ABSTRACT
A woman walks across stage in high-heeled shoes, smoking a cigarette. Dancers pirouette in the aisles in moving buses, using the handrails to push themselves off. Contemporary performance is replete with references to the everyday, and the avenues of its exploration are manifold—from amateur performers and pedestrian movements to the use of ordinary public spaces and everyday objects, to name but a few. Underlying this trend is a desire to foreground, in the aesthetic realm, that which is typically below the threshold of our notice: the unexceptional and the mundane. But while the everyday has become a major staple of contemporary choreographic work, research on the topic is disproportionately sparse and almost entirely focused on the period of American 1960s and 1970s postmodernism, when it was first embraced with some vigor.
