Modern Dance

I

Introduction

Modern Dance, Western theatrical dance form of the 20th century. Work that is collectively labelled modern dance is by no means uniform in either style or content. It relates in one way or other to theories and concepts of modernism formulated by artists and thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century. The essential character of modernism in general is its rejection of established tradition and re-examination of the nature of different art forms. There was a concern to question accepted ideologies and a quest for intrinsic values. This was, in part, a response to industrialization, the rise of science, and the decline of organized religion. Western society was loosening the bonds of evangelical Christianity and an increasingly secularized society was searching for new values and a refuge from relentless commercialism. The concepts of modernism were a guiding force in the evolution of dance in the 20th century.

II

The Early Pioneers of Modern Dance

Dancers such as Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller were early pioneers of modern dance, illustrating two very different responses to the new age: Duncan sought a renaissance of natural movement through a rediscovery of the simplicity of ancient Greece; Fuller explored the new technology of stage lighting, which could produce extraordinary effects when playing over the swirling fabrics she manipulated. Both were Americans whose work was better known in Europe. Both discarded the corsets and point shoes that were at that time considered the legitimate accoutrements of the ballet dancer. The sensation that Duncan caused by dancing barefoot can scarcely be realized today.

Rudolf von Laban is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern dance theory and a seminal practitioner of European modern dance. He developed a systematic analysis of human movement in time and space that led to a coherent system of dance notation known as kinetography or Labanotation. His legacy was disseminated by his pupils and associates, while he rushed on to new discoveries and new applications for his theories, such as his championing of dance movement therapy, and his formulation of theories of educational dance and studies of time and motion in relation to industrial production.

One of Laban’s most celebrated students and associates, Mary Wigman, enjoyed great renown as a choreographer and performer in the period between the two world wars. As an artist who chose to remain in Germany throughout World War II, however, she found herself cold-shouldered by the post-war artistic establishment, which was concerned to purge all associations with the Nazi regime. Like many other modern dancers Wigman was concerned to establish the independence of dance as an art form and began by divorcing dance from dependence on music. She created work of great expressive force, seeking a universally comprehensible gesture-based form of artistic communication.

Kurt Jooss was also part of this central European dance movement, and formed, together with Sigurd Leeder, the Ballets Jooss. His major work, The Green Table (1932), was an Expressionist vision of the horrors of war framed by a famous scene of masked diplomats negotiating round the eponymous green table. Jooss made work with contemporary themes, abandoning linear narrative in favour of a collage of themes loosely juxtaposed. Like Laban, Jooss had to leave Hitler’s Germany, only returning to the Folkwangschule dance school in Essen (which he had founded in 1927) in 1949. Essen was the only major cultural centre in Germany to maintain the tradition of European modern dance as a theatrical art form.

III

Modern Dance in the United States

Modern dance fared better in the United States, where the tradition of classical ballet had scarcely taken root at the turn of the 20th century. The school started by Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, known as Denishawn, produced a generation of modern dance practitioners. It taught an eclectic mixture of dance styles and techniques in the service of the exotic choreography of its principals. The Denishawn Company performed works loosely based on the dances of Egypt, India, and Asia and presented these largely on the vaudeville circuit.

Pupils of the school, such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, rebelled against the pantomime and spectacular effects of the Denishawn style as well as against the prevailing orthodoxy of ballet. Graham was the first to leave the school and develop an original technique rooted in a version of Expressionism. Graham linked movement to emotional expression and developed a vocabulary to communicate emotions, digging deep into her own psyche as a woman and as an American. The contraction and release of the breath and the muscular energy this generated was central to her technique as was her expressive use of weight. She was a performer of great personal magnetism and created a large repertoire that has been widely seen and widely performed. Her own performing career stretched from 1916 to 1969 and her choreographic career stretched into the 1970s. Based in the psychoanalytical tradition of the 20th century, she projected a world of myths and dreams. The spare angularity of her movement that thrusts up out of the ground and descends to it again was complemented by the scenic art of the Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi, and the musical talents of her friend and mentor, the composer and teacher Louis Horst. Archetypes of American myths, such as the pioneer women in Frontier (1935) and Appalachian Spring (1944), as well as those of Greek mythology—Medea in Cave of the Heart (1946) and the eponymous Clytemnestra (1958)—are portrayed.

Doris Humphrey’s work, though nurtured in the same Denishawn cradle, was very different. Humphrey’s passions were under the control of a cool and rational intellect. She wished to disentangle the art form of dance from the vaudeville trappings of Denishawn and the aristocratic baggage of ballet. She intended to create an independent, democratic form of expression that would deal with subjects worthy of consideration in a modern society. One of her earliest works, Water Study (1928), was performed without music. She believed that dance should stand on terms of equality with other art forms and assert its independence and relevance to the present day. Themes of social organization were important to Humphrey as seen in works such as The Life of the Bee (1928). Her concerns found their expression in her organization of groups in space. She often used groups at different levels within the stage space and explored the expressive potential of different spatial forms. Her technique was based on the principle of fall and recovery as she considered that dynamic tension was generated within the “arc between two deaths”: that is, within the 90° angle between the prone and the upright.

