Trans-sss-mission: Sixties Dance Moves On

Books Reviewed: Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001, edited by Hendel Teicher. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, distributed by MIT Press, 2002; Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible, edited by Sally Banes, with the assistance of Andrea Harris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; Kenneth King, Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

The title of Sally Banes's latest book, Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible, suggests that "everything" is no longer possible, at least in relation to experimental dance. For those of us who attended the millennial PASTForward performances by the White Oak Dance Project, wondering if we would recognize anything (or anyone), the reconstruction of sixties dance did expose a loss. But it was more a loss of identity, of who we were as individuals and as a country at that time, than a loss of artistic vision. In fact, the Forward sections of these performances, where "sixties" choreographers such as Lucinda Childs showed more recent work, actually made the twenty-first century look promising. Such is the effect of the three books reviewed here, all by or about performers associated with the Judson Dance Theater. They should be read not just for the history they conserve but as inspiration for future performances.

Reinventing Dance in the 1960s is a valuable, all-too-brief collection of essays by dance scholars, choreographers, and critics about how the idea of dance was reconceived in the 1960s to include ordinary movement. As is often the case with writings by Sally Banes, there are secondary and tertiary meanings to her title, for she is one of the engineers of this "invention," beginning with Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (1980). In Reinventing Dance, Banes invites other writers to recast the history that she helped create, where a "top-ten" list of white, American performers make a clean break with modern dance and ballet conventions. Now, we hear from Gus Solomons, Jr., an African-American modern dancer with an MIT degree in architecture, who briefly studied choreography alongside the "official" Judson dancers. We also hear from Stephanie Jordan, Research Professor in Dance at Roehampton University of Surrey, about how in London modern and postmodern dance developed almost simultaneously as alternatives to what had been exclusively a ballet culture. Banes then places this new, collective history within a third framework—artists' statements about the PAST Forward project, itself a reinvention of dance in the 1960s. She gives Mikhail Baryshnikov the Foreword and Yvonne Rainer the last word.

While Reinventing Dance adjusts the focus of Banes' youthful research on post-modern performance, it also provides new information on what happened before and after the Judson programs (1962–1964) in a playful variety of literary styles. Banes, who is now an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has obviously thought about the kinds of books she liked to teach and created one that avoids the monotonous tone and tenuous link between chapters often found in essay collections. Along with Noël Carroll, she provides a theoretical context for the book in scholarly writings on defamiliarization and the ordinary in the 1960s avant-garde. In a quite different mode is a "freewheeling" interview that Banes and Joan Acocella conduct with Arlene Croce about the early days of Ballet Review, founded in 1965. Intended to imitate the format of an interview in Croce's "Judson issue" (I, No. 6, 1967), this one occurs over dinner and relies loosely on back issues of Ballet Review for coherence. Among sticking points in the three-way conversation is Banes' attempt to identify Ballet Review as a site for "experimental" dance criticism. Croce refuses the attribute altogether, explaining that in the sixties, criticism was "a little more theatrical," meaning that it was not unusual for critics to pose in print as other personalities for...