What’s in a definition? As far as theatre dance is concerned, quite a lot. Labelling — and often labelling for the mere sake of it — is integral to our dance culture. Take, for instance, the various A-level dance syllabuses, the curricula of most dance-studies departments and, most of all, those dance-history manuals that slavishly perpetuate simplistically formulated principles and equations. Any of those will provide you with a neat definition of postmodern dance, stating that it started in the early Sixties, when some US-based artists decided to fight convention by stripping dance of its most traditional characteristics.
What most of these sources don’t tell you, though, is that there’s also European postmodern dance. This also took to task convention and tradition, but, instead of removing any surplus, it went for an overwhelming game of rich and varied visual narratives that relied on props, sets, lighting, projections, and more.
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