The introduction of non-traditional materials in contemporary art has facilitated the emergence of air dancing—dances that are performed off the floor by means of support systems, such as scaffolding, ropes, rubber cords, wires, or a combination of these materials.

This article is not intended as a historical survey of air dancing. Rather, it represents a theoretical speculation on the esthetic options afforded by air dancing. For this purpose, I have contrasted two choreographers, Batya Zamir, who has only recently incorporated aerial elements in her work, and Stephanie Evanitsky, whose Multigravitational Experiment Group has been involved in air dancing since 1969. The choice of these artists has not been undertaken to evaluate what air dancing ought to be or who the best aerial dancers are. The aim is more limited. Zamir and the Multigravitational Group were chosen to clarify two opposing poles of artistic development in dancing.

My thinking about the medium of performance began in the late Sixties. In saying that, I am pointing to a particular conceptual context that was fully developed when I began to work—one that concerned itself with discovering new forms of movement and totally new ways of structuring the temporal shape of an event. Yet, when I survey the seven years of my work against that background of performances in the Sixties, I realize that those specific concerns with movement and temporality are not my concerns. My own thinking and production has focused on issues of space—ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it. I have returned again and again to a specific set of formal/material metaphors with which to shape this space.

When the appearance of work changes radically, one generally can also assume that the underlying concerns governing the work have shifted. While the hypothesis of that statement definitely applies to my work, the conclusion does not, and I find myself reflecting on aspects of continuity rather than discontinuity, particularly with regard to the involvement of the spectator.

In 1964, one of my dances took place on a street in lower Manhattan. It was observable to an audience from the windows of a loft located on the opposite side of the street. The dance was entirely based on its found surroundings, and performers, myself and one other, essentially blended in with the other activity that was going on in the street. From time to time, however during the six-minute duration of the dance, we were engaged in pointing out various details and/or irregularities in the facades of the buildings: lettering and labels, the assorted content of displays in the store fronts (sheets, pillow cases, etc.).

Two women in white. The feet of one, red. The feet of the other, green. They begin to circle counter or clockwise and keeping opposite each other establish a circle whose radius is the span of the outstretched arm of either, reached toward the outstretched arm of the other, hands meeting palm to palm. Their stride is smooth and medium fast. Again and again their arms are lifted to check the measure, and dropped to let the elements settle into a constant dynamic equilibrium, as their bodies incline slightly toward the apex.

Consider the seven circles of the Star of David; one in the center surrounded by six others, all of the same size. Superimpose on these two more, forming a figure eight whose halves join on the center of the central of the seven circles.

After a time of circling together, one of the women steps along the radius, straight to the circle's center, which she then takes for a point along the circumference of another circle.

The work is ongoing. It is still, in Johnston's phrase, about “any old people,” but it is no longer focused on personal incidents within pedestrian forms. Personal incidents happen now in the context of a duet system that has been named Contact Improvisation.

Each party of the duet freely improvises with an aim to working along the easiest pathways available to their mutually moving, masses. These pathways are best perceived when the muscular tone is lightly stretched to extend the limbs, although not to a degree that obscures the sensations of momentum and inertia. Within this flexible framework, the shape, speed, orientation, and personal details of the relationship are left to the dancers who, however, hold to the ideal of active, reflexive, harmonic, spontaneous, mutual forms. The ideal creates the attitude, which is manifest in the quality of energy-use.

This system is based in the senses of touch and balance.

Modern dance makes more choreographers, I believe, than ballet does. A conventional modern dance company is a very small group working with the specific ideas of a single artist. There are a limited number of these situations and an extraordinary number of dancers in training. It is not always difference in ideology or the compulsive need to explore a single vision that produces a new modern dance choreographer. It is simply expedient to create a personal marketplace in which to exhibit one's wares. The leniency with which modern dance has come to treat the eccentricities of body structure and performance as opposed to continued restrictions in ballets, allows for great variety in style and stature. But the small company, with its specific vision, often does not. So, choreography, for some of us, is self-defense.

When I began performing publicly in other peoples’ work, I had a fairly goodlooking body, (though not a very flexible one), good height, good balance, and no training.

