Pop Culture
Fusion brought one more significant change to what we call main stage contemporary dance. While modern and ballet choreographers were adding in vernacular moves to their choreography, vernacular performers ordinary people, using their natural or ethnic dance styles began constructing dances they intended to be performed on stage as well as in the neighborhood or community center.
No longer content to provide intriguing accents to someone else’s main stage work, they started companies of their own and began staging full evening performances using their own idiosyncratic movement vocabulary. What started as the fusion of different dance forms into mainstream modern and ballet companies transformed seamlessly into a profusion of new dance companies, working in totally different ways than the main stage dance troupes.
No one personifies the way contemporary dance has expanded its boundaries more than Rennie Harris, who grew up in North Philadelphia learning street dance moves and listening to the boom boom beat of the music. These loose-jointed and athletic moves to propulsive sound, whether instrumental or vocal, came to be called hip-hop.
Audiences now are used to dreadlock hair styles, dancers spinning around stage on one hand, and seeing a dancer’s legs go one way while his torso flips off in an opposite direction. Even ballet choreographers look to hip-hop for movement inspiration. Trey McIntyre and Matthew Neenan are just two ballet choreographers who seamlessly twine hiphop moves with ballet.
The Irish dance troupe Riverdance is an example of the happy villagers taking their tradition of Irish step dancing (rapidly moving feet, an erect upper body) and turning it into a full evening performance for their own cultural benefit.
In the 1940s and 1950s, important choreographers were turning to lower class, even criminal class movement, as inspiration in creating main stage theater. Agnes de Mille used American folk dance, square dance, tap (which began as a street performance form), and hoedown in the musical Oklahoma and her ballet Rodeo.
Are all dance innovators either modern-dance choreographers or ballet choreographers? At this point in time, the most innovative of them are a bit of both. This is where fusion has taken dance. The most contemporary work being done today in any of the so-called disciplines involves rethinking what can and cannot be done on stage by dancers.
For more than 100 years, choreographers have created work that is based on personal experience, utilizing emerging technologies and ethnic traditions. This won’t stop it will simply become more and more diverse. This is what makes contemporary dance so exhilarating.
Tags: american folk dance, ballet choreographers, ballet companies, boom boom beat, class, culture fusion, dance tap, dance troupes, evening performances, Fusion, irish dance troupe, irish step dancing, movement vocabulary, neenan, north philadelphia, rennie harris, stage dance, street, way, work