Modern Europe

Dance Magazine, August, 2001 by Clive Barnes

A FEW MONTHS AGO, CAROLYN BROWN, A GREAT FORMER PRINCIPAL DANCER WITH MERCE CUNNINGHAM, PIN-POINTED A TURNING POINT IN MODERN DANCE AS THE VISIT OF THE CUNNINGHAM COMPANY TO LONDON IN THE EARLY 1960s.

Around the same time, the first appearances of Jose Limon and Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham (who had first come as early as 1954), Paul Taylor, Charles Weidman and Alvin Ailey, and a little later, John Butler, Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, in London, and often elsewhere in Europe, were the start of something big. Something almost incredible.

Not only did these extended European forays, as Brown pointed out, give a new visibility and a heightened reputation in the U.S. to these then almost cult-like American companies, but they spawned a whole new growth of dance in Europe. Indeed, they totally changed the face of European dance, far, far more than anyone could have credibly envisaged.

This Americanization of European dance had many sources, reasons, and catalysts. But to my mind, two stand out. Remember that the bridgehead of this Yankee invasion was London, although a few companies also appeared at Gian Carlo Menotti's marvelous and aptly named Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. That London scene for American dance was in large part engineered by the dance writer and editor Francis Mason and the dance philanthropist, the late Robin Howard.

Mason, at this time, was an American cultural attache in London. Not every cultural attache knew a great deal about the arts--sad but true--but Mason was already a well-known writer on dance, and he enthusiastically took on the job of persuading the American government to sponsor more and more dance in London and elsewhere. This was not easy--for the government quite naturally gave priority to sending cultural ambassadors to nations perceived as unfriendly, rather than to the British, Italian, or French, who were regarded as allies. But somehow Mason persuaded, wangled, tricked--whatever was necessary--and managed to get a flood of new dance to London.

He was assisted by Howard, who, for example, personally helped to sponsor the second Graham visit in 1963, and that year set up a trust to fund British dancers studying the Graham technique in New York. Two years later, he brought Graham teachers to London and in 1966 founded, with American teachers, the enormously influential London School of Contemporary Dance, which in turn led to the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, the first European company to base itself on American modern dance technique. It was a real breakthrough.

IT WOULD BE WRONG TO PRESUME that before this Europe had ignored the contemporary dance idiom. Not a bit of it--it had prospered chiefly in Germany, where it fell first under the baleful influence of Nazism, and then, after World War II, ironically, it was considered in Germany suspiciously nationalistic, as German dance moved towards the more culturally neutral ground of classic ballet. Nevertheless, Kurt Jooss (a student of Rudolf yon Laban), who had been forced out of Germany with his company during the Hitler years and built a considerable reputation and audience in England, returned to his base in Essen. Harald Kreutzberg resumed his tours, and Mary Wigman started teaching again in West Berlin.

By the sixties, Europe was good and ready for modern dance. It caught it like a fever. Suddenly the new dance erupted everywhere. The Ballet Rambert, Britain's oldest company, virtually overnight changed from a classic troupe to a modern dance company. By 1973, the Paris Opera Ballet hired Carolyn Carlson from the Nikolais company to lead an experimental group, and the same year the German town of Wuppertal invited Pina Bausch (who had trained both with Jooss in Essen and with Antony Tudor in New York) to form Tanztheater Wuppertal. American modern choreographers such as Glen Tetley, John Butler, and Anna Sokolow were in constant demand, especially in Holland and England.

Now, more than thirty years on, what has happened? It's a curious, spotty record. Take the French. The French government has lavished unparalleled sums of money on modern dance, and some of the results could be seen in New York in this spring's citywide France Moves festival. Now when the French government sponsors a festival, it does so with a certain panache, and this offering of contemporary French dance provided a shop window on their terpsichorean culture with ten companies splashed over two weeks. I only saw six of the ten (the better known, actually, many of which I had seen before) and while some are going to be better than others, it seemed to me personally that even the best were not particularly good--by American standards. Where Europe has excelled is in promoting, after the early examples of, say, Tetley, classically trained "midstream" choreographers, such as Jiri Kylian, Christopher Bruce, Hans van Manen, and, for that matter, the Americans William Forsythe and John Neumeier, who are today more European than American. This is a fascinating group. But is any one of them a distinctively modern dance choreographer in the way, perhaps, of their contemporary, Mark Morris? I hope I'm not splitting hairs here (and every critic has a hairsplitter on his back like a monkey), but looking at France Moves, I could not but note that it was called France Moves rather than France Dances. The dance quotient in everything I saw during that season, and indeed in much of European modern dance, seemed and seems perilously small.