Modern / Contemporary

Modern dance emerged as a Western performance expression during “modernism”, a movement of artists, writers and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist traditions such as classicism which came to represent bourgeois culture. In dance, the established tradition at this time was ballet. Dance researcher Susan Au writes in her book Ballet & Modern Dance:

Ballet in America in the late 19th century mirrored the state of contemporary European ballet: an increasing emphasis on technical virtuosity and visual spectacle had resulted in the loss of expressional content and depth. Ballet scenes often formed a part of sprawling extravaganzas calculated to dazzle the eye with the splendor and ingenuity of their settings, costumes and stage effects. In this context, dance became little more than an extension of the decorative scheme: entertaining, enjoyable and undemanding.

Modern dance emerged as a counter-expression to ballet which was considered a historicist and elitist tradition originating as the entertainment of royalty in Europe’s 16th century courts emphasizing formal values such as clarity, harmony, symmetry and order as well as spectacular display. Au observes that modern dance challenged “contemporary attitudes and preoccupations” through freedom of experimentation.

The term modern dance coined in about 1927, quickly became an umbrella concept to encompass the development of all modern dance forms from its pioneering stage to present. Contemporary dance was coined in the United Kingdom in 1966 and used as another term to describe modern dance. While both terms are generally used interchangeably, there are some differences. Modern dance is also often understood specifically in reference to early modern dance techniques or forms that emerged during the early period of modernism in the West. Given this, contemporary dance has been widely used in place of modern dance (except when specifically referring early modern dance). Contemporary dance has now come to refer to all dance forms incorporating Western modern dance forms as well as the contemporization of established traditional dance forms, including the contemporization of ethnic dance forms such as contemporary Indian, which has little or no Western influence. Nonetheless, there tends to be wider usage of the term contemporary dance in UK, Asia, Australia, Western and Eastern Europe, while modern dance is most often used in Germany, America and American-impacted Asian countries such as the Philippines, Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

Early Years
American iconoclasts Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), Loie Fuller (1862-1928) and Ruth St Denis (1879-1968) led the way with their avant-garde forays long before modern dance was named. Considered as the forerunners of modern dance, each dancer experimented with expressing the human body and spirit in her own way. Duncan, called the “Puritanical Pagan”, skipped, jumped and ran barefoot in a simple tunic while Fuller created luminescent images with her china silk scarf dancing on a glass platform lit from below. St. Denis’s “goddesses, dancing girls, and harem women went beyond the popular orientalist fantasies to show the metamorphoses from the physical to the spiritual.”, as noted by dance critic Deborah Jowitt.

Martha Graham (1894-1991) and Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), both danced with Denishawn, a company formed by St Denis and her partner Ted Shawn (1891-1972) in 1920, and rebelled against the artificial exotic dance entertainment of the company as well as the decadence and constraints of ballet. Dance writers have noted that both Humphrey and Graham shared “a strong socio-cultural concern that dance should be recognized as an art form communicating the rhythm of contemporary life” and “should provoke, stimulate and inform rather than simply entertain”. American dance critic John Martin describes modern dance at this time as “movement made to externalize personal authentic experience”. Both Graham and Humphrey developed their own dance techniques, styles and vocabularies. Humphrey explored “fall and recovery” while Graham experimented with “contraction and release”. Their new forms became accepted by the establishment in the 1930s and are referred to as modern dance.

Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Maude Allen and Ruth St. Denis are regarded as the avant garde, i.e. predecessors of modern dance, while Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey are considered the pioneers of modern dance. Graham codified and systemized her dance form, which was taught at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, a school she established in New York in 1927. Although Humphrey established exercises and vocabulary based on “fall and recovery”, she was unable to demonstrate because she was stricken with polio and confined to a wheelchair. This left her dancers to re-conceive and re-generate her modern dance form. Later, dancers from both Graham’s and Humphrey’s companies went on to form their own dance companies, following their own vision and developing their own techniques.

