Е. Kiseyeva

Postmodern Dance and Avant-garde art in the first half of the twentieth century

The article is devoted to the influence of Avant-garde art in the first half of the XXth century as applied to formation of Postmodern Dance artistic principles. This choreographic tendency developed into the channel of so-called neo-avant-garde experimental strivings in the 1950–1970s. The new choreography founders cultivated the ideas of direct interaction between art and reality, emphasized the priority role of a recipient and the possibility of escape into the sphere of personal onlooker’s experience, and proclaimed the comprehension of creative art as a mode of vital activity. Productive collaboration between young choreographers (M. Cunningham, K. Brown, J. Dunn), composers (J. Cage, L. M. Yang, D. Tudor, M. Feldman), painters (R. Rauschenberg, J. Jones, A. Kaprow) favoured to strengthening of performance art as a new artistic form. The personal contribution into the named process by M. Duchamp (1887–1968) as the symbolical figure embodying the dialogue contiguities between the historical avant-garde of the early XXth century and the phenomena of neo-avant-garde is noted in the article. The aesthetical declarations by M. Duchamp, the famous painter and theorist, missing to the destruction of the art autonomy are characterized by the researcher. In her opinion the leading representatives of Postmodern Dance demonstrated the breaking-off with Western academic tradition because they were to a considerable extent guided by M. Duchamp’s ideas. The obvious corroboration of the said is the conception of the musicalchoreographic performance that was realized in the joint projects by M. Cunningham and J. Cage.

Key words

Postmodern Dance, art of Neoavantgarde, M. Duchamp, M. Cunningham, J. Cage, performance art.

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