What Is Contemporary Dance?
For many years now, I have followed the phenomenon of “contemporary dance” as it circulates within the North American and European artistic contexts, and the ways in which associations of “cutting-edge” and “innovative” have accrued to it. Simultaneously, I have paid attention to dance artists from Indigenous, Black, and brown communities in the global South and North who describe their work as “contemporary,” and the different ways in which they trace the lineage of their experimentations. Inevitably, their work is gridded with lines of power that must be navigated for the sake of survival, but these contestations, contradictions, unresolved differences seldom get air to breathe out their lives. Very often, the complex dynamics in the global field of Contemporary Dance are all but flattened out in the discourse about it. Moreover, despite the assertions of many stakeholders in the field about what constitutes contemporaneity in dance, there are many different, sometimes antithetical, ways in which this category is constructed, even across Europe and North America, which comprises the largest, most prestigious and resourced fora as the global stage for contemporary dance.
Let me trace some of the primary modes of identifying contemporary dance in the global North, which fall along geopolitical and historical, and often, philosophical, fault-lines. Across much of Europe, the contemporary quite staunchly arrives through a rejection of classical ballet (though contemporary ballet is very much its own genre) and a move toward disciplinary border-crossing. Within this, regional and national histories make for particular foci: the development of dance in Germany through Ausdruckstanz and Tanztheater generates a different creative pathway than the intense post-ballet contemporary dance in France or Belgium, for instance. In these latter contexts, the avant-garde edge within contemporary dance becomes further specialized into the worlds of “conceptual dance,” “minimal dance,” and “collaborative dance.” The central questions within this mode of dance-making are about dance itself and the dancing body, resulting in dance that is minimalistic and resonant with American postmodern dance’s investment in pedestrian movement. Celebrated artists within this genre include Jérôme Bel, Meg Stuart, Xavier Le Roy, Vera Mantero, among others. It is significant that the evolution and naming of Contemporary Dance in the global North in the 1980s and 1990s happens in the context of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the ending of the Cold War, and the subsequent swell of globalization, multinational corporations, and booming free-market economies.
Several European dance scholars have identified the self-reflexive turn in contemporary dance as its defining moment, and experimental ways of looking at itself as constituting its avant-garde. Noémie Solomon describes the terrain of an anthology about European contemporary dance as a field that examines “the definition and imperatives of ‘a work’, its recasting within the conditions of labor and cultural production in late capitalist societies” (2014, p. 16). Dance scholar Rudi Laermans writes similarly about the way in which dance itself, and its modus operandi, the body, become the preoccupation of contemporary dance. He marks Contemporary Dance’s assertion that “choreography could be a genuine medium for reflection and … bring to the fore, in a stimulating way, ongoing key issues, such as the status of the body within ‘the society of the spectacle’ as depicted by Guy Debord” (Laermans 2015, pp. 18–19). Both Solomon and Laermans’ analyses suggest that a critique of capital’s penetration into art is inherent in European contemporary dance contexts. This makes sense for many choreographers’ choices of minimal aesthetic and low production effects and their focus on the work of dance.1 But it does not necessarily develop a critique of how class hierarchies, intersected with race, nationality, gender, and other forms of cultural capital, remain intact within the economy of global contemporary concert dance.
Laermans goes on to trace the continuous evolution of Flemish contemporary dance, with the shifting emphasis on conceptual dance, and then on collaborative dance, pointing to the field’s seemingly self-conscious reorganization of itself, and what constitutes value: “Besides a definitive emancipation from the ballet tradition, this multi-layered process was roughly synonymous with the development of a specialized production and distribution circuit … a restricted cultural market on which various actors primarily vie for symbolic recognition” (2015, pp. 18–19). In this world, then, it is an inward gaze, reimagining the body’s relationship to dance, inquiring what constitutes dance, and how dance indexes the current social order, that invites innovation and legitimizes particular kinds of risk-taking. Also of note is the way in which, in much of the European, as also the North American, dance field, contemporary dance produced its own infrastructure, ensuring particular modes of dissemination.
