Ballet and Modern Dance
It was the first time that ballet and modern dance were presented on the same stage. The year was 1959, and ballet’s great twentieth century innovator, George Balanchine, artistic director and founding genius of New York City Ballet, reached a hand across the divide between classical ballet and modern dance. He invited Martha Graham to co-choreograph a two-part work called Episodes with him.
Using the same music, they would each choreograph a dance. The two dances would give the audience a glimpse of how two artists working in different dance traditions used the same music, and how these results would look danced one after the other.
It was not a contest or even a challenge, but an opportunity for the choreographers, their dancers, and the audience to see just how profoundly different, or alike, the work could be. It was a symbolic white flag, a moment of respect, in the ongoing war between the modern and classical camps.
This late 1970s experimentation was the beginning of what has come to be called the dance boom or dance explosion. Whether the audience started to come to dance performances to see a “novelty” dance or see a famous Russian or even out of simple curiosity turned out not to matter.
An audience for dance was developing, one that was able to enjoy it as theater art, whether it understood the fine points of dance technique or a choreographer’s philosophy. Audiences found that watching David Parsons appear to fly through the air as he danced in flickering strobe lights was thrilling enough, so that it did not matter whether they knew Parsons had danced with Paul Taylor’s troupe and represented a line of modern dance tracing right back to Martha Graham.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) established a dance touring program that sent smaller modern companies touring across the United States to perform in theaters and at universities. This was not vaudeville or a sequestered college summer session. Even when the dance touring program was cut back in the 1980s, companies continued to tour, having established audiences for their work across the country.
American modern dance spread overseas, where important companies, including the Netherlands Dance Theater in The Hague and the Frankfurt Ballet in Germany, have flourished with American dancers as artistic directors and choreographers.
Tags: audience, ballet and modern dance, choreographers, classical ballet, Dance, dance explosion, dance technique, dance traditions, david parsons, george balanchine, martha graham, Modern, music, national endowment for the arts, new york city ballet, paul taylor, strobe lights, theater art, work, york city ballet