Following the 1980s flamboyant dance scene, the next decade saw the birth in Europe of a pervasive trend of (speciously labelled) ‘conceptual’ choreography championed by figures such as Jérôme Bel, Alain Buffard, Boris Charmatz and Xavier Le Roy. Firmly questioning choreography’s presuppositions, this cluster of choreographers offers a peculiar echo to the 1960s Judson Dance Theater’s seminal experience in New York City (epitomised by artists and performers such as Trisha Brown, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and Robert Rauschenberg). Both groups radically investigated the nature of dance and bluntly addressed topics such as reductionism, deconstruction, de-skilling and refusal of the ‘spectacle’. Although this kinship is obvious, I believe that these two groups operate with different intents. While Judson committed itself in a sheer challenge of dance as a medium, one can observe in the 1990s trend a shift in favour of a questioning of the institution or apparatus within which this medium operates.

In order to trace the trajectories of those two groundbreaking experiences and to articulate them together, I intend to work through Hal Foster’s hypothesis developed in ‘Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?’ (The Return of the Real: art and theory at the end of the century, MIT Press, 1996). Studying the relation between the ‘historical avant-garde’ of the 1910s and 1920s (constructivists/dada) and the ‘neo-avant-garde’ (essentially the 1950s and 1960s New York art scene), Foster wonders: ‘what relationship between moments of appearance and reappearance do they pose?’ He asks: ‘rather than cancel the project of the historical avant-garde, might the neo-avant-garde comprehend it for the first time?’ and asserts that ‘if the historical avant-garde focuses on the conventional, the neo-avant-garde concentrates on the institutional’. I believe I could put this hypothesis to the test in the field of choreography. This could be an illuminating heuristic device in my own research in order to explore the articulation between the 1990s choreographers and Judson Dance Theater. It will allow me to explore, draw parallels and discuss, in both the visual arts and choreography, such themes as readymade and medium-specificity, apparatus and institutional critique, modernism and post-modernism.