The Joyce is a 400-seat theater in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Host year-round to dance performances, it is a sleek, comfortable house, art deco in design with every seat aimed for maximum visibility. If the bigger uptown venues, such as City Center, New York State Theater, or the Metropolitan Opera House, are to dance in New York City what Broadway is to the theater, then the Joyce is an important part of dance's off-Broadway, one of the places where choreographers and companies who have paid their first dues can move into line for the big time.
This year, the Joyce's annual winter festival showcased an eighties phenomenon that could prove as valuable to American dance as the discoveries of off-Broadway have been to out theater. The festival was called ManMade and featured two weeks of performances by the companies of a dozen young American choreographers - all of them men. Greg O'Brien, Andy Horowitz, and Paul Gordon are the collaborative trio heading the Second Hand Dance Company, and the other nine choreographers head their own troupes -Mark Dendy, Alfred Gallman, Ralph Lemon, Barry Martin, Stephen Petronio, Peter Pucci, Randy Warshaw, and Bill Young.
Founding Mothers
The very idea that American dance has a dozen young men with their own well-established companies was the festival's first surprise, confirming the eighties as the decade when men began to multiply in dance. Until then, American modern dance was dominated, if not defined outright, by its women. Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan began the whole thing early in the century, and their mantle was taken up by a second generation of founding mothers, chief among them Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. The men in American modern dance whose word and companies lasted and had impact - Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey - were the exceptions. Things began to change with the sixties and the Judson Church experiments, but even into the seventies, when American modern dance was reaching its third and fourth generations, women widely outnumbered men in the vanguard of contemporary dance.
ManMade was a Berlitz course in how the eighties have changed that scenario. We're coming out of a decade that saw sweeping changes in American modern dance. The minimalist stronghold on musical alternatives was broken, and movement itself got physically complicated again, requiring real and complex techniques. The ready emotionalism that had originally characterized modern dance returned to Large Issues, to dance as a medium for personal and political observation.
The dozen choreographers in the Joyce Festival hit every one of the eighties high points, beginning with the eclecticism of musical and movement means. At the very least, ManMade is a landmark for the fact that, of the twenty-nine works presented, none of them were set to the music of either Philip Glass or Steve Reich. In place of the two minimalist composers whose works were modern dance staples until well past the mid-eighties, the Joyce choreographers helped themselves to everything from the Chopin polonaises to Dendy's Movements 1 and 2 to Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms for Varone's Antediluvian to the most immediately contemporary of composers. The commissioned musicians included Trio Bravo, a jazz-influenced New Wave group from Belgium, for Warshaw's Even Horizon, and Gallman's Newark Dance Theater performed to music by, among others, Stevie Wonder, Freddie Jackson, and Vanessa
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