Contemporary dance is aging well but it’s ready for new ideas

Monday 25 March 2024 1:20 pm Choreographers in both London and New York seem to be going through an introspective phase. Western contemporary dance has lost many of its leading creatives: Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, all left the stage for good. Those who still create are looking inwards, testing one by one the ideas contemporary dance stands for. Sehnsucht has set in. We know what to find in this style. Since the Seventies we have been enjoying ensembles without the military synchronicity of precision movement: we relish the individual personality within the formation and the creative variation between one performance and the next. We expect dancers to shape their bodies along a continuum of positions rather than execute a sequence of figures: uninterrupted flow over repetition, supple limbs over joints locked in extreme tension. In sharp contrast to classical ballet, we cherish the non-artificial nature of moves: there is technique and athleticism, of course, but also mundane, recognisable crouching, slouching, tugging, leaping falling, and just-in-time catching. It’s a mirror of our own daily moves preserving, nonetheless, some of the notions we most closely expect of dance: soaring elevations, perfectly built bodies, absolute control of dancers’ movement...