Task: create a dance class based on your unit of study

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• Task create a dance class based on your unit of
  study
• Presentation
• Warm-up
• Center
• Across the floor
• Cool down and quiz

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Why is dance history important to your dance
experience?

• Please take note on the dance history timeline.
  Write what is in bold print. You will be tested
  on the information

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The history of modern dance

• At the turn of the century, the public looked
  upon dance as a diversion, not a form of artistic
  expression. The pioneers of modern dance, often
  performing in vaudeville theaters, chose
  classical or exotic subjects. After World War I,
  successors would drop gods, lyricism, and color
  for strong, percussive dancing and psychological
  and political subjects. By the 1950s, mood and
  relationships were presented with few historical
  references and in a less literal manner. The next
  generation mistrusted theater and favored
  minimalist effects. Our century winds down with a
  generation that favors abstract as well as timely
  subjects and dances them in an unconventional,
  frankly theatrical way to a wide variety of music.

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Pre Modern Dance

• Loïe Fuller (1862-1928). An American actress with
  no dance training, she became a wizard of
  creating magical illusions of natural forms with
  lighting and drapery. Idolized in France, she
  made Paris her permanent home.
• Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was a revolutionary
  who danced solos to classical music and whose
  private life defied political and sexual norms.
  Fervently believing that dance could enhance the
  spiritual health of society, she became a legend
  through her interpretive artistry and personal
  example. She was the first dancer to appear on
  stage barefoot.
• Ruth St. Denis (1880-1968). After an
  international career performing lyrical
  interpretations of Asian myths, she returned to
  the U.S. and formed the Denishawn Company (1915)
  with her pupil and husband, Ted Shawn. The
  dominant serious dance company of the 1920s,
  Denishawn was the training ground for Graham,
  Humphrey, and Weidman, among others.
• Mary Wigman (1886-1973). A peerless solo artist
  who became the most important figure in German
  expressionist dance. Influenced by the movement
  theories of Rudolf Laban, she drew on primitive
  mythical subjects that emphasized a bond with
  nature while developing a style that evolved from
  muscular tension and release.
• Ted Shawn (1891-1972) parted artistic company
  with St. Denis in 1933 they never were
  officially divorced to form Ted Shawn and His
  Men Dancers, the first all-male troupe in the
  U.S. He disbanded it in 1940 to start Jacobs
  Pillow Dance Festival.

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The Big Four

• Hanya Holm (1893-1992). A student of Wigman, she
  established a school here in 1931 and introduced
  the German Expressionist use of space as a
  sculptural entity to U.S. modern dance.
• Martha Graham (1894-1991). After a late start at
  age twenty-two as a Denishawn student, this
  intensely passionate artist developed a
  contraction-and-release technique based on
  breathign that became the most widely taught of
  modern styles in the U.S. Developing a company as
  she built a repertory, Graham explored Greek
  myths, the Bible, the American frontier, and the
  human heart while struggling against our Puritan
  heritage. Among the choreographers she nurtured
  were Hawkins, Cunningham, Taylor, and Sokolow, as
  well as May ODonnell and John Butler.
• Charles Weidman (1901-75) and Doris Humphrey
  (1895-1958) in their Humphrey-Weidman Company
  (1928-45) developed a movement vocabulary based
  on fall and recovery. His wit meshed comfortably
  with her idealistic humanism that stretched the
  body to its physical limits.

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Outbreak

• Helen Tamiris (1905-66) danced with the
  Metropolitan Opera Ballet before beginning her
  solo career and choreographing for Broadway
  musicals, the concert stage she was the first
  to use spirituals for concert dance and the
  company she formed with her husband, Daniel
  Nagrin (b. 1917).
• José Limón (1908-72). Born in Mexico and brought
  up in the U.S., he joined the Humphrey-Weidman
  company (1930-40) and organized his own troupe
  after World War II. A hero betrayed is a motif in
  his work.
• Erick Hawkins (1909-94) combined nature mysticism
  and classic folk tales in a style that
  substituted smoothly muscled flow for the angular
  tension he learned as the first male in the
  Graham company.
• Anna Sokolow (b. 1910). Urban isolation, set to
  the cadences of jazz music, and the lone
  individual, coping with the buffeting of daily
  life, are at the core of her works, grimly
  attuned to social and political reality.
• Alwin Nikolais (1910-93). His dances emerge in a
  wonderland of visual effects and structured
  costumes that recall the pioneering days of
  Fuller. Divorced from the stress and strain of
  emotion, a Nikolais dance explores a world of
  motion in which man is a mechanism, not the whole
  wheel of life.
• Katherine Dunham (b. 1912) pursued her artistic
  vision in popular theater and movies. A serious
  student of Afro-Caribbean folk culture, Dunham
  prepared evening-length productions of sensuously
  costumed dance.

