ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which innovative choreography from Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s explored new ways of creating dance material for male dancers. Focusing on Trisha Brown's Set and Reset (1983), and Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane's Rotary Action (1982), both from the United States, and from Europe Pina Bausch's Blaubart (Bluebeard 1977), and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker Mikrokosmos (1987), it investigates the range of responses that these choreographers from each side of the Atlantic had to changing social attitudes towards identities. While there is evidence that all were aware of debates about feminism, only Jones and his partner and collaborator Arnie Zane directly referred to issues around sexuality and ‘race’. Although at the time Bausch, Brown, De Keersmaeker, Jones, and Zane were considered to be working in very different ways, in retrospect, one can see that they were all presenting work in the same international circuits of festivals and theatres specialising in progressive new dance. While the Americans were often promoted as postmodern choreographers, all of them were part of a cultural moment that responded to and created new ways of understanding shifts in social and cultural experience that, at the time, was often being discussed in terms of the postmodern. The chapter investigates correlations between these new postmodern ways of performing masculinities and a sceptical questioning of the supposedly unmarked, normative nature of heterosexual masculinity.
