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Modern dance: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Modern dance
In 1877, a young girl named Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco with a vision that would eventually shatter the rigid constraints of the Victorian era. She did not want to be a dancer in the traditional sense, nor did she want to wear the corsets and pointe shoes that defined the ballet world of her time. Duncan believed that the human body was a natural instrument that should move freely, inspired by the winds, the waves, and the ancient Greeks. She stripped away the heavy costumes and the strict rules, replacing them with loose tunics and bare feet. Her performances were not just about movement; they were a political statement against the social structures that confined women. She thought ballet was ugly and meaningless gymnastics, a view that alienated her from the American establishment but resonated deeply with those seeking liberation. Her life was a constant search for freedom, leading her to Europe where she found a more receptive audience before her tragic death in Nice in 1927.
Lighting the Silk Stage
While Duncan was freeing the body, another pioneer named Loie Fuller was revolutionizing the stage itself. Born in 1862, Fuller began her career as a burlesque skirt dancer but quickly evolved into an innovator of light and movement. She experimented with gas lighting and colored gels to create ethereal effects that had never been seen before. Her voluminous silk costumes became extensions of her body, swirling and flowing to create shapes that seemed to defy gravity. Fuller patented her own apparatus and methods of stage lighting, using burning chemicals to produce luminescence that transformed her performances into living paintings. She developed a form of natural movement and improvisation that was inextricably linked to her revolutionary lighting equipment. Her work was not about the dancer's face or emotion, but about the interplay of light, fabric, and motion. This approach laid the groundwork for the multimedia experiments that would follow decades later, proving that dance could be a visual spectacle as much as a physical one.
The Denishawn School
In 1915, Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn founded the Denishawn school and dance company, creating a crucible for the next generation of modern dance legends. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman were pupils at the school and members of the dance company, learning the foundations of this new art form. Seeking a wider and more accepting audience for their work, Duncan, Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis had already toured Europe, but the Denishawn school brought the movement to America. Graham viewed ballet as too one-sided, European, imperialistic, and un-American, so she developed her own dance technique that hinged on concepts of contraction and release. In Graham's teachings, she wanted her students to feel, meaning having a heightened sense of awareness of being grounded to the floor while feeling the energy throughout their entire body. Her principal contributions to dance were the focus of the center of the body, coordination between breathing and movement, and a dancer's relationship with the floor. This period marked the transition from the early free dance to a more structured, yet still rebellious, form of expression.
When was Isadora Duncan born and where did she die?
Isadora Duncan was born in 1877 in San Francisco and died in Nice in 1927. Her life was a constant search for freedom that led her to Europe before her tragic death.
What year did the Bennington Summer School of the Dance open?
The Bennington Summer School of the Dance opened in 1934 at Bennington College. This program marked the beginning of professional viability for American dancers and laid the foundations of the Central Modern period.
When did the Katherine Dunham Dance Company open a school in New York?
Katherine Dunham opened a school in New York in 1945 to teach the Katherine Dunham Technique. This technique integrated African and Caribbean movement with ballet and modern dance.
What year did the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform in New York?
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed in New York in 1958. Their most popular and critically acclaimed work is Revelations, which remains a cornerstone of the modern dance repertoire.
When did Hanya Holm found the New York Wigman School of Dance?
Hanya Holm founded the New York Wigman School of Dance in 1931. She later became a founding artist of the first American Dance Festival in Bennington in 1934.
When did Merce Cunningham present his first New York solo concert with John Cage?
Merce Cunningham presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in 1944. This event introduced chance procedures and pure movement to choreography and established the Cunningham technique.
The year 1934 marked a turning point for American dance with the establishment of the Bennington Summer School of the Dance at Bennington College. Educators accepted modern dance into college and university curricula, first as a part of physical education, then as performing art. Agnes de Mille wrote of the program that there was a fine commingling of all kinds of artists, musicians, and designers, and that all those responsible for booking the college concert series across the continent were assembled there. Free from the limiting strictures of the three big monopolistic managements, who pressed for preference of their European clients, American dancers were hired to tour America nationwide for the first time. This marked the beginning of their solvency and professional viability. The program fostered a community where choreographers could develop distinctively American movement styles and vocabularies. It was here that the foundations of the Central Modern period were laid, with artists like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Katherine Dunham developing clearly defined and recognizable dance training systems. The Bennington years were not just about teaching dance; they were about building a sustainable infrastructure for a new art form.
