ABSTRACT
A recurring choreographic motif in much new dance in Europe and the US during the late 1970s and early 1980s was serial repetition. This chapter looks at three key works of this time – Pina Bausch’s Café Müller (1978), Trisha Brown’s Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor (1979), and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas Danst Rosas (1983) – which each used serial repetition, though in different ways and with different effects. Through a discussion of these three works my aim is to show that, while there are obvious differences between the way that advanced theatre dance developed on either side of the Atlantic during the 1970s and 1980s, there were nevertheless some similarities in the way each of these pieces asserted the materiality of the dancing body in order to distance itself from older, expressive modes of choreography. This, I propose, is a central legacy of Judson Dance Theater to ambitious, experimental dance on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decades of the twentieth century. In choosing Bausch and Brown, I am revisiting the discussion initiated in the first chapter about the relationship between new dance on either side of the Atlantic; I have chosen Rosas Danst Rosas because De Keersmaeker shared Brown’s concern for rigorous formal and conceptual structures but also adopted a deconstructive approach to dramaturgy and theatrical representations that can be usefully compared with Bausch’s work.
