Modern Dance and the Modernist Work

Abstract

In performance theory and criticism the use of the term ‘postmodern’ has had its longest history in association with the changes in American dance of the early 1960s. Like the modern architectural styles against which Charles Jencks sets his description of the postmodern in art, the rejection of a self-consciously modern and stylised American dance by the dancers and artists associated with the Judson Dance Theater in New York has been taken to mark a radical departure from ‘modern’ modes of work. After Clement Greenberg’s account of the modernist project, influential readings of the modern, the modernist and, consequently, the postmodern in performance have been constructed around the Judson Dance Theater’s rejection of the expressionism characteristic of modern choreographies. In the context of Michael Fried’s unequivocal condemnation of the ‘theatrical’ in art, however, one might challenge the very possibility of a properly ‘modernist’ performance, and, in turn, these readings of the move from a modern and to a postmodern dance.