Post-Modern Dance in Britain

To address the story of post-modern dance in Britain is to open up a can of peculiarly slippery critical worms. The subject naturally begs the question of what post-modernism is - as opposed to modern, modernist and so on - and it also demands a special application of that term to dance, the history of which tends to be out of synch with the chronology and -isms of the other arts. But it begs further discussion, too, of how post-modern dance has emerged in this country, where it has always been somewhat confusingly associated with the movement 'new dance', but not wholly identified with it. In his essay, 'Postmodernism in Dance: Dance, Discourse and Democracy',1 David Michael Levin makes a long and involved case for the criteria by which he thinks we should distinguish postmodernism from the rest of 20th-century experimental art. Like most self-confident formulations, these itch to be knocked down; but they are especially useful for having been worked out specifically in relation to dance. Levin dismisses the usual chronological distinction made between the terms modernist and postmodern - that the former covers all the avant garde movements from cubism through to surrealism, while the latter takes off somewhere in the 1950s and 1960s - arguing that it blurs important points of difference and development. To clear up vagaries in the usage of 'modernism' he begins by adopting the term avant garde to cover any work that was 'created in revolt against tradition', that 'had something new to say', and that 'looked for a new language' with which to say it - his candidates for avant garde dance artists are the obvious ones, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, and Martha Graham. He then argues that the term modernist should apply strictly to works which call into question their methods of representing the world, and which refer in some way to their own history, their own conventions and modes of construction. Under this label come the

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