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290 Poslmodern Dance century lady ofthe French court who explained, "J'aime les jeux innocents avec ceux qui ne Ie sont pas," and Ralph Manheim translated the title ofthe Brothers Grimm as Grimms' Tales for Young and Old, explaining that not until the tales reached England did they become rationalized, sanitized, and "gift-wrapped" for children17 - in our day they have come to be almost entirely relegated to children's culture. Thus the fascination they hold for the current avant-garde can be seen as part of a larger fascination with childhood associations of all kinds (as in the "toy-puppet" performances of Stuart Sherman and Paul Zaloom, the relay races and early reminiscences of Johanna Boyce's dances, Jim Self and Frank Moore's cartoonlike cinedance Beehive, and even the fifties "rec-room" atmosphere of Lower East Side performance clubs). This tendency seems to be a dialectical response to a mainstream cultural obsession with childhood, not surprising in an era of the most recent American baby boom. The postmodern fairytale ballet places itselfin a position ofresistance, as I have suggested, to that uncritical mainstream celebration of children and childhood. In 1984, Noel Carroll remarked that the new dance images of play and childlike "fun" seemed to assert themselves as antidotes to the austere minimalism of the seventies, contributing to a more general return of expression in postmodern dance that signaled a yearning for rejuvenation.IS The genre ofthe postmodern dance fairytale that has emerged in the mideighties conjoins that infantile, polymorphous pleasure, focused on the body, with the very adult pleasure of analysis, focused on the text.19 34 Pointe of Departure Ifthe 1960s prized speaking directly, the eighties is an age of irony. Quotation marks surround everything; originality becomes a matter of quoting differently, ofwearing tuxedoes and tennis shoes. Call it pastiche. It is the aesthetic ofpostmodernism. An about-face from modernism's "tradition of the new," it at the same time represents an extension of the collage techniques beloved ofthe modernist avant-garde. No less than in the other arts, this nostalgic eclecticism has swept through the contemporary dance Boston Review (October 1986). Point. of Departure scene. And nowhere has it more strangely- or more revealinglyexpressed itself than in the current invasion of avant-garde choreographers into that bastion of choreographic conservatism, the ballet stage. At the Metropolitan Opera House last spring, American Ballet Theater audiences viewed Mikhail Baryshnikov as quick-change artist portraying a series of character types from Dr. JekylllMr. Hyde, to a Pavlova-as-Camille ballerina dying of a cough, to Mata Hari's accomplice, to Smith the butler in a murder case where everyone's surname is Smith. This was David Gordon's Murder (with music by Berlioz and sets by Edward Gorey), a work that combined a balletic vocabulary and opera-house scale with the typical Gordonian choreographic devices his loft audiences have come to know: spoken texts; a narrative structure that shifts meaning and coils around itself to end, with a surprise, at the beginning; a patterned, almost obsessively repetitive way of manipulating objects and dancers with the same comfortable casualness; transitions effected not by logical causation but by "moving furniture" to literally create a new space (here taken to ceremonial extremes in a recurring funeral procession); quotations of Gordon's own choreography as well as loving allusions to film and ballet classics. A heretofore fiercely independent experimental choreographer, Gordon designed the movement for the Philip Glass opera The Photographer at the Next Wave Festival ofthe Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 1983. This is Gordon's second ballet for the American Ballet Theater (ABT), which in 1985 premiered his Field, Chair and Mountain, and his third ballet on the Metropolitan Opera stage, where Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1985 performed his Piano Movers. Those same ABT spectators last spring saw quite a different avantgarde ballet in Karole Armitage's The Mollino Room, with decor by David Salle, music by Paul Hindemith, and dialogue by Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The tone of the ballet is an oblique tribute to the twentieth-century Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino, who championed kitsch and prefigured (the press release informs us) "the current thesis of banal design ." Yet despite the dancers' awful fifties clothing and the monstrous everyday objects painted on Salle's drop curtains, The Mollino Room is anything but banal. Armitage's first important work, choreographed for modern dancers and set to punk/new wave music by Rhys Chatham, was Drastic...

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