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.
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.
Read more about Postmodern Dance: Influence, Process, Founders
Famous quotes containing the words postmodern and/or dance:
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the rumba, or the cha cha, to rock and roll and to twist and even to dance the waltz and foxtrot. But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of the gombe sugu, the mangala, nyang’umumi, kiduo, or lele mama?”
—Julius K. Nyerere (b. 1922)