Post-modern dance

"Post-modern" must be the hardest term to define in the world of dance. The notion of "modern dance" was already unpopular enough, and Martha Graham, for instance, never accepted it as a description of her art. But at least we knew what it meant - a form of stage dancing that was created in the early twentieth century and broke with the rules of classical ballet.

Very few people have any idea what the term "post-modern dance", which made its appearance in American dance literature in the late 1970s, actually means. To my mind, the best definition of it was given by the choreographer Alvin Ailey some years ago at a press conference. "Post-modern dance?" he said. "Easy. It means dance after Merce Cunningham." This seems to denote no more than a time frontier, but in fact the term describes the position of not just one but several generations of choreographers in relation to the American dance genius of the second half of the century. They have either taken up the torch handed on by Cunningham or rebelled against his style and aesthetic.

For America this makes sense but probably not for Europe. It is true that Cunningham has been extremely influential in France since the 1960s and has inspired many young choreographers. But in France and almost everywhere else in Europe, in the last fifteen years at least, the influence of the German choreographer Pina Bausch has been stronger than Cunningham's.

Many new forms and trends

Of course, Pina Bausch herself is not free from foreign influences. She was trained in Essen and at the Julliard School of Music in New York. However, there is more to post-modernism than the "dance theatre" which she created in the 1970s and which became a style model all over the world.

The fact is that contemporary dance has no stylistic and aesthetic unity; it is a highly complex edifice with many rooms, all furnished differently. It cannot be limited to post-modern American dance, which encompasses the pale neo-classicism of Karole Armitage as well as the early minimalist exercises of Trisha Brown, or to European dance theatre, whose variants in Germany and France, Belgium and Spain differ widely from one another.

There are many other trends in contemporary dance as well as these two major currents. A list of them would include Japanese Buto (see article page 27), and choreographers such as Saburo Teshigawara who have tried to go further than Buto; the first, occasionally timid, but highly fertile and determined excursions of non-Western cultures into modern dance, e.g. the alchemy with which Lin Hwai-min in Taiwan has fused the Chinese tradition and Western dance techniques; the demythification of Indian dance by Chandralekha in Madras; the revolutionary blend of Indian Bharata Natyam dance and Western music created by Shobana Jeyasingh in London; African dance as performed by Irene Tassembedo and her Ebene group from Burkina Faso; and the opening of traditional dance forms of Australian Aborigines to contemporary themes by the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre and the Bangara Group in Sydney.

Dancing on turf, earth and water

This variety of contemporary dance, which is not even remotely covered by the label of post-modernism, is such that it is hard to predict how dance will develop. At the same time it gives grounds for hope that when one form or another runs out of steam the development of dance will not come to a standstill.

Whatever happens, however, the freedoms won by the two dominant figures of recent decades, Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, are sustainable acquisitions that will shape the future of dance. In Cunningham's case they include the abolition of the one-dimensional perspective and its replacement by an open, spatial view which corresponds in a sense to the world-view of modern physics. Bausch has raised the possibility of turning every human movement, however banal or routine (including the spoken word and singing) into choreography and of abandoning the classic dance stage in favour of more natural surfaces such as turf, earth and even water.

In future, there will be more and more dance pieces that will not be designed for the traditional theatre stage but for theatre in the round; more and more pieces in which the dancers speak and sing when movement alone is not enough to explain their action; more and more pieces that are not dedicated to a single dance code (such as the Martha Graham style or the Jose Limon technique); and many others in which mastery of conventional dance movements will not even be essential. It does not interest us here whether aquatic ballets in swimming pools and aerial ballets in which the dancers climb up and abseil down walls are an aesthetic fad or represent genuine artistic progress. The fact is that they exist and are likely to become more widespread in the future.

A list of the ways in which modern Western dance has fused with non-European dance forms may give the impression that Western style is increasingly influencing dance in non-Western cultures via a modern form of cultural colonialism. That impression is not totally incorrect, but in dance aesthetic influence is not a one-way street. Dance styles from outside Europe are increasingly gaining ground in the West. African and Asian dance forms are being transplanted to the West by migrants from those continents to their new homes in the West, and today a European or an American who wants to see authentic African or Asian dance does not necessarily have to travel to Africa or fly to Asia. Cities like New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris have much to offer in these fields.

More and more Western dancers are beginning to study non-European dances as well as or instead of Western techniques, and their studies are naturally having an impact on their work. Today, many Western groups have assimilated Japanese Buto, and it is not necessary to have been born in Madras or Jaipur to master the subtleties of Bharata Natyam or Kathak. Influences of this sort can only enrich dance. The multicultural society of the kind which is developing in the capitals and big cities of many Western countries will also develop its own special dance profile and its contours will no longer be purely Western, something from which everyone will benefit.

However, the influence of classical ballet cannot be disregarded. Since modern dance and ballet buried the hatchet (in Episodes, staged jointly by Martha Graham and George Balanchine in New York in 1959), the two great Western concepts of dance have moved closer together. The spectator who sees choreography by the Swede Mats Ek, the Czech Jiri Kylian, the American William Forsythe, or the Dutchman Hans van Manen, will often not know whether it is an example of ballet or the new form of dance. In any case, it does not really matter into which particular compartment the critics try to place Jiri Kylian's solo Double You or Ek's duo-ballet Grasse. Through their sheer quality such pieces influence the neighbouring field of free dance.

One thing is perfectly clear. In dance as in pictorial art, the tendency to put less and less substance into the frame has gone. Minimalism has had its day. It was probably necessary in order to chart the extreme limits of what could still just be described as dance. The trend today - in Japan and America, Germany and France - is back to more movement - all kinds of movement in all kinds of surroundings. Dancers will have to dance and not stand still or sit motionless if we are to accept their performance as dance.

JOCHEN SCHMIDT, German writer and journalist, is artistic director of the International Dance Festival of North Rhineland-Westphalia. He is the author of Tanztheater in Deutschland ("Dance Theatre in Germany", 1992) and has made a documentary film on Pina Bausch.

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