The Influence Of Postmodern Dance - Essay

Postmodernism was a late 20th century movement that opposed the Modernist preoccupation with purity of form and technique, and aimed to eradicate the divisions between art, popular culture, and the media. Postmodern artists employed influences from an array of past movements, applying them to modern forms. Postmodernists embraced diversity and rejected the distinction between “high” and “low” art. Ignoring genre boundaries, the movement encourages the mix of ideas, medias, and forms to promote parody, humor, and irony.

-started 1960s in a church

-the word postmodern after modern techniques Graham n Isadora

-influced by Cunningham n cage

-timely, moving on today

Where Modernists tended to believe in the future and reject the past, Postmodernists are more pessimistic and do not see the world necessarily improving in the future.

1960-1970s even though it was short time

Postmodernist music includes Philip Glass’s minimalist works and John Cage’s collaborative performances in which he involved the audience.

genres like ballet and modernism and develop new styles. The most famous of these pioneers was probably Anna Halprin, who based her choreography on real experiences, not classical works. Her group, the Dancers Workshop, usually avoided traditional technique and often performed outdoors instead of on a conventional stage. Another modern dance pioneer, Robert Dunn, believed that the process of art was more significant than the end product. Merce Cunningham experimented with the relationship between dance and music and created choreography that was unrelated to the music it was accompanied by.

What Followed Postmodernism?

Postmodern dance was a relatively short-lived movement, but it was a stepping stone to other artistic endeavors. Performance art, a movement featuring theatrical events realized through loosely structured combinations of events, grew out of the collaboration between dance and other art forms. Dancers like Twyla Tharp put their own stamp on postmodern theory and began a return to more structured choreography, making way for the contemporary dance genre of today.

Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance form. A reaction to the compositional and presentation constraints of modern dance, postmodern dance hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocated novel methods of dance composition.

Claiming that any movement was dance, and any person was a dancer (with or without training) early postmodern dance was more closely aligned with ideology of modernism rather than the architectural, literary and design movements of postmodernism. However, the postmodern dance movement rapidly developed to embrace the ideology of postmodernism which was reflected in the wide variety of dance works emerging from Judson Dance Theater, the home of postmodern dance.[citation needed]

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Lasting from the 1960s to the 1970s the main thrust of Postmodern dance was relatively short lived but its legacy lives on in contemporary dance (a blend of modernism and postmodernism) and the rise of postmodernist choreographic processes that have produced a wide range of dance works in varying styles.

Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern. The traits associated with the use of the term postmodern in art include bricolage, use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, depiction of consumer or popular culture and Performance art.