Avant-garde dance of the 1960s and 1970s changed the way we look at dance, as well as our idea of what the art of dance could and should be. The new choreographers of those years—postmodernists (as they came to be called) like Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, and Twyla Tharp—created dances based on the conviction that dance should consist of nothing but movement, and that movement should be its only subject. They discarded as superfluous distractions the proscenium stage, dancing to music, costumes, sets, stories, romance, traditional drama, virtuosity, and pre-existing vocabularies of steps. Their dances took place in unusual spaces—lofts, rooftops, parking lots, museums, and fields—and were composed of nonsystematized, nonrepresentational movement that focused on parts of the body little used in traditional dance, and a restricted number of steps that were newly invented. The postmodernists of the Sixties and Seventies thus created a mode of pure or formalist dance that was recognized as a distinctly new contribution.

Today, however, in the revisionist Eighties, a new generation of postmodernists like Tim Miller and Margaret Jenkins, and even some of the founding postmodernists themselves, are abandoning pure or formalist dance and reclaiming all that they once discarded. Accordingly, postmodern dance works are nowadays likely to be staged in opera houses and theaters, and are laden with sets, speech, film, video, painting, sculpture, sex, stories of the choreographers’ lives, analyses of the world’s problems, fashion-designer costumes, scores, soundtracks, and assorted