This is me dancing.

A few years ago, I read an interview with Paul Taylor in which he said: “I don’t know what modern dance is today.” I often think of that quote, sorry that the interviewer didn’t ask him to explain. I imagine he was puzzled by the current emphasis on virtuosity, so different from the way modern dance began, and also, perhaps that it is recycling old ideas, something that would have been anathema to the Modern Dancers of his youth. We often read how ballet has borrowed from modern dance, which it certainly has, but the borrowing has been a two-way street. When modern dancers began to take ballet classes in the late 1970s and ‘80s modern dance changed as well, becoming more elongated, more precise, less dangerous. Turns are now pirouettes; high extensions and pretzel partnering are turning up in modern dances — now often called “contemporary dance,” a non-genre genre that’s somehow slipped into the vocabulary. The power of a simple run — or a simple anything — is not often on view today.