Loïe Fuller's contributions to the theory and practice of theatre and dance are numerous, yet few dancers and even fewer theatre people know of her work. Most dance and theatre historians, if they mention her at all, only devote a cursory paragraph to her achievements. As is often the case, repeated omission is gradually solidified into misinformation. Other people have often been credited with her innovations.

Between 1865 and 1891, Fuller had a rather successful career as actress, manager, and sometime. playwright. After 1892, she influenced (and was influenced by) Art Nouveau, Symbolism, and Impressionism. She was written about, painted, and sculpted by most of the important artists in Paris at the turn of the century. A theatre was even built for her. And she set up and managed the initial European tours of Isadora Duncan, Maude Allen, and two Japanese acting companies. All the while, she kept on writing plays.

Nikolai Foregger (1892-1939), christened Nicholas Baron Foregger von Greiffenturn, the sole descendant of an aristocratic Russo-German family, was one of the most extreme exponents of mechanization and abstraction in the Soviet theatre and dance during its first decade. Foregger belonged to that unique generation of Russian writers, artists, directors, and dance-masters who, born in the 1890's, quickly reached their artistic maturity in the early Twenties. Writers and artists like Mayakovsky, Sergei Tretyakov, Isaac Babel, Varvara Stepanova, and Alexander Rodchenko are among the best known of that era. In the fields of theatre and dance, there were Foregger Eisenstein, Sergei Radlov, Boris Tikhonovich, Boris Ferdinandov, the FEKS group Vera Maya, and Kasyan Goleizovsky. Together, despite acknowledged differences in motivation and style, these young artists accepted the critical appellative Constructivist to describe their art.

With the exception of Eisenstein (see T61) and Meyerhold, who was judged according to other standards, the scenic work of the Constructivists is not well known although at the time of the Constructivist period (1920-1924), many of their productions and techniques were considered more radical than Meyerhold's and in fact prefigured many of his own post-revolutionary innovations, such as Biomechanics and mobile decor.

The contemporary era is a working era. Every day, every hour—a new thrust forward, a new blow at the dying order. Simplicity, precision, expediency—these are the requirements called for in works of art. “I create-as the bird sings”; “I am above all and create what my leg desires”; “Art is accidental”; “Art for art's sake,” are phrases that now have been forgotten. The muses have become production workers and have dispersed to their respective trade unions. They meet not on Olympus but at the All Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTSPS), and are summoned not by Apollo but by Tomski.

The dance fulfills certain functions, strengthens the basics for self-discipline in the masses, provides practice for the learning and mastery of rhythm (mass dances), which is so necessary in all labor processes. It can be said that the work of the Scientific Organization of Labor (NOT) is the inculcation of the dancing instinct in industrial manufacturing.

Working alone in his one-room New York apartment, Robert Anton has built and continues to perform an event that cuts across the problems and history of making theatre. It is hard to say who “makes” this theatre. Anton has built “actors” with heads no bigger than an inch and a half, whose hands are the size of fingernails.

Take off is at once a parody and a series of collusions masked as deceptions (or put-ons). The central issue is trust in the truthfulness and loyalty of a confederate. The confederate is trusted to carry a desired impression to another person. But she or he is also the confederate of that other person and may not be loyal. The possibility of secrecy and intimacy exist on all sides. And betrayal.

But since all three parties become at some point go-betweens (or confidence women/men), each one is able to take certain advantage of the others by manipulating the truth. The take off lies in the fact that the whole Activity is a grand collusion in which each of the the participants knows the scheme from the start, and knows that the others know.

Ken Jacobs’ two-and-three-dimensional shadow play, “ ‘Slow Is Beauty’—Rodin,” was performed over several weekends in the fall of 1974 in a loft at the Idea Warehouse on Reade Street in New York City. The central aim of Jacobs is to make “depth recognition an esthetic event as.is done in dance and sculpture, to tune the audience into the sensuality of depth intervals.”

The traditional shadow play is done by backlighting puppets, hands, or actors who perform behind a translucent screen, curtain, or panel. The effect is flat and two-dimensional. To achieve a three-dimensional effect, Jacobs uses two opposingly polarized sources of light, each of which causes the object before it to cast a shadow. The audience thus sees two separate shadows, which may overlap to some extent, for one object. When the viewer puts on a pair of polarized glasses with eyepieces of opposing polarities, he sees only one image with each eye.