Hundreds of modern dance styles are taught across the United States. Some focus on the technique of one major modern-dance figure. Most serious modern dancers have taken classes at one time or another in the techniques of Martha Graham, Limón-Humphrey, Lester Horton, Merce Cunningham, and Mary Wigman.
These particular techniques are studied in part not only because the people were great dancers, but because they made movement systems that could be taught. Some of these are almost as formal and codified as ballet.
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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.
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On the small stage of the Coolidge Theatre at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Martha Graham stood taking a bow. It was October 30, 1944, and, at age 50, she had just danced the lead role of a young bride in the premiere of her Appalachian Spring.
The radiant Graham accepted the applause hand-in-hand with Erick Hawkins, a 35-year-old dancer who had appeared in the stage role of her bridegroom a role he would play later in real life. Merce Cunningham, a phenomenally talented dancer who had portrayed the frontier preacher, was on her other side.
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By the late 1920s, Americans had become accustomed to the idea of “artistic” dance. Denishawn had crisscrossed the country many times as well as making itself newsworthy with its famous Orient tour. Moreover, Isadora Duncan, although reviled in her lifetime as a decadent Communist, inspired young women across the United States to seek self expression by putting on Greek tunics and dancing barefoot.
Ballet also attracted widespread interest as Anna Pavlova toured the United States, leaving in her wake scores of would-be ballerinas, including Agnes de Mille. Meanwhile, word filtered back from Europe that Russian impressario Serge Diaghilev was presenting dazzling new productions with charismatic dancers such as Vaslav Nijinsky.
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If Duncan turned to emotion as movement’s source, her contemporary Ruth St. Denis looked to what she called the spirit. Born Ruth Dennis in 1879 in New Jersey, she changed her name in the early years of her career when she danced in musical revues. A producer called her “Saint Dennis” as a way of teasing her about her high minded and serious approach to dance. She liked the sound of St. Denis, and it was true that for her, dance was a spiritual pursuit. “As I see it,” she said, “the deepest lack of Western cultures is any true workable system for teaching a process of integration between soul and body.”
Like Fuller and Duncan before her, St. Denis’s earliest stage appearances were in popular musical theater. While on tour in 1904, she happened to see a cigarette advertisement with an image of the Egyptian goddess Isis.
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