Turning the World Upside Down Veronica Dittman Stanich

In Memory of Ivor Guest, Dance Historian Joint-Founder of the Society for Dance Research and of its Journal (14 April 1920 - 30 March 2018)

RESUMEN: A particular movement -inverting the body to a tail-over-head orientation and fleetingly taking weight on the hands- has been a staple of postmodern dance training and choreography since the early 1990s, yet it remains unnamed and uncodified. Taking a material culture studies approach, I examine this movement closely, using interviews, observation, historical analysis, and a survey of dance practitioners to situate this not-exactly-a-handstand within the field of American postmodern dance. These multiple perspectives yield new insights into the field, its practitioners, and its relationship to the larger cultural picture. I find embodied in this transitional, upside-down movement not only postmodern dance's countercultural and eclectic inheritance but also the conflicted cultural space it occupies. Postmodern dance is old enough, to have a tradition, but doesn't want to relinquish its maverick identity; meanwhile, its meaning-making codes are inaccessible to much of the general public even as it begs a bigger audience in order to thrive. PALABRAS CLAVE: handstand, inversion, postmodern dance, Judson Dance Theater, Lisa Race, material culture research