ABSTRACT
Thomas Leabhart, in his book Modern and Post-Modern Mime, offers a very similar view of postmodernism. Speaking of Leonard Pitt, a mime "who began as a pure modernist and who discovered his own postmodernism," Leabhart discusses Pitt's "post-modern synthesis of theatrical elements" in the 1985 work 2019 Blake, a solo piece directed by San Francisco performance artist George Coates with music by composer Paul Dresher. In the program note to this production Dresher spoke of his music as defying:
a single stylistic definition, drawing as it does from such seemingly disparate sources as non-western (particularly West African, Indonesian, and North Indian) traditions, European classical and renaissance musics, the experimental tradition of the twentieth century, jazz, and rock and roll. From these Dresher is able to create a hybrid music that acknowledges the universal musical ideas and techniques at the core of the various traditions and styles but transcends the exotic surfaces of each.
