Modern and Postmodern Dance History

The history of modern and postmodern dance, from early twentieth-century revolts against ballet to the experimental practices of the Judson era and after.

Definition

The historical study of modern and postmodern concert dance and their successive challenges to balletic and theatrical convention.

Scope

This topic covers the rise of modern dance through pioneers who rejected ballet's formalism in favor of expressive, grounded movement; the consolidation of modern dance techniques mid-century; and the postmodern turn associated with the Judson Dance Theater, which questioned virtuosity, narrative, and the boundaries of dance itself. It extends to contemporary and conceptual practices.

Core questions

• Why did early modern dancers reject ballet, and what did they propose instead?
• What aesthetic and political stakes drove the postmodern dance experiments?
• How did the Judson Dance Theater redefine what counts as dance?

Key concepts

• expressionism
• release technique
• task-based movement
• pedestrian movement
• Judson Dance Theater

Key theories

Postmodern dance as analytic and democratic practice

The framing of 1960s-70s experimental dance as a movement that stripped away virtuosity, narrative, and spectacle to foreground everyday movement, task, and the materiality of the body.

History

Modern dance arose in the early twentieth century as dancers in Europe and the United States broke from ballet to develop expressive, individual idioms. By mid-century these had become codified techniques, prompting a postmodern reaction in the 1960s, centered on the Judson Dance Theater, that questioned the very definition of dance and opened onto contemporary experimentation.

Debates

Defining the boundary of postmodern dance

Scholars contest whether postmodern dance names a coherent aesthetic or simply a historical moment of experimentation, and how its democratic claims relate to its institutional setting.

Key figures

• Sally Banes
• Ramsay Burt
• Martha Graham
• Merce Cunningham
• Yvonne Rainer

Seminal works

• banes1987
• burt2006

Frequently asked questions

What was the Judson Dance Theater?

It was an informal collective of dancers, choreographers, and artists active in New York in the early 1960s whose experiments with everyday movement and task-based structures helped define postmodern dance.