THE HISTORY OF MODERN DANCE
INTRODUCTION
Modern Dance, a tradition of theatrical dance unique to the 20th century. Modern Dance flourished in areas that lacked strong ballet traditions, such as in the United States where ballet companies were imported from Europe. Although Modern Dance originated in Europe, by 1930 the United States had become the center for dance experimentation. Many early modern dances were miniature-solos of highly compressed effect. They were unlike anything known, for dance at that time was dominated by late 19th-centrury ballets, which were characterized by large casts, a great variety of dance numbers, and spectacular scenic effects. But ballet itself was not always so monumental in scale, and just as ballet has evolved over the centuries as a changing tradition, so also has Modern Dance during its shorter period of extistence.
The history of Modern Dance can be divided into three periods:
THE EARLY PERIOD: 1900
The first three decades of Modern Dance - embracing the careers of the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and the German dancer Mary Wigman - were preceded by a period of reaction against what many dancers saw as the empty spectacle of late 19th-century ballet. Contemporary with this reaction were two developments that helped inspire a freer kind of dance movement. One was the system of natural expressive gestures developed by the 19th-century French philosopher of movement, Francois Delsarte, as an alternative to the artificial mannerisms then customary in the theater. The other was eurhythmics, a system for teaching musical rhythms through body movement, created by the Swiss music educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and later used as a training method by many dancers.
Seeking to give their dance more communicative power, the early modern dancers looked beyond the dominant tradition of Western theatrical dance - ballet as they knew it in the late 19th-century - and drew on earlier or non-Western sources for inspiration. During the same period, some ballet choreographers, such as the Russian-born Michel Fokine, also looked to similar sources, reacting against late 19th-century ballet as vehemently as the modern dancers did.
Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan used Greek sculpture as a movement source. She danced in bare feet rather than in ballet slippers and appeared in a simple tunic rather than in the corseted ballet costume of the late 19th century. Locating the source of movement in the solar plexus, she created dances that alternated between resisting and yielding to gravity. Her response to the music of romantic composers such as Frederic Chopin and the Hungarian Franz Liszt dicated the form of her choreography.
Ruth St. Denis
Ruth St. Denis turned to the dance styles of India, Egypt and Asia as the basis for her compositions. Like Duncan, St. Denis began as a solo dancer, but in 1915 she formed a company, "Denishawn", with her husband, Ted Shawn. She trained dancers to dance as she did, in a diverse range of styles. Later American choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus continued St. Denis's interest in ethnic styles.
Mary Wigman
Mary Wigman looked to Africa and Eastern Asia for choreographic inspiration. Like St. Denis, she presented both solo and group works, often arranged in cycles. Along with other German modern dancers - Rudolf von Laban, Kurt Jooss and Harald Kreutzberg - she made extensive use of masks. The rise of the Nazi political party in Germany in the 1920's ended the German modern dance movement.
Kurt Jooss
THE 1930'S & 40'S
About 1930, in New York City, the second wave of modern dancers emerged. They included the Americans Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, all of whom had danced with "Denishawn", the German-born American dancer Hanya Holm, who came from Mary Wigman's company, as well as Lester Horton. These dancers rejected external movement sources in favor of internal ones. They turned to basic human movement experiences, such as the actions of breathing and walking, and then transformed these natural actions into dance movement.
Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman
Martha Graham evolved her technique of contraction and release from the natural exhalation and inhalation of breathing. In her early abstract works she explored movement initiated in the torso. In the late 1930's, Graham became interested in narrative structure and literary subject matter. With the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi she created narrative locales that were both mythic and psychic. She danced the roles of female protagonists confronting moments of crisis; other dancers represented various aspects of the protagonist's self in crisis.
Martha Graham
Doris Humphrey evolved her technique of fall and recovery from the natural dynamic of the human footfall, the giving into and rebound from gravity. This technique became a metaphor for the relationship of the individual to a greater force, whether a social group or spiritual presence. After Humphrey stopped performing and disbanded the company she had formed with Charles Weidman, she continued to choreograph for her protege, the Mexian-American dancer and choreographer Jose Limon. The choreographic sources for Humphrey's later works were words and gestures rather than her own movement experiences.