Humphrey’s performing career was cut short by a fall and an arthritic condition of the left hip, and her work was carried forward through one of her pupils who went on to form his own company, José Limón. Her book, The Art of Making Dances (1959), is a landmark publication in the story of modern dance. Few other practitioners would or could explicate the theoretical principles of their craft.

Merce Cunningham was one of the major innovators in the field of modern dance and was a member of Martha Graham’s company. He redefined the concept of modern dance, turning away from the celebration of individual expression or even the exploration of an individual’s relationship to society. In this version of modernism the emphasis was on form rather than content: meaning was to be found by the spectator, not dictated by the artist. Cunningham’s works may be performed to music with a stage set, but the elements are created separately and united only in performance, often only on the day of the performance. The movement has its own rhythm. Many types of chance procedures are introduced into the compositional process. Movement phrases are created, but their order may depend on the throw of the dice.

Cunningham’s musical influence, John Cage, was a prophet of the new music, experimenting with time, tone, and silence, just as Cunningham experimented with time, space, movement, and stillness. There is no attempt to integrate the elements of the event in the service of one art form; they merely occupy the same time/space position. Cunningham’s work paradoxically returns to many of the values to be found in classical ballet: impersonality and formalism, together with a lightness and buoyancy not found in the anguished weightiness of early modernism. Yet Cunningham is not striving towards a goal of classical perfection and balance; he does not defy gravity in order to show the dancer leaping towards the heavens or transcending the earthly body in spiritual Romanticism. What Cunningham defies is expectation, and to do this he requires his dancers to use their spinal columns as if they were coiled springs, controlling movement in order to derail the logical development. In Cunningham’s art the movement is an eclectic mix, as mundane and ungainly actions are often made the subject of artistic communication.

IV

Postmodernism and After

The term “postmodern“ is sometimes applied to Cunningham, although this is largely considered to be a misapplication. Originally the term was considered appropriate for a group of experimental artists, whose prominent members included Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, and Lucinda Childs. Many of them came together in a composition class taught by Robert Dunn at the Cunningham Studio and they were based at Judson’s Church Theatre during the 1960s. They moved beyond the limits of Cunningham’s choreography, questioning every aspect of the art form. They took dance out of the confines of theatre and into the streets, and introduced differences in the types of bodies, styles of mundane movement, and the shapes of the spaces they used. Choreographers such as Brown created works where the dancers were suspended at 90° angles to the vertical, and walked on walls. They took abstraction to the limits, rejecting every sort of extraneous matter and reduced the form to its minimal component parts. Improvisation became an accepted performance strategy as the emphasis turned from product to process. The dance revolution achieved credibility with the artistic avant-garde as a form whose innate immediacy and ephemerality made it attractive in a world of op art, pop art, Neo-Dadaism, action painting, and live art.

After the 1960s, however, new artists rediscovered the traditional techniques of narrative, expression, virtuosity, theatricality, and drama, although they put them together differently from before: narrative, but not linear narrative, virtuosity combined with high-camp theatricals, and apparent incongruities abounded. Audio and visual technology offered new dimensions; time could run backwards on a video-player. New theories of art developed from philosophers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, who anatomized the universe of language, leaving signs and symbols rather than words and meanings. Like many other words, the term “postmodern” became so diluted as to lose any specificity.

In Britain, where ballet hegemony was strongly entrenched, modernism gained a toehold only in the late 1960s with the advent of Robert North at Ballet Rambert (now Rambert Dance Company) and the founding of the London Contemporary Dance School and Company by Robin Howard and Robert Cohan. The British pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s such as Margaret Morris and Ruby Ginner and the émigrés such as Laban, Jooss, and Leeder had made little impression on the public consciousness, although they did influence dance considerably in the educational and community dance sectors. Many things seemed to happen simultaneously in Britain, where Graham’s technique jostled with the most avant-garde forms of contact improvisation, as British artists visited the United States and returned as disciples of styles developed at different periods. Performers such as Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, Rosemary Butcher, Lloyd Newson, and the New Dance artists, including Emilyn Claid, Gaby Agis, Sue MacLennan, and Laurie Booth, cover a whole spectrum of styles and techniques developed and adapted from the European and American traditions that are collectively known as modern dance.

There are also many dance artists making connections between non-Western forms and the theories of modern dance: these include Japanese-Americans such as Eiko and Koma or South Asian artists working in Britain such as Shobana Jeyasingh. There is also an increasingly blurred line between modern dance and ballet as modern American choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Carole Armitage, and Mark Morris are increasingly commissioned by ballet companies. The European tradition is also resurgent, with artists such as Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke in Germany, and Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker in Belgium among the most prominent.