Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance

Terpsichore in Sneakers offers the first critical review of the history of post-modern dance—an avant-garde style that emerged in the USA in the 1960s.

One of the leading historians and theorists of contemporary dance, Sally Banes, reviews the development of post-modern dance in the America of the 1960s and 1970s. The book looks at ten influential choreographers and dancers, including Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Meredith Monk, and the Grand Union dance group. Banes describes their key works, analyses their styles, ideas, and techniques, and explains why each of them created a stir in the dance world.

American culture of the 1960s was characterised by active collaborations across the arts: painters, sculptors, composers, and dancers took part in each other’s projects, which allowed everyone to enrich their practice. "Sources outside dance," Banes writes, "were equally important for the revolutionary notions of the post-modern choreographers, who found structures and performance attitudes in new music, film, the visual arts, poetry, and theatre—especially in Happenings <…>."