Contemporary dance exists at a fascinating intersection: it is simultaneously an art form with rigorous technical traditions and a mirror reflecting society's evolving values, technologies, and communities. Yet "contemporary dance" itself resists easy definition. For some, it signifies a specific concert dance genre that emerged after modernism; for others, it encompasses any movement practice responding to present-day culture. This retrospective embraces both perspectives, tracing how concert dance innovation and popular movement cultures have influenced each other across eight decades—and how each era's dances carried the DNA of its social moment.
1950s: Modern Dance Reaches Maturity—and Fragments
By the 1950s, modern dance had already revolutionized concert performance for half a century. Isadora Duncan had freed the body from ballet's corseted constraints in the 1900s; Martha Graham had spent three decades developing her contraction-and-release technique that plumbed psychological depths. Yet this decade marked a crucial pivot.
Graham entered her mature period with works like Cave of the Heart (1946, revived throughout the 1950s) and Seraphic Dialogue (1955), distilling Greek mythology into universal human drama. Meanwhile, Merce Cunningham—who had danced with Graham until 1945—began developing something radically different. His Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951) introduced chance procedures derived from collaborator John Cage: movements determined by coin tosses, disrupting narrative and emotional continuity.
This fragmentation within modern dance—Graham's mythic intensity versus Cunningham's cool objectivity—set the stage for what would follow. The decade also saw Alvin Ailey found his company in 1958, bringing African American cultural experience into concert dance with Blues Suite and, later, Revelations (1960). Jazz dance flourished in Broadway and film, codifying techniques that would later cross-pollinate with concert forms.
1960s: Postmodern Dance Demolishes the Fourth Wall
The postmodern dance movement emerged not as evolution but as deliberate rupture. Where modern dance sought transcendence through the trained body, choreographers at Judson Dance Theater (founded 1962) asked: What if any movement is dance? What if any person is a dancer?
Yvonne Rainer's "No Manifesto" (1965) explicitly rejected "no to spectacle, no to virtuosity, no to transformations and magic and make-believe." Her Trio A (1966) demonstrated this new aesthetic in six minutes of continuous motion without climax, pedestrian dynamics, and deliberately anti-expressive performance—eyes averted from audience, face neutral. Trisha Brown explored gravity's logic in Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970, developed from 1960s experiments), while Steve Paxton developed contact improvisation from 1972, using weight-sharing and physical dialogue between bodies.
The postmodern democratization of movement—anyone's walk qualified as dance—would paradoxically enable street dance's elevation to concert stages in decades to come.
1970s: Street Dance Claims Space and Contact Improvisation Blooms
While postmodern choreographers investigated minimalism, urban communities across the United States generated movement forms rooted in entirely different imperatives: competition, improvisation, and cultural identity. Breaking (breakdancing) emerged from Black and Latino communities in the Bronx, with the Rock Steady Crew forming in 1977. These forms developed through cypher circles—democratic spaces where skill, not credentials, determined status.
Hip-hop's four elements (DJing, MCing, graffiti, breaking) shared an improvisational ethos and emphasis on individual expression within collective culture. Unlike concert dance's choreographed reproducibility, breaking prioritized spontaneous adaptation to opponents and music.
Simultaneously, Steve Paxton's contact improvisation gained institutional traction, offering non-competitive, somatic exploration that would influence contemporary dance training worldwide. European innovators like Pina Bausch were developing Tanztheater in Germany, merging expressionist dance with theatrical narrative and social critique—her Café Müller (1978) and The Rite of Spring (1975) would prove globally influential.
1980s: Music Video and the Commodification of Choreography
The 1980s accelerated dance's penetration into mass media. Michael Peters choreographed Michael Jackson's Beat It (1983) and Thriller (1983), creating visual languages that millions would attempt to emulate. Arlene Phillips brought theatrical precision to music videos and stage shows. These weren't simply promotional tools—they established new relationships between dance and camera, with editing rhythms and framing becoming choreographic elements.
Films like Flashdance (1983) and Footloose (1984) packaged dance as
