Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance movement that came into popularity in the early 1960s. While the term postmodern took on a different meaning when used to describe dance, the dance form did take inspiration from the ideologies of the wider postmodern movement, which "sought to deflate what it saw as overly pretentious and ultimately self-serving modernist views of art and the artist" and was, more generally, a departure from modernist ideals. Lacking stylistic homogeny, postmodern dance was discerned mainly by its anti-modern dance sentiments rather than by its dance style. The dance form was a reaction to the compositional and presentational constraints of the preceding generation of modern dance, hailing the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocating for unconventional methods of dance composition.
Postmodern dance made the claim that all movement was dance expression and any person was a dancer regardless of training. In this, early postmodern dance was more closely aligned with the ideologies of modernism rather than the architectural, literary and design movements of postmodernism. However, the postmodern dance movement rapidly developed to embrace the ideas of postmodernism, which rely on chance, self-referentiality, irony, and fragmentation. Judson Dance Theater, the postmodernist collective active in New York in the 1960s, is credited as a pioneer of postmodern dance and its ideas.
The peak popularity of Postmodern dance as a performance art was relatively short, lasting from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, but due to the changing definitions of postmodernism, it technically reaches the mid-1990s and beyond. The form's influence can be seen in various other dance forms, especially contemporary dance, and in postmodern choreographic processes that are utilized by choreographers in a wide range of dance works.
Influences
Postmodern dance can be understood as a continuation in dance history: stemming from early modernist choreographers like Isadora Duncan, who rejected the rigidity of an academic approach to movement, and modernists like Martha Graham, whose emotion-filled choreography sought to exploit gravity, unlike the illusionistic floating of ballet.
Merce Cunningham, who studied under Graham, was one of the first choreographers to take major departures from the then-formalized modern dance in the 1950s. Among his innovations was the severance of the connection between music and dance, leaving the two to operate by their own logic. He also removed dance performance from the proscenium stage. To Cunningham, dance could be anything, but its foundation was in the human body— specifically beginning with walking. He also incorporated chance into his work, using methods like tossing dice or coins at random to determine movements in a phrase. These innovations would become essential to the ideas in postmodern dance, however, Cunningham's work remained grounded in the tradition of dance technique, which would later be eschewed by the postmodernist. This means that the chance methods, which could be the toss of a coin, determine the movements rather than the choreographer. Dance by chance was not a distinctly postmodern method – it was first used by modern dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. to describe the form during the 70s. It was more conceptual, abstract, and distanced itself from expressive elements such as music, lighting, costumes, and props. In this way, analytical postmodern dance aligned more with modernist criteria as defined by art critic Clement Greenberg.
Analytical postmodern dance was also heavily influenced by the political activism taking place in the U.S. during the late 60s and early 70s. The Black Power movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the second-wave feminist movement, and the LGBTQ movement all became more explicitly explored in analytical postmodern dance. In using the chance technique, it was not uncommon for dancers in a postmodern piece to hear the music they were dancing to for the first time during the premiere performance.
Postmodern choreographers also often utilized an objectivism similar to literary theorist Roland Barthes' idea of "death of the author." Narratives were rarely conveyed in postmodern dance, with the choreographer more focused on "creating an objective presence."