One liability of modern-dance-going is having to watch aging choreographers who are unwilling to accept that their dancing days are over. Martha Graham reluctantly retired from the stage when she was in her late seventies; Merce Cunningham is still putting in appearances at age sixty-seven. It is not mere vanity that keeps these choreographers clinging to their performing careers long after attaining senior-citizen status but the very nature of their art: unlike the classical ballet, the so-called modern dance is predicated upon the rejection of traditional, received vocabularies in favor of highly personalized systems of movement that spring from within the dancer-choreographer’s own body. The modern-dance choreographer is by definition the supreme exponent of his or her style; another dancer assuming the choreographer’s roles can at best be only a shadow of the original.

Compared with Graham and Cunningham, David Gordon, a first-generation postmodern, is a stripling: he turned fifty last year. Gordon is large, cuddly, dark-bearded, Talmudic. It happens to be a type to which I am partial, and I did not at all mind seeing him put himself through his extremely limited paces, though a younger female colleague of mine found him “old and fat” and couldn’t bear to watch. Far more disturbing as a performer was Gordon’s wife of twenty-five years, Valda Setterfield: fragile, painfully thin and drawn, with close-cropped silver hair, she looks as if any sudden move might cause her to shatter. In part Setterfield’s tentativeness is the legacy of the Royal Ballet-style