The African American Tradition
African American dance blended modern dance with African and Caribbean movement, creating a unique fusion of flexible torso and spine, articulated pelvis, and polyrhythmic movement. Katherine Dunham trained in ballet, founded Ballet Negre in 1936, and then the Katherine Dunham Dance Company based in Chicago. In 1945, she opened a school in New York, teaching the Katherine Dunham Technique, which integrated African and Caribbean movement with ballet and modern dance. Taking inspiration from African-based dance where one part of the body plays against one another, she focused on articulating the torso in her choreography. Pearl Primus drew on African and Caribbean dances to create strong dramatic works characterized by large leaps. She often based her dances on the work of black writers and on racial issues, such as Langston Hughes's 1944 The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and Lewis Allan's 1945 Strange Fruit. Her dance company developed into the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute. Alvin Ailey studied under Lester Horton, Bella Lewitzky, and later Martha Graham. He spent several years working in both concert and theater dance. In 1958, Ailey and a group of young African-American dancers performed as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York. He drew upon his blood memories of Texas, the blues, spirituals and gospel as inspiration. His most popular and critically acclaimed work is Revelations, which remains a cornerstone of the modern dance repertoire.
The Radical Dance Movement
Disturbed by the Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism in Europe, radical dancers tried to raise consciousness by dramatizing the economic, social, ethnic and political crises of their time. Hanya Holm, a student of Mary Wigman and an instructor at the Wigman School in Dresden, founded the New York Wigman School of Dance in 1931, which became the Hanya Holm Studio in 1936. She introduced Wigman technique, Rudolf Laban's theories of spatial dynamics, and later her own dance techniques to American modern dance. An accomplished choreographer, she was a founding artist of the first American Dance Festival in Bennington in 1934. Holm's dance work Metropolitan Daily was the first modern dance composition to be televised on NBC, and her labanotation score for Kiss Me, Kate in 1948 was the first choreography to be copyrighted in the United States. Holm choreographed extensively in the fields of concert dance and musical theater. Anna Sokolow, a student of Martha Graham and Louis Horst, created her own dance company. Presenting dramatic contemporary imagery, Sokolow's compositions were generally abstract, often revealing the full spectrum of human experience reflecting the tension and alienation of the time and the truth of human movement.
The Abstract Avant-Garde
In the late 1940s and 1950s, a new generation of choreographers introduced clear abstractionism and avant-garde movements, paving the way for postmodern dance. José Limón, after studying and performing with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, established his own company with Humphrey as artistic director in 1946. It was under her mentorship that Limón created his signature dance The Moor's Pavane in 1949. Limón's choreographic works and technique remain a strong influence on contemporary dance practice. Merce Cunningham, a former ballet student and performer with Martha Graham, presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in 1944. Influenced by Cage and embracing modernist ideology using postmodern processes, Cunningham introduced chance procedures and pure movement to choreography and Cunningham technique to the cannon of 20th-century dance techniques. Cunningham set the seeds for postmodern dance with his non-linear, non-climactic, non-psychological abstract work. In these works each element is in and of itself expressive, and the observer determines what it communicates. Erick Hawkins, a student of George Balanchine, became a soloist and the first male dancer in Martha Graham's dance company. In 1951, Hawkins, interested in the new field of kinesiology, opened his own school and developed his own technique, a forerunner of most somatic dance techniques.
The Legacy of Expression
Modern dance has evolved with each subsequent generation of participating artists, with artistic content morphing and shifting from one choreographer to another. Artists such as Graham and Horton developed techniques in the Central Modern period that are still taught worldwide, and numerous other types of modern dance exist today. The legacy of modern dance can be seen in the lineage of 20th-century concert dance forms. Although often producing divergent dance forms, many seminal dance artists share a common heritage that can be traced back to free dance. Contemporary dance emerged in the 1950s as the dance form that is combining the modern dance elements and the classical ballet elements. It can use elements from non-Western dance cultures, such as African dancing with bent knees as a characteristic trait, and Butoh, Japanese contemporary dancing that developed in the 1950s. It incorporates modern European influences, via the work of pioneers like Isadora Duncan. Modern dancers use dancing to express their innermost emotions, often to get closer to their inner-selves. Before attempting to choreograph a routine, the modern dancer decides which emotions to try to convey to the audience. Many modern dancers choose a subject near and dear to their hearts, such as a lost love or a personal failure. The dancer will choose music that relates to the story they wish to tell, or choose to use no music at all, and then choose a costume to reflect their chosen emotions. The evolution of modern dance continues to this day, with new artists building on the foundations laid by the pioneers of the early 20th century.