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280 33 Hoppily Ever After? The Postmodern Foirytole ond the New Donce Now I am going to tell you the story of the postmodern fairytale in the new dance, which is really four separate stories. All four of these stories - the history of recent postmodern dance; the history of theatrical dance since the nineteenth century; the history ofthe folktale and ofrecent folktale scholarship; and the intellectual history of modernism and postmodernism-converge in this new genre. Space will not, of course, allow me to unfold these stories in full. However, as I weave together strands from each story, the reader should keep in mind that the postmodern fairytale in the new dance can only be understood as located, not in a single context, but in several separate though overlapping contexts, and that this particular new genre of postmodernism in dance expresses a dense web of dance-historical and cultural issues. The 1980s have seen a broad trend toward the narrative in avantgarde dance. One of several strategies to rebut the modernist, essentialist, antinarrative preoccupations of the previous generation of choreographers in the sixties and seventies (that is, the group that we now call postmodern), the new narrative in dance, like the "new talkies" in avant-garde film and the "new textuality" in avant-garde theater, raises old issues for the art form, but in new ways.l In the age of poststructuralism, narrative in general has captured the intellectual and artistic imagination, where it has been analyzed , dismantled, demystified, and deconstructed. The fascination with narrative - its conventions, its meanings, and its reception - seems a logical sequel to the repudiation of narrative that earlier characterized the modernist project overall. And the field ofavant-garde dance, where in fact the notion ofthe seamless narrative had already perished before the current generation of dancers was born, shares this fascination. Merce Cunningham in the fifties and then the postmoderns of the sixties and seventies wanted to get rid of narrative partly for essentialist La Danse au Defi (Montreal: Parachute, 1987). Reprinted with permission. The Postmodern Fairytale reasons - ifthey wanted to tell stories, to paraphrase John Cage, they would have been writing, not dancing. But these same artists opened up choreography to so broad a field ofaction that, even while attempting to pare dance down to its essence, they planted the seeds for a postmodern proliferation of techniques, styles, and functions.2 By 1980, anything could be in a dance but that meant not only walking, playing games, talking, silence, and untrained bodies, but also character, plot, music, and virtuosity. Certainly the new narrative is a response in the dance dialectic to the obdurate "inexpressivity" of the seventies.3 Some of the early postmodern choreographers themselves began to turn to narrative forms by the late 1970s. The pursuit of the story led Rainer from dance per se into performance art and then film. Gordon for a time specialized in a kind of semiotic ofthe gesture, playing with the various meanings of bodily movements as they shifted function and context, especially in relation to words; a notable example is his What Happened. Brown moved her signature puredance piece Accumulation into a new era first by telling the story of its making as she performed it, and then by telling several stories simultaneously while interpolating another dance into the sequence. Yet the generation of choreographers that emerged in the eighties has outstripped the earlier postmoderns in its insatiable appetite for narratives of all kinds: autobiography, biography, fiction, political document, interview, the use of sign language and other emblematic gesture systems. And, this in a development that at first glance seems improbable - the fairytale. The fairytale was, of course, the exemplary narrative form of the nineteenth-century ballet, reaching its apotheosis in Petipa's works for the Russian Imperial Ballet; the paragon ofthis genre was The Sleeping Beauty (1890). For a number of different reasons (its rigidity of form, technical "magic," extravagant mise-en-scene, hierarchical politics, and seemingly trivial themes) the fairytale ballet, with its sparkling divertissements punctuated by literary pantomime to advance the plot, became a despised old chestnut for most ofthe twentieth century, especially for artists who aspired toward the modern. Ifthe fairytale speaks ofotherworldly marvels, Duncan, for one, wished to show the here and now ofthe human body; ifthe fairytale is a myth writ small, Graham, for one, aimed at monumentality; if a fairytale stylizes and condenses experience into glittering symbols of consciousness , Rainer wanted to explore reality in all its mundane, unmanipulated glory...

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