Jose Limon
Hanya Holm worked in a more varied range than either Graham or Humphrey did. She created humorous dances and dances of social commentary, as did Weidman. Beginning in the late 1940's, she also choreographed for musicals, being one of the first to bring the style of Modern Dance and Ballet in opposition to one another. Whereas Modern Dance was established as a technique with its own internal coherence, Ballet was defined by reaffirming the essential tenets of its tradition. Ballet and Modern choreographers focused on the purity of their traditions.
Hanya Holm
Lester Horton is considered one of the most influential founders of American Modern Dance. After dancing with the Michio Ito Company he formed his own group of dancers. Combining dance and drama into a total theatrical experience, he was intimately involved in creating all aspects of a production. His fascination with the American-Indian, ethnic dance, human sensuality and cultural history was expressed in a prodigious body of work with themes ranging from the classics to melodrama, social concerns to farce. Horton's "choreodramas" were built on a movement technique that is still taught and used in dance schools and companies today.
Lester Horton
Horton felt that the body itself was the determining factor and that it should be developed in as many ways as would be needed by a choreographer. In a quote from the 1930's: "I am sincerely trying to create a dance techniqe based entirely on corrective exercises, created with a knowledge of human anatomy, a technique that will correct faults and prepare a dancer for any type of dancing he may wish to follow, a technique having all basic movements which govern the actions of the body, combined with a knowledge of the origins of the movements and a sense of artistic design."
Alvin Ailey
According to some, it was a very Utopian approach. Unlike the Martha Graham technique based on the contraction, or the Humphrey-Weidman technique based on the arc and rebound and rising and falling of the body, the Horton technique defies any limits on what the body can do. Horton was concerned with the whole body. There are exercises for every part of the body, even eyebrows and tongue!
Carmen de Lavallade and Josephine Baker
Despite his early death in 1953 at age 47, his impact was tremendous. Horton's company members and students included well-known dancers such as Alvin Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade, Bella Lewitzky and James Truitte.
Bella Lewitzky
POSTWAR DEVELOPMENTS
The third period of Modern Dance began after World War II ended in 1945 and continues today. Such American dancers as Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham, James Waring, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey and Twyla Tharp found their movement sources in the proliferation of 20th-century dance styles. Their works combined and fused techniques from Social Dance, Ballet and Modern Dance. (In the years following World War II, Ballet choreographers also borrowed just as freely from Modern Dance.)
Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham revolutionized conventional Dance by fusing Graham's technique with traditional Ballet, locating the source of movement in the spine. He organized the changes of movement through methods based on chance, and he considered music and decor independent of the dance. His works revealed individual dancers experiencing their relation to present time and abstract space, rather than to history and locale.
Twyla Tharp
James Waring and, more recently, Twyla Tharp have worked with both Ballet companies and with their own Modern companies. Along with Paul Taylor and Alwin Nikolais, they employed a sense of humor in their choreographies. Odd juxtapositions of movement created these humorous effects, as did parodies of their own and other's dance styles.
Paul Taylor with Eileen Cropley in "Aureole"
Tharp began her career as part of the 1960's "Avant-Garde". During this time of social upheaval, the American dancers Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk and others created works at the extreme limit of what is considered Dance. They became interested in everyday activities, manipulations of objects and mixed-media presentations. In the 1970's the dance mainstream came to accept these choreographers' works, but few so completely as Tharp's.
Pina Bausch
Modern (or Postmodern) Dance in the mid-1980's, no longer interested in traditional techniques, relied on theatrical elements and the use of literary and pictorial devices. "Tanztheater Wuppertal", founded by the German dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch, has performed evening-length, mixed-media works - such as "The Seven Deadly Sins" - that stem from the tradition of the expressive Dance of Kurt Jooss.
Other notable postmodern dancers are the American Mark Morris (who worked with Twyla Tharp) and the ballet dancer Eliot Feld; and Karole Armitage, a dancer and the choreographer of the "Mollino Room", performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and the American Ballet Theatre in 1986.
Karole Armitage
Armitage's work is characterized by stabbing, insectlike motions and savage confrontations; among the pieces composed for her own group is "The Watteau Duets", which merges dancing on pointe with torso movements in the style of Merce Cunningham. Much interest has also been attached to Sankai Juku, a group of Japanese dancers trained in Modern and Classical Dance. Their work is based on Buto, a form of dance theater that avoids structured choreography and strives to express primitive emotions by making minimal use of costuming and actual movement. In their "hanging event", dancers suspended upside-down on ropes are slowly lowered, uncoiling their bodies as they descend.