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• Bella Lewitzky (b. 1916) shared the eclectic
  artistic sensibility of her mentor, Lester Horton
  (1906-53). In 1946 she established Dance Theater
  in Los Angeles, the first U.S. performing space
  devoted exclusively to dance.
• Merce Cunningham (b. 1919). He explored and
  conquered an unknown world when he removed the
  cause-and-effect relationship between music and
  dance. Cherishing independence, he gave similar
  freedom to the artists who were his
  collaborators they repaid him with stunning
  lighting, settings, and costumes.
• Paul Taylor (b. 1930). Determined to explore
  human experience, he has created an outstanding
  repertory of antic wit and hard reality. Taylor
  scrutinizes the epic and the everyday with tough
  innocence and athletic vigor.
• Alvin Ailey (1931-89) explored the black
  experience in America more widely than any other
  choreographer. Hope, despair, success, faith, and
  joy all have found expression in his work. He
  drew inspiration from the deep belief of
  spirituals and from the elegant sophistication of
  Ellington.
• Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) studied composition under
  Robert Dunn and, with Steve Paxton (b. 1939),
  turned Judson Memorial Church into a space for a
  generation of minimalist choreographers. They are
  famous for improvisation and minimalist
  happenings.
• Trisha Brown (b. 1936). Her dancers once walked
  around on walls in harnesses, and her recent work
  in more conventional settings remains muscular
  and distinctive.

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• Pina Bausch (b. 1940) is the leading force in
  Tanztheater, contemporary Germanys successor to
  1920s Expressionism. Sexual alienation is her
  main subject, and she spurns formal schooling for
  dialogue, gymnastics, and gesture amid such
  settings as pools, hillocks, and collapsing
  walls.
• Twyla Tharp (b. 1941). Her mathematically musical
  mind and sympathy for popular culture have
  created a quick, bold, slithery, and densely
  packed style of movement that she applies to a
  wide range of classical and pop music.
• Mark Morris (b. 1956). A remarkably gifted
  performer, he has brought his economical sense of
  gesture to some 100 dances created over two
  decades to a wide variety of music. Folk dance
  and homages to modern styles are undercurrents in
  his work.
• Bill T. Jones (b. 1952) and Arnie Zane (1948-88)
  established their company without undergoing
  apprenticeship in another troupe to choreograph
  an eclectic body of work dealing with such topics
  as sex and racism, a tradition that Jones has
  continued after Zanes death.
• John Jasperse (b. 1963) may embody the trend of
  modern dance in this century He first studied at
  Sarah Lawrence, and attracted attention in Europe
  before forming his own company. He combines a
  sense of social and personal crisis with wit,
  wisdom, and physical frankness.
• Pilobolus. Four Dartmouth students Moses
  Pendleton, Jonathan Walken, Robby Barnett, and
  Lee Harris founded this choreographic
  collective in 1971. Initially, they created
  startling sculptural shapes that unfolded with
  biological linkage. The addition of Alison Chase
  and Martha Clarke in 1973 allowed them to set
  their gymnastic aplomb to exploring sexual
  interaction.

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• Choose one choreographer to study in depth.
  Answer the following questions
• What influenced your choreographer and how did
  these influences affect their intensions?
• What is the movement style of the choreographer?
  Address time, space, dynamics.
• Does the choreographers work influence others?
  How and why?
• What impact did studying this choreographer have
  on you?

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• http//whitepaintedwoman.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/
  timeline-of-modern-dance-in-the-20th-century/