The post-modern movement as a whole is a rather confusing one. Like many other large, encompassing art movements (the Post-Impressionist movement comes to mind), there are different sects and groups and new techniques and ideas become popular throughout the years. However, there are some characteristics that hold them together. The term post-modern dance was created by Michael Kirby, who defined it as a dance where “movement is not preselected for its characteristics but results from certain decisions, goals, plans, schemes…” (Banes xiv). Essentially, post-modern dance is functional; rather than using mood, music and characterization, it uses things like costume, lighting and in functional ways. (2). The idea was for the dancers to showcase the crux of what dance was- expression and emotions. They wanted the audience to really see the very movements and create a story behind them. There were many performances where the dance was simply eating onstage, or performing daily actions during a precise time-constraint. This brought about the new idea that dance is not dance because of the story told, but because it was shown and called a dance. In addition, post-modern dance was spontaneous. It had a freedom that modern dance and ballet didn’t; the dancers “…relinquish technical polish, literally to let go of bodily constraints and inhibitions, to act freely…” (xxvii).
Steve Paxton, a member of the Judson Dance Theater was a choreographer of the post-modern movement. Paxton was fascinated with the idea of the human body and its functionality and explored it in many different pieces. He was part of a growing number of people who believed the human body was the very center of the art that is dance, rather than being the carrier, or facilitator. Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation was a very radical idea, but function into the very conceptions we place on post-modern dance. Paxton had his students be trained in the human body; they learnt was movement and how to move separately and with others. They learnt how to hold their weight and shift it throughout their body and to stop thinking and for a lack of a better term, “go with the flow”. Steve Paxton’s CI is the epitome of spontaneity – the dancers have no idea what they’re going to be doing even seconds before it happens. The result of what he has is something very smooth, sensual and organic. It does not rely on the costumes or the backdrop or the music to make a complete piece the audience can enjoy- his work stands on its own.
Malavika Attur (Blog B)
At the heart of Analytic Post-Modern dance is, as Malavika mentioned in her blog post, functionality. There is a heightened sense of objectivity in movement, underscored by a separation between the dancer’s actions and his/her personal expression. Analytic Post-Modern dance does away with traditional uses of music, mood lighting, costumes, and props, all of which are thought to obscure the basic simplicity of movement, in favor of structural devices that reveal the purity of the dance and call close “attention to the workings of the body in an almost scientific way” (Banes xxi). Therefore each step or gesture becomes more significant than the overall effect of a phrase; each step or gesture becomes a study in motion, introducing “the possibility…that the underlying form will be bared” (16).
This reduction of dance to its basest elements is among the most powerful of goals in the Analytic Post-Modern movement. Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation, as discussed by Malavika above, demonstrates these core ideas of deriving pleasure and understanding of form from seeing the nakedness of movement. So too does the work of choreographer Trisha Brown. In “Glacial Decoy”, she invites the spectator to appreciate the work through “examining the seams” (16). There is no fluff in her piece, no fanciful lighting or overbearing musical accompaniment. There is only the most basic of lighting/set (gray and white hues and images) and of costumes (translucent, white gowns that seem to accentuate the dancers’ bodies rather than attempt to mask them.) And there is almost complete silence. The audience hears only the whisper-quiet sound of bodily motion, of a foot hitting the ground, of a flutter in dress fabric, of a breath and a sigh as the dancers dance across the stage.
In this bareness, this abstention from traditional notions of aestheticism and performance, Trisha Brown shows us the seams of her piece in all their untampered glory. We observe transitional moments, the sometimes abrupt juxtaposition of organic, flowing movement with the harsher, mechanical rigidness of movement which Brown calls the “stabilizing factor” of the dance. The dancers are vulnerable to awkwardness and to the fact that any and all mistakes will be visible by everyone in the audience. The spectator has nothing else to look at or be distracted by but these dancers and their movements.
Yet this is the beauty of Analytic Post-Modern dance. There is no showiness or musical bravura to cover up what is being witnessed on stage. These movements across the stage are about as true to human nature as walking or running. There is value and merit in Paxton, Brown, and other post-modern choreographers’ ability to bring the dancers down from a performer’s pedestal. The dancers appear less as deliberately-crafted, dissociated figures moving across a decorated stage and more as humans exercising motions that the spectator can relate to because they are simple and pure. Perhaps it is ironic then when Banes writes that Analytic Post-Modern dance is created “for the pleasure of the dancer, whether or not the spectator finds it pleasing, or even accessible” (16). The accessibility of this type of dance should be far-reaching, if only for the fact that it allows each spectator to view a piece of him/herself atop that sparse and revealing stage.