us experimental dance outside new york city in the 1970s—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. So too, close attention to experimental dance theater also provides fresh insights into the historical moment of the 1970s, 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 in the 1970s; 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 abstraction to an interest in identity. This ran alongside the emergence of “identity politics” as a whole in the 1970s. Experimental dance, however, endowed the turn to identity with a concrete, material, and embodied intensity and robustness. Later, spontaneity would give way to more rigid, essentialized forms of identity both in dance and politics, but in the uncertain moment of improvised identities in the 1970s, locations beyond New York City manifested a diverse range of possibilities—not only for dance, but also for broader cultural and political life. These are well worth revisiting and reconsidering today.
Preliminary Table of Contents
- Introduction: Identifying Improvisations
- Ceremony: Anna Halprin’s San Francisco Dance Workshop and the Watts Studio Dancers Workshop
- Untapped: Bella Lewitzky, the Inner City Cultural Center, and the Mafundi Institute in Los Angeles
- Gravity: Steve Paxton in Vermont
- Contact: Oberlin College and Extensions of Contact Improvisation
- Links: The 1970s Chicago Dance Scene
- Asylum: Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, and Lois Welk in Western New York
- Epilogue: Improvising Identities