Kristin Poor is a PhD candidate focusing on modern and contemporary art and performance at Princeton University.
Martha Graham became emblematic of American modern dance in the 1930s and 1940s, which rejected the artifice of classical ballet, conceiving movement instead, as she put it, as “the condensation of strong feeling.” Many of Graham’s dances, like American Document (1938), drew on American history and mythic themes. In direct opposition to the virtuosic, expressive movement cultivated by Martha Graham and the modern dancers of the intervening generation, Trisha Brown and the other young choreographers, dancers, and artists who, in 1962, formed the Judson Dance Theater, valued inclusivity, everyday, ordinary movement, and chance operations. Brown’s dance of the 1960s and 1970s included structured improvisations, additive compositions of “mathematical pieces” like Group Accumulation in…