Modern Dance - History - The First Generation

Early Period – 1900

The first three decades embrace the careers of the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and the German dancer, Mary Wigman. This was preceded by a period of reaction against the empty spectacle of late 19th-century ballet.

There were two developments that helped inspire a freer kind of dance movement:

- The system of natural expressive gestures – developed by French Actor Francois Delsarte.
- Eurhythmics – a system for teaching musical rhythms through body movement – created by Swiss music educator, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze.

Early modern dancers looked beyond the dominant tradition of Western theatrical dance (ballet) in order to give their dance a more communicative power. They drew on archaic or exotic sources for inspiration. During the same period, some ballet choreographers also looked to similar sources.

Isadora Duncan used Greek sculpture as a movement source and danced in bare feet and a simple tunic. She created dances that alternated between resisting and yielding to gravity. Her response to the music of romantic composers such as Chopin and Liszt dictated the form of her choreography.

Ruth St. Denis turned to ethnic and Asian dance styles as a basis and in 1915 she formed the dance 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 her interest in ethnic styles.

Mary Wigman looked to Africa and the Orient for inspiration. She presented both solo and group works, often arranged in cycles. Along with other German modern dancers – Rudolf von Laban, Kurt Jooss and Herald Kreutzberg, she made extensive use of masks.

http://www.dancedirectory.co.za/content/articles/articles.asp?MID=270&Section=ModernDanceandHipHop

Dorris Humphrey

Doris Batcheller Humphrey (October 17, 1895 – December 29, 1958) was a dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Humphrey was born in Oak Park, Illinois but grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She was the daughter of Horace Buckingham Humphrey and Julia Ellen Wells and was a descendant of pilgrim William Brewster. Along with her contemporaries, Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers, who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As a result of many of her works being annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed to this day.

In Chicago, she both studied and taught dance, opening her own dance school in 1913 at the age of 19. In 1917, she moved to California and entered the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, where she studied, performed, taught classes, and learned choreography. Her creations from this era, Valse Caprice (Scarf Dance), Soaring, and Scherzo Waltz (Hoop Dance) are all still performed today. Humphrey toured the Orient for two years, followed by a successful career in American vaudeville theaters.

In 1928, she and fellow dancer Charles Weidman separated from the Denishawn School and moved to New York City, to become key figures in the modern dance movement. Her choreography explored the nuances of the human body's responses to gravity, embodied in her principle of fall and recovery. Her choreography from these early years includes Water Study, Life of the Bee, Two Ecstatic Themes and The Shakers.
The Humphrey-Weidman Company was successful even in the darkness of the Great Depression, touring America and developing new styles and new works based not on old tales, but on current events and concerns. In the mid-1930s, Humphrey created the New Dance Trilogy, a triptych comprising With My Red Fires, New Dance, and the now-lost Theater Piece.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Humphrey

Martha Graham

“I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements . . .I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.”
–Martha Graham

Born in 1894 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Graham spent most of her formative years on the West coast. Her father, a doctor specializing in nervous disorders, was very interested in diagnosis through attention to physical movement. This belief in the body’s ability to express its inner senses was pivotal in Graham’s desire to dance. Athletic as a young girl, Graham did not find her calling until she was in her teens. In 1911, the ballet dancer Ruth St. Denis performed at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. Inspired by St. Denis’ performance, Graham enrolled in an arts-oriented junior college, and later to the newly opened Denishawn School. Denishawn was founded by Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn to teach techniques of American and world dance. Over eight years, as both a student and an instructor, Graham made Denishawn her home.

Working primarily with Ted Shawn, Graham improved her technique and began dancing professionally. In “Xochital”, a dance made specifically for her by Shawn, Graham danced the role of an attacked Aztec maiden. It was the wildly emotional performance of this role that garnered her first critical acclaim. By 1923, eight years after entering Denishawn, she was ready to branch out.

