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Poslmodern Dance Revisited Is Clark just a chronicler of the wild world he puts on stage, with its narcissistic glitter and its fascistic overtones, or is he a political critic? One British critic saw in Now Gods, one section ofa longer ballet called No Fire Escape in Hell, "a powerful hypnotic vision of the sort of violent society which seems just an election away." In the 1970s, avant-gardists saw the body as material for art and the performance as a moment both for rinsing movement of all the excess trappings oftheatricality that distracted from the dance itselfand for technical innovation. In the eighties - the age of the postrnodern spectacleArmitage and Clark lead the way for a new generation ofdancers to reinvest the body with sexual and emotional meanings, to reinstall the other arts in the theatre and to rediscover the wealth of dance history. 36 Terpsichore in Sneakers, High Heels, Jazz Shoes, and on Pointe: Postmodern Dance Revisited In dance, the term "postmodern" came into use in the early 1960s, when Yvonne Rainer and otheremerging choreographers used it to differentiate their work from that of the preceding generation - modern dance. By the midseventies, it had become a critical term to label a movement. Now, in the late 1980s, when the term has been theorized not only in the arts, but in cultural criticism generally, "postrnodern" has come to mean something quite different for dance - though clearly our current usage is an evolution from those original ruptures with the dance academy in the sixties. For we in the late twentieth century are everywhere enmeshed in "the postrnodern condition."l In one sense, everything about our current first-world, post-industrial, mass-media culture is postmodern. But postmodernism , it should be remembered, has had specific, though disparate, Dance 89 (Munich, 1989). 301 302 Postmodern Dance meanings in the various spheres of culture, meanings that are tied to the particular history and practice of each discipline. Charles Jencks, the architect and critic, popularized the term (which was first advanced in the 1930s, and then entered literary-critical discourse in the early 1960s) for his own field, beginning in 1975. In his recent book What is Post-Modernism?, Jencks reiterates his definition: that postmodern architecture involves "double coding," in two senses. Deliberately hybrid, it appeals to two separate audiences; it both continues and transcends modernism by mixing it with classicism - combining old and new styles, materials, and techniques - in order to engage both the general public and the experts. For Jencks, this eclecticism has a moral and political, as well as aesthetic mission. It is entertaining, decorative, and symbolic, reanchoring architecture in the public service; at the same time, its playfulness is professionally informed, reinstalling the art in the depth and breadth of its historical tradition. But Jencks is adamant about protecting his category from what he considers easy elisions with postindustrial culture generally.2 Jencks disputes the definitions given by such critics as Hassan and Krauss, which ally postmodernism with experimentation, radical discontinuity , and deconstruction. For these critics, Jencks argues, any break with high modernism is labeled postmodern. But in his view, because such artists as John Cage, William Burroughs, and Robert Morris still work in a singly coded, hermetic avant-garde tradition - without the symbolism , ornament, and- pluralism that characterize postmodern architecture - they should be categorized as late-modernist, not postmodernist . In literature, John Barth and Umberto Eco, among others, have used the term postmodern to refer to the ironic use of traditional forms, again doubly coded, in that postmodern literature will be enjoyable to broader audiences (say, than Beckett's), yet will still intrigue the literary expert. Fredric Jameson has theorized postmodernism as pastiche, signaling cultural schizophrenia. Charles Newman sees it as an expression of inflationary culture. In the practice and criticism ofthe visual arts, the term refers to appropriation from mass culture, the "death of the subject," a Lyotardian "loss of master narratives." In theater, postmodern has been used to mean the death of character.3 But this jumble of meanings should not paralyze us in looking at dance history. Jencks disagrees with the way the term is used in literature and the visual arts because his definers for architecture are not necessarily applicable across the arts. Since modernism dictated that each art specialize in its own unique essence, it is not surprising that postmodernism has taken different directions in each art. And yet a fundamental part of postmodernism - or postmodernity- is th~ antimodernist, interdisciplinary mingling of these previously...

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