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real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of
the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been
and always will be the same."
In
The ltOrld's Illusion,
Jacob Wasserman tells us that "to dance
means to be new, to be fresh at every moment, as though one had
just issued from the hands of God." We may be tempted to dismiss
this sort of talk as mere poetic fancy; but in a very real and practical
sense, dance
is
an art without a history. Only a handful of works cho–
reographed prior to the twentieth century survive today. This la–
mentable state of affairs can of course be attributed in large part to
the absence of
an
adequate notational system prior to this century.
But one of the reasons that notation has developed so much more
slowly for dance than, say, for music is that the choreographers and
performers themselves have often been opposed to preservation.
Isadora Duncan steadfastly refused to permit her dances to be
filmed, preferring to confine their existence to the fleeting moment
in which they were performed. And Martha Graham has been noto–
riously protective of the roles she created, often refusing to "hand
them down" to capable successors, and thereby affirming both the
ephemerality of the dance and the (apparently) inseparable bond
between "the dancer and the dance."
Andre Levinson once said of Isadora Duncan, "She was the
product of a race that had no past."
If
dancing is indeed the least
"historical" of the arts, then it makes perfect sense that it should
flourish-as it does-in the least historical of countries, the United
States. Afflicted with what sometimes appears to be a permanent
loss of memory, Americans are among the world's most avid dance–
goers.
Despite the tenacious persistence of these ideas in the dance
world-perhaps
because
of it-the most progressive choreography of
the past three decades (the work of Merce Cunningham and his
younger, "postmodern" successors) has attempted to purge itself of
primitivist ideas and practices. In fact, the repudiation of primitiv–
ism constitutes a virtual definition of postmodern dance . The work
of choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, David
Gordon, Kenneth King, Lucinda Childs, and the early Twyla Tharp
shares a number of common characteristics: a "pedestrian," unstyl–
ized movement vocabulary; an indifference-if not an outright hos–
tility-toward technique and virtuosity; an unwillingness to conceal
