With the exception of France, American postmodern dance has not been thoroughly received in Europe.

In Germany in particular, the question arises as to how the history of dance would have developed over the past thirty years if the Judson Church, co-founded by Yvonne Rainer, had been a stronger aesthetic model than the dance variant of German director's theatre, the Tanztheater.

But in the country that produced the famous "German Expressions Dance" until 1939, a kind of authorial approach prevailed even in the so-called classical dance in the theaters.

Youri Vámos, John Neumeier, ultimately even William Forsythe did very different things, but they did dance theatre, only, unlike Pina Bausch, they did not reject ballet as a language.

Hamburg did not continue the post-war cooperation with George Balanchine,

Cunningham and Bausch died that same summer, 2009. Since then there has been confusion in Wuppertal about how to preserve Bausch's legacy.

But the curtain has fallen on Cunningham's legacy, his lifelong collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.

And the fewer comparisons with works of the past are possible, the less it is noticeable how under-complex the works of Demis Volpi, David Dawson or Goyo Montero are in comparison.

It is not the highly talented Adam Linder who will be in charge of the Frankfurt Dresden Dance Company, but the former Forsythe dancer Ioannis Mandafounis.

This is not directed against the latter, but an aesthetic change of direction would be desirable.

Thanks to Baryshnikov

Before the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden opened one of its white state halls for Yvonne Rainer's new choreography "Hellzapoppin': What about the Bees?", the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne had already opened in 2012 with the exhibition "Space.

Body.

Language” showed how the co-founder of the New York performance group Judson Church had tried to make interesting art as a political activist in her live performances, films, dances and texts.

So it was museums, not theatres, that brought Yvonne Rainer, who was born in 1934, out of the local obscurity.

She was interesting not least because of her comrades-in-arms: in 1963 the charismatic Steve Paxton danced for her, and the lighting designer was Robert Rauschenberg.

Rainer owed her comeback as a choreographer in 2000 to Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had increasingly focused on filmmaking since the 1970s.

His lively interest in post-modern dance was repeatedly expressed in the programs of his "White Oak Dance Project".

"After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" was the name of Rainer's piece for Baryshnikov and his dancers.

In 2002 she converted parts of this work into a film and added the word "hybrid" to the title.

This film, which traces early Viennese modernism and connects it with the present and today's problematic political developments, was shown in Baden-Baden before the new play.

Beauty in slow motion

Clips from two different films can be seen on the screen behind the eight dancers: "Hellzapoppin'" on the left, "Zero for Conduct" on the right.

Filmed in 1941, "Hellzapoppin'" features a predominantly black dance troupe performing the Jitterbug's most athletic moves at an incredible pace - with plenty of lifts, slides, leaps, flings and twirls.

The dizzying and incredibly virtuosic demonstration forms the basis of Rainer's stage choreography.

In sneakers and comfortable clothes, her ensemble shows what a postmodern, downgraded, rephrased version of it, so to speak, reduced to a normal human format, can look like.

What's interesting is how much of the Jitterbug's beauty really unfolds in this playful slow motion.

Rainer's thinking is as ambivalent as it is complicated.

Of course she shows an incredibly beautiful dance in sneakers, but it's stolen, as she demonstrates.

So did the white art elite of the United States become famous on the backs of black dancers?

In New York, where the entire stage area was lined in black instead of white as in Baden-Baden, Rainer's radical anti-racism was admired less.

Rather, their reaching out into the past seems to have been misunderstood as cultural appropriation.

The confrontation with the film clip from "Zero Conduct" is not so obvious.

The pillow fight of rebellious boarding school students is pretty, but together with Rainer's confusing text coming off the tape, it's too much of the simultaneity.

In Rainer's text, the ancient god to whom Balanchine dedicated his "Apollon musagète" speaks and laments American racism and the deep economic and social inequality between black and white.

The text is an interesting meandering between anecdotes and observations, quotes from newspaper articles and films.

But the understandably deep need to bundle all worries and reflections in a work that the eighty-eight-year-old announced as her last, she should have suppressed more strongly herself.

How succinct was her famous No-Manifesto from 1965: "No to style, no to camp, no to seducing the viewer through the tricks of the performer, no to eccentricity, no to movement or to being moved," it said, which was as funny as it was radical.

On the other hand, how could such a substantial late work of the most ephemeral of all arts not incur the fear of being forgotten?