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No More Ordinary Bodies deaden things. Instead, we try to breathe together, to feel where everyone else is in the phrase. I like feeling connected to the other dancers when I'm performing. And, as a spectator, I like watching people who are watching people. It's so much more interesting than watching people who are just dancing for an audience." 32 No More Ordinary Bodies The line between play, games, and sports, on the one hand, and dance, on the other, is not always a clear-cut one. For one thing, key to many children's games is a dance element, movement sequences savored for all sorts of qualities, from vertiginous pleasure, to the development of muscular or hand-eye coordination, to social glue. But even in theatrical dancing there is a sense of a tenuous border between the two realms. In times when ballet has become overly virtuosic, critics have complained of performances that have "degenerated" into gymnastics, while to see the dancerly qualities in a gymnast's routine is to praise it. And yet it would be hard to say what, beyond context, distinguishes the one from the other. When a baseball team plays the game sans ball, has the performance become a dance? When we decide to pay attention to the movement ofthe players even as they use the ball, have we turned the game into a piece of choreography? These kinds of questions vexed the first generation of postmodern dancers in the 1960s, as did questions about the blurry boundaries between dance and other arenas: not only specialized nondance movement forms like sports, but also ordinary, pedestrian actions, and ofcourse the other art forms. The problems of defining dance in distinction from other events provided these choreographers with important structures and materials in regard to play, games, and sports. I think ofSimone Forti's Huddle, Rollers, and other pieces using children's playas source; Yvonne Rainer's followthe -leader format for the pivotal Room Service, one of several dances in a Village Voice, April 23, 1985. 277 278 Poslmodern Dance Judson Dance Theater collaboration with the sculptor Charles Ross that used a jungle-gym-like structure, springs, platforms, and other equipment. I think of Trisha Brown's rule games, Steve Paxton's use of iconic baseball postures, Judith Dunn's references to wrestling, and the more general playful attitude in such strategies (used, not only by the dancers at the time, but also by musicians, filmmakers, poets, happenings-makers, visual artists, and theater people) as improvisation and spontaneous determination. Play, games, and sports were fascinating to this generation for other reasons than those of definition. These activities, though specialized in their own ways, were easily accessible and had a more democratic feeling than the modem dance or ballet of the time. You may have to know the rules governing the game in order to play it, but you don't have to go through years of rigorous training or become an acolyte in a cult of personality. It was the democratic commitment of the early postmodern choreographers that led them to use children's games and quintessentially American sports like baseball; you didn't see dances based on Olympic events. But also, the view of the body and of behavior in the sixties had something to do with it. In dance, the ordinary body executing its mundane tasks and functions suddenly emerged as something surprisingly extraordinary , something amazingly graced. To perform a task, in the theory ofsuch choreographers as Forti, Rainer, and Robert Morris, was a way ofpresenting the intelligently engaged body modestly stripped of the alluring gaze so typical of theatrical performance. Game structures, like the chance techniques ofMerce Cunningham and John Cage, served as more strategies for depersonalizing performance; play activity served as a kind of t

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