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Modern Dance Breaks Out in France
| Article
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13218 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1987 |
1,327 Words |
| Author
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David Stevens
David Stevens is music critic for the International Herald
Tribune. |
Dance has a long history in France, or at least in Paris, going back to the allegorical court entrainments of the late sixteenth century and the founding in 1661 of the Academie Royale de Danse, the direct ancestor of today's Paris Opera Ballet. But there is nothing in French dance history to explain how the fragile seedling of modern dance, originally imported from the United States, grew and spread like a weed, transforming itself in the process into a hardy, homegrown phenomenon that, in the last five years, has become an export product.
Perhaps it all began with Merce Cunningham. In June 1964, Cunningham and his company began a long overseas tour with a run in a Paris theater, to surprising acclaim from both the public and the critics - and this at a time when Cunningham was still not really a mainstream dance figure in New York. That fall, the Paul Taylor Dance Company appeared in the recently established Paris International Dance Festival, whose audience at the time was oriented primarily toward classical ballet, and met with bewilderment and half-empty houses. The festival persisted, however, largely under the influence of its unofficial adviser on contemporary American dance, Michel Guy (later a French minister of culture), and Cunningham, Taylor, and other American modern dance troupes became regular Paris visitors, either in the festival program or under other auspices. (Indeed, Taylor was playing to full houses in May 1968 when students from the nearby Sorbonne began their famous uprising by occupying the Theatre de l'Odeon.)
Early Dance Wave
During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Paris audiences made the acquaintance of
... (1998 of 8029 Characters)
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