Anniversary gallery postmodern dance covers.

IN THE 1960s AND '70s artists like Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer broke the rules of dance composition. They performed everyday movement, defied the theme-and-variation format, and danced on walls. Because the look of it and the rhythm were so different from previous modern dance, they were labeled "postmodern."

Merce Cunningham can be considered a bridge between modern and postmodern dance. Influenced by John Cage's Zen-like philosophy, he created dance independent of the music, relying on the perception of the audience to unite them in their own ways. He laid the foundation for postmodern dance.

In April 1964 when Lucinda Childs appeared on the cover, George Jackson wrote an article on postmodern dance titled "Naked in Its Native Beauty." "The participants do not personify attitudes or even assume the role of 'being a dancer,'" he wrote. "These persons are simply being themselves."

Twyla Tharp showed her first piece, Tank Dive, at Hunter College in 1965. Four years later in February 1969, a photo of her in that dance appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine and she was deemed a "promising young avant-garde" choreographer.

Dancer/choreographer/composer Meredith Monk appeared on the cover in 1976 in her duet with Ping Chong, Paris. Jack Anderson wrote in a review, "And, oh yes, Ms. Monk had a moustache. But the most surprising thing about it was that it wasn't surprising: one simply accepted it as the way things were in her part of Paris."

While postmodern dance first erupted with Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s, it was eventually recognized as part of the flow of dance history. "New dance has always existed on a continuum between formality and freedom, between imitation/adaptation of the past and rejection/reaction to that past," wrote Robb Baker in Dance Magazine in 1974.

A strange and powerful new partnership was brewing in the '70s between two grads of SUNY Binghamton. It eventually became the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and graced our cover with a backdrop by their favorite artist, Keith Haring, in 1984.

In 2005, Trisha Brown made her first new work for Paris Opera Ballet, thus bringing postmodern dance into the hallowed halls of the oldest ballet company--and furnishing Dance Magazine with its April cover story.

Postmodern dance has always had two radical sides to it. As Jack Anderson said of Yvonne Rainer in our June 1968 issue, she was "simultaneously a Puritan and a hedonist."