Postmodern dance has come a long way from its makeshift beginnings at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village in the early Sixties. After a detour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it has recently installed itself at City Center, erstwhile home to New York City Ballet. So much a part of the mainstream cultural scene has postmodern dance become that this year’s fall dance season was opened there in September by the Trisha Brown Company, complete with post-performance black-tie “champagne reception and buffet” at the postmodern Equitable Tower.
It’s not so much that audiences have become more catholic in their tastes as that the dance itself has become more accessible. Postmodern dance began as a rebellion against both ballet and the traditional modern dance: hence its cognomen. It rejected such expressive resources of the theatrical dance as music, decor, and virtuosity; indeed, for a time it appeared to be rejecting dance itself. The Eighties have witnessed a resurgence of interest in theatricality among avant-garde choreographers—what Sally Banes, in her new introduction to the reissue of Terpsichore in Sneakers, the bible of postmodern dance, calls “the rebirth of content.” So opposed are many of these tendencies to the “analytic mode” of the Seventies that Banes suggests the postmodern dance of the Eighties might more accurately be called “post-modernist.”
Trisha Brown, an original member of the Judson Dance Theatre, proved a harbinger of this new theatricality in
