The Legacy Lectures: Arcs in Time American Postmodern Dance Protagonists

Betsy Goolian

October 2008

The Department of Dance launches the 2008-2009 monthly Legacy Lecture Series, this fall designed to explore American postmodern dance. For the first of these year-long lectures, Professors Jessica Fogel and Angela Kane use parallel presentations. Kane’s lecture challenges mainstream accounts of the iconoclastic development, most particularly the privileging of Merce Cunningham, Robert Dunn, and the Judson Church as the originators of the form during the late 1950s/early 1960s. Professor Fogel provides an “insider” perspective, recounting her experiences as a dancer and choreographer in NYC during the second wave of post modernist dance. The focus on postmodern dance this fall provides a point of entry into what will surely be an historical event, the restaging of a work by choreographer Laura Dean at the Department’s January/February Power Center dance concert, this year themed Arcs in  Time.

Laura Dean, longtime collaborator with minimalist composer Steve Reich, was rediscovered at the 2007 American Dance Festival when one of her works, Sky Light (1982), was reconstructed by a former member of her dance troupe and presented to festival-goers. The performanced launched an avalanche of interest in Dean’s work which nearly fell into obscurity when her company folded in 1994. Now the dance world is reexamining her work and rediscovering its power. The Department of Dance will restage Dean’s Impact (1985), set to a score by Reich, under the direction of Professor Amy Chavasse who danced with Dean for five years and who was featured in the original staging of Impact, a high-energy, demanding work that requires incredible physical stamina and the ability to master Dean’s signature spins.

The lecture is Friday, October 24 at 4:00 p.m. at the Palmer Commons Forum Hall (100 Washtenaw).