Simultaneously in Europe, modern dance was introduced in the 1920s largely through the efforts of Kurt Joose (1901-1979) and Mary Wigman (1886-1973). They are viewed by Isa Partsch-Bergsohn in her book as the first generation of dancers in Germany who “regarded themselves as revolutionaries creating a new world” during post World War I after Germany’s defeat, a time when “all the nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetics and values it had represented” toppled. Joose and Wigman created Ausdrucktanz, also called German expressionist dance, influenced by German expressionistic painters. Wigman developed her form of modern dance based on her belief that “art grows out of the basic cause of existence” and is best known for her use of exaggeration, distortion and strong movements to convey emotional intensity. Joose included large-group unison work and individual characters to create productions that were socially conscious. His best known production was The Green Table (1932) depicting the futility of peace negotiations of the times. Kurt Joose established Ballet Joose in 1928 and was dance director at the Folkwang Hochschuler from 1929 till 1934 when he was exiled and again after his exile in1949. Pina Bausch succeeded Joose. The Ausdrucktanz tradition was built up by Joose as well as Wigman who established several schools throughout Germany in the 1920′s and a branch in New York in the 1930′s. Since Ausdrucktanz was a method rather than a codified dance training system, dance artists were encouraged to improvise and experiment and create new forms.

1950s
Later in the 1950s, primarily in America, the second generation of modern dance choreographers began producing dance independently from their founders. Unlike their predecessors, this group of choreographers was interested in movement for movement’s sake rather than an expression of the human condition as well as incorporating modern dance as one component in combination with other artistic disciplines. Thus, their productions are described as resembling “collages combining music for full orchestra, often electronically amplified, with dialogue, singing, film, sound, slide projections, dance episodes and scenes from conventional dramas.” American choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-) brings together various artistic forms such as music/sound, stage design and dance. However, Au notes that they are “treated as independent entities.although music occupies the same timespan as the choreography, and the design the same physical space, neither has to relate in any other way to the dancing”. Another American choreographer Alwin Nikolais (1912-1993) was also interested in integrating dance with music and design. Unlike Cunningham, however, he did not collaborate with other artists but served as his own composer and designer besides choreographer. Au says Nikolais has “compared his work with non-objective art, which does not aim to represent ‘real’ objects, but instead draws the viewer’s attention to its substance – shape, color, texture, space, time – which becomes the focal point of the work”.

1960s-1970s
In the 1960s-1970s when individualism and freedom of expression prevailed in America, a group of modern dance choreographers sometimes referred to as postmodernists in dance, were not interested in dance technique, the proscenium stage or repertory. Instead, they utilized non-dancers and ordinary objects as well as explored natural movement and spontaneity in spaces like fountains, museums, plazas, rooftops and walls. The famous manifesto by American choreographer Yvonne Rainer (1934-) sums up the vision of modern dance by this group of dance artists:

NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction or spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.
Thus, dance at this time represented a break from what had previously been established, i.e. the dance formalism of Cunningham, Nikolais and Taylor. Jowitt writes, “At a time when young people worldwide were questioning the political and social establishment, these artists were querying the separation of the arts, the hierarchical arrangement or compositional elements, the elitism and potential eradication of individuality inherent in much academic training.” They tore down all conventions and perceptions about dance to start anew and from this point onward modern dance took many directions.

Since 1980s
Since the 1980s modern dance has gone on to include an eclectic range of experimentations by choreographers who continue to express their present experience through new and unconventional explorations, often bringing together multiple elements from various artistic disciplines and given their own name, including Pina Bausch (1940-) in Germany who created a form called Tanztheatre, a further development of Ausdrucktanz. Her productions have been described as bringing together “animistic borrowings, mime, spoken texts, bizarre vocal effects and occasional slapstick” and employs stage designers to produce living rooms, cafes, public spaces and natural landscapes on stage, often made up of made of old leaves, peat, grass, bushes, large cacti, fields of carnations, sand dunes, water puddles, etc. Another multidisiciplinary form referred to as New Dance, synthesizes Release Technique – which channels the body’s natural flow of energy through breath and momentum to facilitate movement – and various somatic practices, both therapeutic as well as Asian martial arts.

Contributed by Caren Carino

References:

Au, Susan. Ballet and Modern Dance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

Jowitt, Deborah. “Introduction”. Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Ed. Martha Bremser. London: Routledge, 1999.

Martin, John quoted by Selma Jean Cohen. Dance Words. Ed. Valerie Preston Dunlop. Singapore: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.

McDonagh, Don. “Introduction”. The Vision of Modern Dance. Eds. Brown, Jean Morrison, Naomi Mindlin and Charles H. Woodford. USA: Princeton Book Company, 1979.

Partsch-Bergsohn, Isa. Modern Dance in Germany and the United States. Singapore: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994.

Reynolds, Nancy and Malcolm McCormick. No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.

Wigman, Mary. “Stage Dancer-Stage Dancer”. The Vision of Modern Dance In the Words of Its Creators. 2nd edition. Eds. Brown, Morrison, Naomi Mindlin and Charles H. Woodford. New Jersey: Princeton Book Company, 1998.