The modern dancers were a dense core of five or six, and they held themselves back from the other dancers as though they were superior, and perhaps they were. Modern was technical and demanding—part acting, part contact sport, part nervous breakdown. The person who ran the modern section was one of those philosopher artists who shouted Wittgenstein at the dancers as they worked their way through the tangled knot of his choreography. It was less a dance than an institutionalized destruction of the self.
