Postmodern dance, emerging in the early 1960s, revolutionized 20th-century concert dance by fundamentally rejecting the rigid conventions and "pretentious" ideals of preceding modern dance. This innovative movement controversially asserted that all movement was dance expression and any person was a dancer, championing everyday gestures, improvisation, and unconventional compositional methods over traditional technique. While Merce Cunningham's innovations in the 1950s—such as separating music from dance and incorporating chance—laid crucial groundwork, the Judson Dance Theater in 1960s New York is widely credited as a pioneer of its radical ideas.
Choreographers further challenged audience expectations by employing non-trained dancers, detaching movement from musical tempo, and integrating concepts like irony and fragmentation. Though its peak popularity lasted from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, Postmodern dance profoundly influenced subsequent forms like contemporary dance and continues to shape choreographic processes in diverse works today.