american experimental dance outside new york city after the 1960s—book manuscript in progress.
Experimental forms of dance theater expanded dramatically in the United States in the aftermath of the 1960s. This expansion occurred not only in New York City, always a center of avant-garde culture in the US, but also in many other locations that have been far less studied. Buoyed by robust funding for the arts and charged with the social upheaval of the previous decade, experimental dance theater thrived far beyond the Big Apple. The supposed hinterlands turned out to be centers of exciting breakthrough and innovation. Choreographers and dance makers were sometimes in dialogue with New York City, or perhaps with trends in Europe and Africa and Latin America, but just as often dance in other locations took on their own particular histories and orientations.
What the dance scholar Sally Banes called the “post-modern” turn of dance toward a style of “Terpsichore in sneakers” included people, scenes, and networks of dance that have only begun to be studied and assessed. Examining their stories helps us better understand what happened to contemporary or “post-modern” concert dance in the 1970s and after. So too, close attention to experimental dance theater also provides fresh insights into the aftermath of the 1960s, when new concepts of self, community, region, nation, and civic belonging appeared during a moment of economic and political crisis in the US itself and in the larger world.
This book does not offer a comprehensive or encyclopedic approach to experimental dance theater outside New York City after the 1960s; instead, it uses case studies to set the stage for further inquiry. Locales such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vermont, Ohio, Chicago, and Western New York offer distinctive stories, but they share a breaking free of balletic and social constraints alike. New forms of spontaneity that had first exploded onto the scene in the 1960s now began to pivot from a focus on abstraction to an interest in identity. This ran alongside the emergence of “identity politics” in the broader culture and politics of the time. Because of their artistic focus on embodiments of self and group, dancers and choreographers offer us a particularly robust arena for exploring the stakes of identity politics coming out of the 1960s. In movement, we can glimpse the shifts, leaps, turns, and transitions of 1960s social movements as the decades advanced forward.
Preliminary Table of Contents
- Introduction: Identifying Improvisations
- Ceremony: Anna Halprin’s San Francisco Dance Workshop and the Watts Studio Dancers Workshop at the Start of the 1970s
- Untapped: Bella Lewitzky, the Inner City Cultural Center, and the Mafundi Institute in Los Angeles
- Gravity: Steve Paxton and Contact Improvisation in Vermont
- Contact: Oberlin College and Extensions of Contact Improvisation
- Links: The Chicago Dance Scene After the 1960s
- Asylum: Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, and Lois Welk in Western New York
- Epilogue: Improvising Identities