ABSTRACT
In September 1985 a small incident occurred in Montréal during the first Festival International de Nouvelle Danse which participants have probably long since forgotten. During the same week, Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker were all presenting work in the festival and they, together with members of their dance companies, were all staying in the same hotel at the same time. One evening, the dancer Dena Davida, who runs Montréal’s experimental dance centre Tangente and was one of the organizers of the festival, was sitting in the hotel coffee shop talking to Trisha Brown and Stephen Petronio (who was still at that time dancing with Brown). Davida commented that Pina Bausch and a few of her dancers were sitting at the next table. When Brown said she knew of Bausch’s work but had not met her, Davida introduced them to one another and gradually members of different dance companies started to talk together.1
