Postmodern Dance Strategies on Television

Abstract

In contrast to Chapter 3, which examines how the televisual apparatus acts upon dance, Chapter 4 focuses on the implications of dance in the television context. The evolution of video dance can partly be attributed to developments in film and television, and the significance of the image and technology in late twentieth-century society. Yet the dance context out of which video dance and its practitioners have arisen has also had an impact. The emergence of video dance in the United Kingdom in the 1980s coincides with the beginnings of British postmodern stage dance (Banes, 1987; Mackrell, 1991). The dance artists who became involved in creating video dance works were, and continue to be, primarily located in this particular dance scene. Hence Chapter 4 sets out to examine the significance and implications of dance, and specifically postmodern dance practices, within the television context. Although the evolution, developments and ambiguities of a postmodern stage dance aesthetic are well documented within dance scholarship (Copeland, 1986; Banes, 1987; Briginshaw, 1988; Manning, 1988; Mackrell, 1991; Daly, 1992), the relationship between postmodern dance and postmodernism within other art forms is far from clear. This is highlighted by the plethora of texts that expose the multifarious, and often contradictory, conceptualizations of a postmodern aesthetic within different art practices and cultural formations (Appignanesi, 1986; Kaplan, 1988a; Collins, 1989; Connor, 1989; Hutcheon, 1989; Boyne and Rattansi, 1990; Jameson, 1991; Docherty, 1993).