Modern dance

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Modern dance began with a refusal. In the late 19th century, a handful of artists looked at classical ballet, with its strict movement vocabulary, its corsets, and its pointe shoes, and decided none of it was for them. Isadora Duncan, who was born in 1877, called ballet ugly and meaningless gymnastics. She danced barefoot, with loose hair and free-flowing costumes, drawing inspiration from classical Greek arts and the simple act of running, skipping, and leaping. This was a western concert dance genre rising out of Europe and the United States, and it carried a charge of rebellion. But it was never only about rejecting ballet. Why did women's colleges start teaching aesthetic dance by the end of the 1880s? How did a burlesque skirt dancer with patented lighting equipment, a Chicago school built on Caribbean rhythm, and a choreographer who let chance decide his steps all belong to the same family tree? The answers stretch across three eras and two continents, and they begin with people who wanted, above all, freedom of movement.

• 2. A New Atmosphere

  ›

  Industrialization reshaped American life, and with it came a rising middle class with more disposable income and more free time. The decline of Victorian social strictures opened space for a new interest in health and physical fitness, and dance moved into that opening. As one account put it, a new dance was emerging as much from a rejection of social structures as from a dissatisfaction with ballet. Champions of physical education prepared the way, and gymnastic exercises served as technical starting points for young women who longed to dance. By the end of the 1880s, women's colleges were offering aesthetic dance courses. Emil Rath, who wrote at length about the emerging art form, described music and rhythmic bodily movement as twin sisters of art, come into existence simultaneously. He named Isadora Duncan and Maud Allan among those using a form of dancing that strove to portray in movement what a composer expressed in his work. He called it interpretative dancing, and that idea, that the body could read music aloud, would soon take a stage of its own.

• 3. The Free Dancers

  ›

  Loie Fuller, born in 1862, came to dance through burlesque, working as a skirt dancer who grew fascinated by what gas lighting did to her silk costumes. She built a form of natural movement and improvisation around revolutionary lighting equipment, and she patented her apparatus and methods. Her stage glowed with coloured gels and burning chemicals for luminescence, wrapped in voluminous translucent silk. Ruth St. Denis, born in 1879, took a different route into the body's expression. Drawn to the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the Japanese dancer Sada Yacco, she developed her own translations of Indian culture and mythology, touring extensively while researching Asian arts. Isadora Duncan, meanwhile, kept returning to the United States only to find her work poorly received at home. She placed her stress on the center, the torso, and folded humor into emotional expression. Europe welcomed her where America would not, and she died in Nice in 1927, the free dance she pioneered already passing into other hands.

• 4. European Currents

  ›

  Mary Wigman gave Germany its own branch of the movement, building Expressionist dance from theories of human motion. Around her worked Francois Delsarte, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, whose system was called Eurhythmics, and Rudolf Laban, each developing ways to map and teach human expression. Kurt Jooss carried the banner of Ausdruckstanz, and Harald Kreutzberg added his own voice to the European pioneers. These were not isolated experiments. When the Great Depression set in and fascism rose across Europe, a set of radical dancers turned their art toward the crises of the moment. They dramatized economic, social, ethnic, and political emergencies, trying to raise consciousness through the body. One of them, Hanya Holm, had trained under Wigman and taught at the Wigman School in Dresden. In 1931 she founded the New York Wigman School of Dance, which became the Hanya Holm Studio in 1936, carrying Wigman technique and Laban's theories of spatial dynamics across the Atlantic.

• 5. American Vocabularies

  ›

  In 1915, Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn founded the Denishawn school and dance company, and through its doors came the next generation. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman were all pupils and company members there. Graham, often regarded as the founding mother of modern 20th-century concert dance, became a Denishawn student in 1916 before moving to New York City in 1923. She judged ballet too one-sided, calling it European, imperialistic, and un-American. Her own Graham technique hinged on contraction and release, and she asked her students to Feel, to stay grounded to the floor while sending energy through the whole body and out to the audience. Her contributions centered the body's core rather than ballet's limbs, and tied breathing to movement. Around her, distinct training systems hardened into named techniques. Erick Hawkins, who came to Graham by way of George Balanchine and became the first male dancer in her company, grew interested in kinesiology, opened his own school in 1951, and built a forerunner of most somatic dance techniques.

• 6. Chance And Abstraction

  ›

  Merce Cunningham presented his first New York solo concert with the composer John Cage in 1944, and the partnership pulled dance toward the unknown. A former ballet student and Graham performer, Cunningham introduced chance procedures and pure movement, treating each element as expressive in itself and leaving the observer to determine what it communicated. His non-linear, non-climactic, non-psychological work planted the seeds for what would follow. José Limón took a more dramatic path. In 1946, after years with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, he founded his own company with Humphrey as artistic director, and under her mentorship created his signature work The Moor's Pavane in 1949. Anna Sokolow, trained by Martha Graham and Louis Horst, started her company around 1930 and built abstract compositions that revealed the tension and alienation of her time. Paul Taylor studied at the Juilliard School of Music and the Connecticut College School of Dance, danced for Cunningham, Graham, and Balanchine in that order, and founded the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954. From his ranks came Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean, Dan Wagoner, and Senta Driver.

• 7. African American Roots

  ›

  Katherine Dunham brought a flexible torso, an articulated pelvis, isolated limbs, and polyrhythmic movement into the modern dance she had trained in. She founded Ballet Negre in 1936, then the Katherine Dunham Dance Company in Chicago, and in 1945 opened a New York school teaching Katherine Dunham Technique, a fusion of African and Caribbean movement with ballet and modern dance. Drawing on traditions where one part of the body plays against another, she made the torso her focus. Pearl Primus turned African and Caribbean dance toward strong dramatic works built on large leaps, often grounded in the writing of black authors and in racial issues. She set dances to Langston Hughes's 1944 The Negro Speaks of Rivers and to Lewis Allan's 1945 Strange Fruit, and her company grew into the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute. Alvin Ailey studied under Lester Horton, Bella Lewitzky, and later Martha Graham before forming the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York in 1958. He drew on what he called his blood memories of Texas, the blues, spirituals, and gospel, and gave the form its most celebrated work, Revelations, in 1960.

• 8. What Came After

  ›

  Postmodern dance arrived in the 1960s, when American society questioned truths and ideologies in both politics and art. Choreographers stopped building specific schools or styles, and the influences from earlier dance grew vague and fragmented. The formalism that Graham and her peers had so carefully constructed was now the thing to be rejected, alongside new tools like performance art, contact improvisation, and release technique. Contemporary dance had already begun forming in the 1950s, combining modern dance elements with classical ballet and reaching outside the West for material. It borrowed African dancing with its characteristic bent knees and absorbed Butoh, the Japanese form that itself developed in the 1950s. The writer Treva Bedinghaus described how a modern dancer first decides which emotions to convey, often choosing a subject near and dear, a lost love or a personal failure, then selects music or no music at all. That impulse, to dance from the innermost self, runs straight back to the barefoot freedom of free dance, the heritage that even the most divergent forms still share.