No to Homogenized Dancing

NO TO HOMOGENIZED DANCING John Howell and a visitor to New York City at any time is apt to feel that the place is in process of being improvised. Structures run up, abandoned, left behind in a night; graffiti, sound and light shows, iridescences; neon; footnotes to history; registrations of the current, persistences in the memory, in tacit defiance of paperback transcience: so the domain of the 1970's Muse." - Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World Near the decade's end, the re-shaping of dance which began in the early sixties continues to unfold in surprising turns. Since the primer lessons of Merce Cunningham's compositional freedom and the Judson Dance Theatre's open definition of dance movement, an entire generation has approached dance as a code, not a given heritage. Styles and rules are elected, and if found lacking or used up, can be changed. The principal resource is the resourceful self; theory serves the particular job at hand ("I don't have ideas, exactly," says Cunningham, meaning Ideas). It's a personalized pragmatism based on another Americanbrand theme: authenticity. Mirroring a national mantra of "just the facts," movement stems from a notion of kinetic realism, the immediacies of action laid out in bold contexts. Those elements perceived as standing between the fact of the body and its motion-myths, plots, characters-show up only as cameos or caricatures. So goes an abbreviated canon of dance in the seventies. 3 None of this need imply simplicities. Philosophies of the "useful" and the "real" loom as unruly as any other categories of thought. And out of these heady legacies have been culled possibilities so various that we recognize fully developed genres: theater-dance, dance cum media, so on. This article is not a survey of every "downtown" trend, but takes for a subject that dance which employs clothing instead of costumes, efficient lighting, little or no music, few if any props. The modest trappings stem from sixties polemics, when they carried a heretical charge, but now function as status quo: the lack of distraction is rhetorical. Further, as the body's movement and its patterning alone must fix the attention, the topic calls for a considerable if allowably idiosyncratic technique. It will not do to over-indulge the formula; much work that fits the description remains only experimental, affecting no terms but its own. From such a sketchy imperative, however, a few artists have conjured distinctive dance which alters, again, what seems vital to the form. One salient feature of this dance is a tendency to show a thing being done, not a thing made. Cunningham's 16 Dances (1951) exhibited a solo of chance-determined parts, suggesting an excision of convenient number, nothing more, from a limitless, ongoing source. In Sara Rudner 's 33 Dances (1977), the selection also looks arbitrary. Any structural resonances are ignored to present, simply, that many short dances; counting them is unimportant. Unlike Cunningham, who exposed his transitions to highlight his assemblage, she tightly joins the set sections of an hour-long solo. Rudner developed a vocabulary with Twyla Tharp-she was the Tharp dancer for eight years-notable for its accented fluidity: rapid tempos, quick speedups and slowdowns within a framework of non-stop slippery rhythmic phrasing. Sans pop music and theatrical details, that style becomes virtuoso fluency, locating validity in the moving. Rudner's carefully plotted segues do hold 33 Dances together as something more luscious than a random anthology; still, the net effect is of dancing rather than A Dance. As Is (1977) takes off from the notion of serial dances, beginning with a core of several sections (performed by all four dancers in unison), then elaborating the different motifs in a series of solos and duets, trios and quartets. The phrases also proceed by theme and variation ; they accumulate, repeat and reverse, change tempo, fragment, expand. Hardly didactic, the studies cross-reference themselves to unify a vast range of movement spread over a three hour period. A windmilling arm gesture acquires, later, a jump rope, which it swings in identical waving. A combination of fast foot stamps and abrupt turns with hands clasped front and back recurs as a kind...