Different ways of making, producing, and circulating dance mark the work of artists such as Hofesh Shechter, Marie Chouinard, Angelin Preljocaj, Maguy Marin (specifically her earlier works), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Sasha Waltz, and Akram Khan, dance-makers working in France, UK, Canada, Germany, and Belgium, whose investigations are as much about dance as about other issues, and who generally work with larger companies and high production values. Most of these choreographers have reclaimed virtuosity and theatricality, but do not remain within the confines of one pre-established movement aesthetic. Even as there is seldom the articulation of technique for the sake of spectacular presentation, technical nuance and movement expertise reappear in idiosyncratic ways, often shaped through the collaboration of choreographer and dancers. This kind of contemporary work distinguishes itself through a series of strategies to negotiate its theatricality, often capturing our imaginations through a heightened, vivid, imagistic scale, refashioning the space of the theater, and weaving in surreal provocations through uncanny juxtapositions that refuse a linear narrative and aesthetic flow.
Such highly produced, polished, and skillful contemporary dance manifests itself somewhat differently in the US, where the movement influences are different, and might be seen, for instance, in the work of Sidra Bell, Lee Sher and Saar Harari, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, Andrea Miller, Kyle Abraham, and others. However, despite the strong periodizing impulse in the US, where ballet is narrativized as being followed by the revolution of modern dance, and then postmodern dance, studying the works and artists archived under the “Contemporary” category of the Jacob’s Pillow Interactive dance web library raises many questions (https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/browse/genre/#genre=contemporary). This archive includes the work of artists such as Reggie Wilson, Kyle Abraham, Wendy Whelan, Camille Brown, as well as of Paul Taylor (whom many would consider as representative of classic modern dance) and Pilobolus (also part of the later canon of American modern dance), Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown (whose work might be described as characterizing the first wave of American postmodern dance), and even includes a nod to contemporary aesthetics in ballet (Dance Theater of Harlem, performing The Lark Ascending by Alvin Ailey, and Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet). The best way I can read the structure of this listing is as suggesting that: (a) “contemporary” be understood in a quasi-chronological way (Paul Taylor’s work Airs seemed to be “of the times”, contemporary, in the 1980s, regardless of its aesthetic) and (b) we consider individual pieces as inviting analysis as “contemporary” because of the aesthetic decisions they embody even if other works by the same choreographer/company do not.
Interestingly, in this self-consciously “international” archive, though companies such as Salia Nī Seydou (Burkina Faso) and Compagnie Jant-Bi (Senegal) receive double listing under “contemporary” and “cultural” categories, Chandralekha (India) and Pichet Klunchun (Thailand) are mentioned only in the “cultural” category. This reminder that artists from global Black and brown communities are racialized differently, often in keeping with larger cultural stereotypes and the aesthetic lineages they claim, indicates the complex power map that suffuses the world of contemporary dance. Moreover, how are we to understand a category named “cultural” nearly a quarter century after Joanne Kealiinohomoku’s classic essay resituated ballet within the world of “ethnic dance”?2 We might ask: in what contexts is “culture” imagined as synonymous with “tradition?” When does it become a proxy for aesthetic difference?
As I conversed with colleagues about their understanding of contemporary dance, some suggested that the descriptor contemporary is sometimes deployed in a temporal sense, so that performances by traditional modern dance companies such as Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Company, the butoh company Sankai Juku, the Indian classical dance company Nrityagram, Ballet Hispánico, performing their founder-created repertoire or newer works, and the reconstruction of Deborah Hay’s works, in the year 2019 for instance, can all be seen within the same frame, as co-existing in current time. Yet, more often than not, contemporary dance operates as a category that is primarily aesthetically defined, with strong considerations of chronological, historic, and political urgencies.
Let me pause momentarily to emphasize that the focus of my investigation is on theatrical or concert dance, even as I recogni...