 She found her chance dancing in the vaudeville revue Greenwich Village Follies. At the Greenwich Village Follies, Graham was able to design and choreograph her own dances. Though this work provided her with some economic and artistic independence, she longed for a place to make greater experiments with dance. It was then that she took a position at the Eastman School of Music, where she was free of the constraints of public performance. At Eastman, Graham was given complete control over her classes and the entire dance program. Graham saw this as an opportunity to engage her best pupils in the experiential dance she was beginning to create.
 
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/martha-graham/about-the-dancer/497/ 

Ted Shawn

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=ted+shawn&hl=en&sa=X&rlz=1T4ACAW_enGB349GB349&biw=1024&bih=322&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnsb&tbnid=lSo6Hw25rb8OMM:&imgrefurl=http://www.britannica.com.sg/dance/shawn-ted-378428.html&docid=28bmYsbfQ865tM&imgurl=http://www.britannica.com.sg/article_images/26300.jpg&w=311&h=300&ei=EkkhT8-iEIuUOpHHiL0I&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=359&sig=100399837663214566333&page=1&tbnh=162&tbnw=186&start=0&ndsp=5&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0&tx=113&ty=59

Ted Shawn (21 October 1891 — 9 January 1972), originally Edwin Myers Shawn, was one of the first notable male pioneers of American modern dance. Along with creating Denishawn with former wife Ruth St. Denis he is also responsible for the creation of the well known all-male company Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. With his innovative ideas of masculine movement he is one of the most influential choreographer and dancer of his day. He is also the founder and creator of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts.



Together, Shawn and Ruth St. Denis established the principle of Music Visualization in modern dance —- a concept that called for movement equivalents to the timbres, dynamics, and structural shapes of music in addition to its rhythmic base.

Ted Shawn's nine published books provided a foundation for Modern Dance, and particularly Fundamentals of a Dance Education, Dance We Must and Every Little Movement.^[12]

• (1920) Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet
• (1926) The American Ballet
• (1929) Gods Who Dance
• (1935) Fundamentals of a Dance Education
• (1940) Dance We Must
• (1944) How Beautiful Upon the Mountain
• (1954) Every Little Movement: a Book About Francois Delsarte
• (1959) Thirty-three Years of American Dance
• (1960) One Thousand and One Night Stands (autobiography, with Gray Poole)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Shawn

Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis - Ruth St. Denis founded Adelphi University's dance program in 1938 which was one of the first dance departments in an American university. It has since become a cornerstone of Adelphi's Department of Performing Arts.

Her early works are indicative of her interests in exotic mysticism and spirituality. Many companies currently include a collection of her signature solos in their repertoires, including the programme, “The Art of the Solo,” a showcase of famous solos of modern dance pioneers. Several early St. Denis solos (including “Incense” and ”The Legend of the Peacock”) were presented on September 29, 2006, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A centennial salute was scheduled with the revival premiere of St. Denis' "Radha," commissioned by Countess Anastasia Thamakis of Greece. The program's director, Mino Nicolas, has been instrumental in the revival of these key solos.

One of her more famous pupils was Martha Graham, who attended Ms. St. Denis' school of dance, Denishawn, that she had started with her husband, Ted Shawn. Doris Humphrey, Evan Burrows Fontaine and Charles Weidman also studied at Denishawn, and Graham, Humphrey, Weidman and the future silent film star Louise Brooks all performed as dancers with the Denishawn company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_St._Denis

Isadora Duncan

Isadora Duncan (May 27, 1877 — September 14, 1927) was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life. She performed to acclaim throughout Europe.

She rejected traditional ballet steps to stress improvisation, emotion and the human form. Duncan believed that classical ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, was "ugly and against nature"; she gained a wide following that allowed her to set up a school to teach.
Duncan became so famous that she inspired artists and authors to create sculpture, jewelry, poetry, novels, photographs, watercolors, prints and paintings of her.

