we define modern dance in the twenty-first century.

On November 28, 1980, dancer Mark Morris rented a studio space at The Merce Cunningham Studios, and together with a group of eight friends, collaborated to give a dance concert in New York City. By 1995, the Mark Morris Group was the fourth largest modern dance troupe in the United States, with an annual budget of two million dollars, employing musicians, designers, teachers, and dancers. L'Allegro, II Penseroso ed II Moderato (1988) was his first full-length work to Handel's music of the same name and based on poems by John Milton, where 24 dancers weave movement, music, and text together, bridging the divide between the use of gravity, truth, and self-awareness — conventional themes in modern dance — juxtaposed to the postmodernist suspension of reality, working through asymmetrical shape toward political irony and self-conscious historicism and intersectionality. This piece had been set on the Belgium National dance theatre, but Morris clashed with the establishment over his iconoclastic approach, so he returned to the States to collaborate with Mikhail Baryshnikov on the White Oak Project (O’Mahony, 2004).

The Mark Morris Group enacts this choreographer’s “passionate manifesto for the arts as a universal birthright: the guardian, reflection and critic of a civilized society” (Shilling, 2019). From this ideological standpoint, the dances reflect the postmodern rejection of binary perspectives on traditional gender roles. Women perform men roles. Men perform women’s roles. Women lift men, men lift men, and unisex costuming explicitly redefined the perception of ‘what a dancer should look like’. The Mark Morris dance group engages individuals of every color and physical description, casting dancers without regard to race, rank, or sex. Typified by a stark lack of glamor, they show distinct awkwardness, vulnerability, and have a natural look to them in performances that can be shocking, poetic, hilarious, raw, beautiful, and ironic. Movement is set to music of all time periods and cultures including religious hymnals, classical, pop, country western or folk music. Choreographically, the music is many times sharply contrasted to movement. A dancer’s movements could exude poetic musicality in duet then devolve into clumsy slapping at each other. When asked about his philosophy as a choreographer, Morris stated, “I make it up and you watch it. End of philosophy” (Shilling, 2019).