In dance, as in other fields of artistic practice,
the narrative of a progressive modernism
exhausts itself or runs aground in the early
1960s. For dance historian Susan Manning it
was the Judson Dance Theater that signalled a
moment of crisis; Judson marked the end point
of a period of sustained formal experimentation
and also of the legitimating narratives that had
once supported American dance modernism
(Manning 1993: 23). In this period a number of
strategies directed towards dissolution of the
constitutive binaries (of form and content, art
and life) of modernist aesthetic ideology were
vigorously explored. The insertion of the
‘non-aesthetic’ in the form of ordinary
movement and untrained performers was one
such strategy. I am revisiting this period of
radical dance practice because I believe the
provocation it offers has not been exhausted.
Indeed the familiar dance historical ways of
telling the story of this period of dance
experimentation elides some of its most radical
implications for dance and choreographic
practice today.