Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance form. A reaction to the compositional and presentation constraints of modern dance, postmodern dance hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocated novel methods of dance composition.

Claiming that Any movement was dance, and any person was a dancer (with or without training) early postmodern dance was more closely aligned with ideology of modernism rather that the architectural and literary movements of postmodernism. However, the postmodern dance movement rapidly developed to embrace the ideology of postmodernism which was reflected in the wide variety of dance works emerging from Judson dance theater, the home of postmodern dance.

Lasting from the 1960s to the 1970s the main thrust of Postmodern dance was relatively short lived but its legacy lives on in contemporary dance (a blend of modernism and postmodernism) and the rise of postmodernist choreographic processes that have produced a wide rage of dance works in varying styles.

The influence of postmodern dance

postmodern dance led to:

• contemporary dance
• dance improvisation
• contact improvisation
• dance for camera
• dance technology
• the concept of all movement as dance
• the postmodern choreographic process

see also: 20th century concert dance

The postmodern choreographic process

The postmodern choreographic process may reflect the following elements:

• post-structuralism / deconstructivism
• parody
• irony
• jouissance
• revisionism
• hyperreality
• Death of the Author

see also: choreographic technique

Founders of postmodern dance

the founders of postmodern dance are

• Merce Cunningham (who came before postmodern dance per se but used a postmodern choreographic process)
• Robert Dunn (who taught composition at the Cunningham school)
• the members of the Judson Dance Theater
• Alwin Nikolais
• Murray Louis

Related articles

• Judson Dance Theater
• 20th century concert dance
• Modern dance
• List of dance style categories
• Dance
• Postmodernism

Further reading

• Banes, S (1987) Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819561606
• Banes, S (Ed) (1993) Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body. Duke University Press. ISBN 082231391X
• Banes, S (Ed) (2003) Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 029918014X
• Bremser, M. (Ed) (1999) Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Routledge. ISBN 0415103649
• Carter, A. (1998) The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. Routledge. ISBN 0415164478
• Copeland, R. (2004) Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. Routledge. ISBN 0415965756
• Reynolds, N. and McCormick, M. (2003) No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300093667