The Ballet Russes with Diagaliev as impresario expanded the range of ballet. The Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) with choreography by Nijinsky and music by Stravinsky paved the way to a whole new approach to dance.
Twentieth Century Dance
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The Ballet Russes with Diagaliev as impresario expanded the range of ballet. The Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) with choreography by Nijinsky and music by Stravinsky paved the way to a whole new approach to dance. |
Modern Dance
While classical dancers try to conceal any display of the physical effort that goes into creating the dance, modern dancers, like modern artists, exalt the process and the techniques of dancing, thus making new the art of dance.
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Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), |
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Ruth St. Denis (1878?-1968) Was a tireless champion of dance as an independent art form, at a time when it was considered little more than a minor branch of show business or, at best, an adjunct to grand opera. Her greatest achievement was to have created serious dance from the materials of popular theater. With her husband, Ted SHAWN, whom she had married in 1914, she founded (1915) the DENISHAWN dance school in Los Angeles, where Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, among others, studied. Where Duncan expressed her feelings directly and immediately, St. Denis objectified hers in dramas of Eastern ritual. Her movement was minimal: an evocative walk, a subtle turn of the head, marvelous undulations of the arms. |
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Martha Graham (1894-1991) The eclectic and innovative character of early modern dance is best illustrated in the work of Martha Graham (1894-1991). Graham once defined dance as "making visible the interior landscape." Following Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky, Graham rejected the conventional positions of classical ballet and explored the expressive power of natural movements of the body. But Graham went even further-she sought in dance a direct correspondence between body movement and human emotion. Graham attempted to find definitive gestures for feeling states. Dramatic abstraction, along with a fierce, earthy expressiveness, was a major feature of Graham's style and of early modern dance in general. |
| Katherine Dunham (1910- ) Is an African-American choreographer and anthropologist who studied Afro-Carribean ritual and social dancing and developed respect for a style of modern dance that played one part of the body against the other. |
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George Balanchine (1904-1983) His style is called neoclassical because the era of Marius Petipa is known in ballet history as the heyday of classicism; while Balanchine slimmed down and speeded up and occasionally turned inside-out the classical idiom, his primary concern, like Petipa's, was a felicitous match between steps and score, between structured movement sequences and musical structure. "The structure of a ballet must be tight, compact, like the structure of a building; good ballets move in measured space and time, like the planets," he said. He extended the classical ballet vocabulary to capture the essence of modern contemporary times. |
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Arthur Mitchell (1934- ) Became one of the founders of The Dance Theatre of Harlem, the first classically oriented ballet company in the United States with only black dancers. |
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Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) Ailey concentrated on ballets that used blues, folk songs, & gospel to celebrate the southern Black experience in America. |
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Twyla Tharp (1941- ) Twyla is considered a Post Modern choreographer in that she combines several styles--classical ballet, Jazz & Modern--and mixes them together to create a style that is slightly witty. |
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Expressionistic & PostModern choreographer Pina Bausch has expressly determined that she is less interested in how people move as in what moves them. She wants to learn something and transmit something about their surroundings, about people's daily lives, their cares, fears, problems and joys. RealPlayer Quicktime Mediaplayer Two Cigarettes in the Dark |
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Collaborating with radical painter Robert Rauschenberg and composer John Cage, Cunningham stripped dance of meaning. He experimented with improvisation and chance movements in dance--sometimes even flipping a coin to see who would start a dance piece. |
