Music/Dance in the Eighties : In World of Dance, 10 Years of Obsession With Risk and Power

The first major dance attraction to play Los Angeles in 1980 was the Bayanihan folk company of Manila, and this Times reviewer noted that “the current civil turmoil in the Philippines gave special poignancy to a representation of an ancient peace pact between warring tribes.” Some things never really change.

Some things change dramatically. Soon after, Martin Bernheimer reported on the first major dance-related news event of the ‘80s:

“Musicians and dancers from the Soviet Union who were scheduled to appear in the United States this season are suddenly being denied permission to leave Russia,” he wrote, “apparently as a result of the Afghanistan crisis.”

No longer. In 1989, it is the Chinese who have again become prisoners in their own land--but not before showing the world the most doom-laden sculpture since the Trojan Horse and an improvisational pavane between one man and a line of tanks.

Was this incredible act a dance at all? Everything the avant-garde had been teaching the mainstream since long before the birth of postmodernism left no doubt. Depicting nothing but what it showed, it dealt directly with the mastery of space and time, obliterating any distinction between life and art. And it summed up the whole decade’s obsession with risk, with pared-down, “essential” motion, with content-within-form, and most of all with power.

In a theatrical context, the Japanese movement-theater idiom called butoh claimed these obsessions as its own, but added a fixation on disease and deformity, on irrational, intuitive vision and, inevitably, on death.

It, too, sometimes took to the streets to claim unorthodox contexts for performance--and, midway through the decade, it reached a terrible epiphany when performer Yoshiyuki Takada fell six stories to his death in Seattle when the rope holding him broke during Sankaijuku’s “hanging dance.”

Astonishing in its level of performer commitment, butoh proved one of the most extreme statements of a new Romanticism blooming throughout the dance world in the 1980s, from the post-feminist, sex-war psychodramas that found exploitation at the core of all love relationships (for example, Pina Bausch’s epics of oppression) to the torturous studio solos pushing a dancer to the edge of exhaustion and beyond.

Even ballet felt the heat. “I believe the point of exhaustion is when people move the way they really move,” said Canadian classical choreographer James Kudelka. “All the pretenses drop away and they really start seeing that it’s got to come from another place that’s very much deeper inside.”

In the ballet world, control had always been something to develop. Suddenly in the ‘80s, it became a frontier to cross. Beyond control was the territory of art, the plateau where male and female could at last meet on equal terms, where all limits could be annihilated and new priorities for dance sorted out.

Some of these priorities began as liberation and ended as dogma. They involved treating the female dancer’s body as a temple, the male’s as a garage sale, and those dismaying social outcasts, the Excessively Beautiful Man and the Excessively Powerful Woman, as paradigms--but only if the Man suffered and the Woman stood alone.

Usually stripped to the legal limit, a race of exquisite males soon haunted our stages--and whether it was Mikhail Baryshnikov as Kenneth MacMillan’s Wild Boy or Tim Miller in his autobiographical performance-art solos, they were presented as damaged goods, Apollo Defiled.

Meanwhile, the females worked out with weights and boxing coaches, began lifting their partners and appeared in spectacular tests of stamina--always either passing with flying colors (Louise Lecavalier of La La La Human Steps) or, at the very least, emerging bloody but unbeaten (Molissa Fenley in “State of Darkness,” her solo to the complete “Rite of Spring”).

Wonder Woman and Dorian Gray made a very odd couple indeed on the dance floor--but, then, as mentioned, incompatibility became one of the decade’s central preoccupations.

So did cultural reclamation: restoring authenticity to idioms degraded by misuse (tap, flamenco, the tango), giving a new generation of dancers (and spectators) access to vault treasures by Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Donald McKayle, Rudy Perez--plus reconstructing lost masterworks by choreographers long dead.

August Bournonville’s 1858 fantasy “Abdallah” resurfaced in 1985 in Salt Lake City, and his 1868 mythological epic “The Lay of Thrym” is scheduled for a re-premiere in Copenhagen five months from now, 85 years after its last performance.

Of course, the preeminent reconstruction of the 1980s--both because of the limited evidence available and the legendary status of the original work--was the 1987 Joffrey Ballet staging of Vaslav Nijinsky’s original 1913 “Le Sacre du Printemps.”

Ironically, this salvage and conservation activity took place just as so many of the people who had defined dance in our time passed away. Start with the architects of neoclassicism, Balanchine and Ashton. Add the creator of psychological ballet, Antony Tudor. Then there’s the most beloved and influential of black choreographers, Alvin Ailey. And, certainly, the primary force inspiring the 20th-Century reconstructions, Robert Joffrey.

These were not merely the great stars who die in any decade--no, they carved out a brilliant repertory, trained generations of dancers to embody their vision, shaped our sense of what dance could be.

To lose them en bloc makes the ‘80s the end of a whole epoch in dance. Definitively, it clears the decks, but for what? Perhaps a breakthrough artist fusing the cultural traditions around us in an idiom that would help restore a sense of wholeness to this society. Why not? Some of us think Twyla Tharp came close, for a time. Lord knows, the need is great.

Could you recognize such artists if they appeared among us--especially if they didn’t happen to be white or come from a major dance-exporting nation? Would you support them so they didn’t have to rely on adoption by the city fathers of Frankfurt or Brussels? Most of all, would you allow them to deepen or focus or just flat-out change your expectations about dance as an art?

If so, we might all find the ‘90s to be quite an adventure.