Contemporary dance is a broad post-1960s genre that draws on ballet, modern, and global movement traditions to create work outside any fixed vocabulary.
Contemporary dance emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a synthesis and extension of modern dance, ballet, jazz, and non-Western movement forms. The Judson Dance Theater in New York (1962–1964) — Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and others — questioned what dance was, incorporating walking, falling, ordinary gesture, and improvisation. In Europe, Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal blurred dance, theatre, and personal testimony in works like 'Café Müller' (1978) and 'Kontakthof' (1978). Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Lebanese-British Akram Khan, and the French-Algerian Nacera Belaza brought Arab, South Asian, and African movement traditions into European contemporary dance. American contemporary work — Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, Crystal Pite — draws freely on classical and vernacular sources alike. The genre's defining trait is its refusal to belong to any single technique.