Throughout her career Duncan did not like the commercial aspects of public performance, regarding touring, contracts and other practicalities as distractions from her real mission: the creation of beauty and the education of the young. A gifted, if unconventional pedagogue, she was the founder of three schools dedicated to teaching her dance philosophy to groups of young girls (a brief effort to include boys was unsuccessful). The first, in Grunewald, Germany, gave rise to her most celebrated troupe of pupils, dubbed the Isadorables, who took her surname and subsequently performed both with Duncan and independently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isadora_Duncan

Loie Fuller

Born Marie Louise Fuller in the Chicago suburb of Fullersburg, now Hinsdale, Illinois, Fuller began her theatrical career as a professional child actress and later choreographed and performed dances in burlesque (as a skirt dancer), vaudeville, and circus shows. An early free dance practitioner, Fuller developed her own natural movement and improvisation techniques. Fuller combined her choreography with silk costumes illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design.

 

Although Fuller became famous in America through works such as Serpentine Dance (1891), she felt that she was not taken seriously by the public who still thought of her as an actress. Her warm reception in Paris during a European tour persuaded Fuller to remain in France and continue her work. A regular performer at the Folies Bergère with works such as Fire Dance, Fuller became the embodiment of the Art Nouveau movement. An 1896 film of the Serpentine Dance by the pioneering film-makers Auguste and Louie Lumière gives a hint of what her performance was like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loie_Fuller

The start of modern dance

Loie Fuller - Loie fuller was a dancer of the 1800-1900's, that rebelled against ballet in her own way by dancing with no shoes on, in a way that was completely different to what the audiences of then knew of and had never seen before. It wasnt all about standing perfectly and placing each movement, it was much more free flowing and unbound in a sense it looked more enjoyable to perform.

 http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=loie+fuller+contemporary+dancer&um=1&hl=en&safe=active&sa=N&tbm=isch&tbnid=BD0G2bTx5G5TeM:&imgrefurl=http://quoteagentleman.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/vintage-dance-the-theatrical-form-of-poetry-par-excellence/&docid=JDXZXFxhZ67HpM&imgurl=http://quoteagentleman.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/vintage-loie_fuller.jpg&w=800&h=553&ei=-VgET5PJJIGWhQeTnfjhBQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=254&vpy=266&dur=188&hovh=187&hovw=270&tx=147&ty=100&sig=104985766232642052033&page=1&tbnh=116&tbnw=164&start=0&ndsp=19&ved=1t:429,r:7,s:0&biw=1024&bih=571

Isadora Duncan- Isadora Duncan was a friend of Loie Fuller who was also a great influence in the formation of contemporary dance dance (then known as modern dance) she bought a flamboyant style inspired by greek and egyptian art to contemporary dance.

 http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=isadora+duncan&um=1&hl=en&safe=active&sa=N&tbm=isch&tbnid=_6Zw5hnmFjOBlM:&imgrefurl=http://www.meaus.com/isadora-duncan.htm&docid=VOo44lzea0dakM&imgurl=http://www.meaus.com/isadora-duncan4.JPEG&w=440&h=320&ei=W1wET763JNKDhQfkvOzNAQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=421&vpy=135&dur=157&hovh=191&hovw=263&tx=149&ty=87&sig=104985766232642052033&page=1&tbnh=107&tbnw=145&start=0&ndsp=23&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0&biw=1024&bih=571

Ruth St. Denis - Ruth St. Denis was also a friend of Loie Fuller, she bought to Modern Dance, a quite erotic style for back then, which was a very new thing for the audience. St. Dennis was greatly influenced by indian and different cultures, her style of dance was barefoot, flirty and flamboyant and very eastern, not at all western.

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=ruth+st+denis&hl=en&sa=X&biw=819&bih=258&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnsb&tbnid=Aha53P0v7JurfM:&imgrefurl=http://artsalive.ca/en/dan/mediatheque/photos/photoWindow.asp%3FmediaID%3D288&docid=loQMyeemW-MnCM&imgurl=http://artsalive.ca/upload/dan/den_0448vu_full.jpg&w=345&h=500&ei=jOsOT7zLCcek8QPBsbzuAw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=233&vpy=-67&dur=110&hovh=270&hovw=186&tx=106&ty=251&sig=100399837663214566333&page=1&tbnh=94&tbnw=66&start=0&ndsp=16&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0

Ruth St. Denis married a dancer Ted Shawn in 1914 and they created a dance school named Denishawn which trained iconic contemporary dancers Martha Graham and Dorris Humphrey.