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"Postmodern dance"
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Anna Halprin : experience as dance
This comprehensive biography examines Halprin's fascinating life in the context of American culture - in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies to the present.
Book
Decomposing the Scene
This article explores dance through the lens of gender, using the case study of Mimosa/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning, a collective performance conceived by four of the most important contemporary choreographers: Trajal Harrell, Cecilia Bengolea, François Chaignaud, and Marlene Monteiro Freitas. This text interrogates different elements highlighted by this performance, such as how dance heritage may dialogue with contemporary perspectives concerning class, gender, and race issues, to help us better understand the representation of subcultural identity in dance.
Journal Article
Anna Halprin : experience as dance
Anna Halprin pioneered what became known as \"postmodern dance,\" creating work that was key to unlocking the door to experimentation in theater, music, Happenings, and performance art. This first comprehensive biography examines Halprin's fascinating life in the context of American culture--in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies. Janice Ross chronicles Halprin's long, remarkable career, beginning with the dancer's grandparents--who escaped Eastern European pogroms and came to the United States at the turn of the last century--and ending with the present day, when Halprin continues to defy boundaries between artistic genres as well as between participants and observers. As she follows Halprin's development from youth into old age, Ross describes in engrossing detail the artist's roles as dancer, choreographer, performance theorist, community leader, cancer survivor, healer, wife, and mother. Halprin's friends and acquaintances include a number of artists who charted the course of postmodern performance. Among her students were Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and Robert Morris. Ross brings to life the vital sense of experimentation during this period. She also illuminates the work of Anna Halprin's husband, the important landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, in the context of his wife's environmental dance work. Using Halprin's dance practices and works as her focus, Ross explores the effects of danced stories on the bodies who perform them. The result is an innovative consideration of how experience becomes performance as well as a masterful account of an extraordinary life.
eBook
Automatism and Creativity in Contact Improvisation: Re-Inventing Habit and Opening Up to Change
This article aims to show that the artistic creativity at work in improvised dance depends on the acquisition of automatisms through the capacity of gestural repetition to dissolve the instrumental character of the movements performed and leads to a focus on the mode of their performance. After illustrating how the rupture and experimental character of postmodern dance relies on repetition and the guiding role of feeling in contact improvisation, an analysis is made of how the abandonment of feeling—conveyed by the abandonment of gravity—that takes place in contact improvisation is indicative of the transition from a controlling attitude aimed at “problem solving” to a creative attitude aimed at “problem finding”. The recourse to the Straussian notion of pathicity, the valorisation of an aesthetic—affective, expressive, emergent, and relational—character of creativity, and the adoption of a neophenomenological approach will be functional in showing that improvisational artistic creativity arises from the acquisition of a sensitivity to otherness that makes one accustomed to respond in ever new ways to the affective stimuli coming from the circumstances and the affective state underlying the dance style and one’s own interpretation of it.
Journal Article
Dancing across the page
An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing Across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power, activism, and cultural, gendered and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing Across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.
eBook
Democracy’s Body, Neoliberalism’s Body
This article analyzes ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. The discussion focuses on contemporary dance practices that embody some of these values by striving to be more egalitarian, thus giving performers more agency in how they participate in creative processes that lead to a collectively created performance work. This analysis emphasizes the tension between these collaborative practices and modes of producing and distributing financial and symbolic, as well as cultural forms of capital in ways that resist and/or reproduce exploitative aspects of capitalism. Examining some works by Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and Tino Sehgal enables the theorization of the entrepreneurial artistic archive as well as practices of crediting creative labor in relation to notions of capital, ownership, collaboration, and consequently who dance-art makers and performers become as politically progressive artists.
Journal Article
Turning the World Upside Down
A particular movement – inverting the body to a tail-over-head orientation and fleetingly taking weight on the hands – has been a staple of postmodern dance training and choreography since the early 1990s, yet it remains unnamed and uncodified. Taking a material culture studies approach, I examine this movement closely, using interviews, observation, historical analysis, and a survey of dance practitioners to situate this not-exactly-a-handstand within the field of American postmodern dance. These multiple perspectives yield new insights into the field, its practitioners, and its relationship to the larger cultural picture. I find embodied in this transitional, upside-down movement not only postmodern dance's countercultural and eclectic inheritance but also the conflicted cultural space it occupies. Postmodern dance is old enough to have a tradition, but doesn't want to relinquish its maverick identity; meanwhile, its meaning-making codes are inaccessible to much of the general public even as it begs a bigger audience in order to thrive.
Journal Article
Angelin Preljocaj's Empty Moves (2014) and Transmodern Dance History
In this article, I examine the choreographic practices associated with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and his work, Empty Moves (Parts I, II & III), a three-part work informed by artistic hybridity and alterity. Through choreographic examples from Empty Moves, I examine the nascent state of transmodernism in dance, an artistic condition that implies a web of complex connections and interactions among dance histories and choreographic practices. In rethinking postmodern dance histories in the wake of recent theories of transmodernism, I conclude by offering a new framework for a dance paradigm and a reconsideration of selected canons of dance histories.
Journal Article
Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning and Communication
This essay explores western theatre dance as meaningful, despite its difference from language or discourse. I contend that although like language dance communicates through cultural codes, it does not convey literal messages but then neither is dance dominated by a requirement for factual specificity. I argue, however, that dance is structured like a language and I provide an analysis of the methods according to which language functions on an everyday basis. I review linguistic categories and argue for their counterparts in dance including vocabulary and syntax, the utterance and the speech act. The speech act is an important instance of language use which I hold is represented in dance; and in addressing this topic I shed new light on the performative quality of dance. The various theoretical issues discussed in the essay are illustrated by examples taken from modern and postmodern dance as well as from classical ballet.
Journal Article
Choreographies
Choreographer Jacky Lansley has been practicing and performing for more than four decades. In Choreographies, she offers unique insight into the processes behind independent choreography and paints a vivid portrait of a rigorous practice that combines dance, performance art, visuals and a close attention to space and site. Choreographies is both autobiography and archive - documenting production through rehearsal and performance photographs, illustrations, scores, process notes, reviews, audience feedback and interviews with both dancers and choreographers. Covering the author's practice from 1975 to 2017, the book delves into an important period of change in contemporary British dance - exploring British New Dance, postmodern dance and experimental dance outside of a canonical US context. A critically engaged reflection that focuses on artistic process over finished product, Choreographies is a much-needed resource in the fields of dance and choreographic art making.
eBook