Modern and


Contemporary
Dance
 
Modern Dance According to
historians, modern dance has
two main birthplaces: Europe
(Germany specifically) and the
United States of America.
 François Delsarte (1811 -
1871, France).

 He is considered as a precursor by
modern dance history because he
invents a theory about the
relationship between human
movement and feelings.
: “feelings
and their intensity are

the cause of movement and its
quality”.
the source of dance lies inside
the dancer, and not outside, in
codified gestures, like classical
dance would propose
These are some of Delsarte’s renowned
contributions:
 Elaboration of a new code of gestures,

completely independent from the
classical dance tradition.
 Study and codification of a logic system
about the relationships between the different
parts of the body, different types of
movement and different human feelings. -
Creation of a system for the study, analysis
and teaching of movement.
 Invention of the
fundamental notion of the
gesture’s expressiveness.
 Introduction of the
importance of the upper
body (trunk, arms, face) as
the main vehicle of
expression of the soul.
 Émile Jaques-Dalcroze
(1865 - 1950, Austria -

Switzerland)
He is a pianist and conductor,
important for modern dance
history because he invents a new
approach to movement called
“Rhythmics” or “Eurhythmics”.
Its main contribution is the work
. between music
over the relationship
and movement.  According to him,
body expresses a degree of
‘musicality’ that can be studied and
taught

He doesn’t plan to apply his

discoveries to dancers, but to
musicians.
These are some of Dalcroze’s renowned
contributions:

Introduction of a notion of
relationship between movement
and rhythm.
Creation of an original
educational method through
movement.
Some of his essential principles:
caused by
body blockages are
rhythmic blockages; relaxation is
indispensable to achieve a right
movement; breathing is crucial to
obtain relaxation and is the
fundamental rhythmic movement.
 Rudolph Laban (1879 –
1958, Hungary
 - U.K.).

is considered by modern dance

history as on of the most
productive of them.
He is a choreographer, dancer,
teacher and researcher

He achieves to spread his name
and ideas widely: first through
Europe, then to the United States
and nowadays around the whole
world.
His thought includes the idea
that human movement is the seat
expresses the
of life and that it
social state of being. Therefore,
dance would be a need of
communitarian experience. He
believes that educating
individuals and groups by the
means of movement can correct
society.
 Mary Wigman (1886 –
1973 Germany):

develops her own understanding of dance
and traduces it in a significant amount of
choreographic pieces.

she is oncerned about a close relationship

between spirituality and movement, she
defends the idea of invisible forces that
would give life to dance.
her ideas are brought to the
United States of America by

Hanya Holm, who passes the
heritage to figures like A.
Nikolaïs.

her most famous piece is

called “Hexentanz” (The
Witch).
 Loïe Fuller (1862 – 1928,
United States of

America)
 is not actually regarded by modern
dance history as a dancer or a
choreographer.

 This is because her main concern is not

dance, or movement itself, as it is for the
whole rest of following modern dancers.
 
she is acknowledged by modern
dance history because of her great
contribution in new possibilities of
scenic illusion, thanks to the use of
the development of electricity.
 Isadora Duncan (1878 -
1927, U.S.A.
 - France)
she is an emblematic figure of
freedom

she has the courage to break dance

traditions and social codes with her
aesthetical propositions.
 Ted Shawn (1891- 1972,
U.S.A.)

With the first company composed
by men only in modern dance
history, he makes tours around the
United States (visiting universities
specially) and attracts a lot of
young people from a high
intellectual level.
He educates boys that look like
muscular athletes, creating an

image of a masculine and
sportive dancer. He also founds
a choreographic center: The
Jacob´s Pillow (Massachusetts),
which is still an important place
for dance as much for its
studying offers as for its dance
festival.
Doris Humphrey (1895 -
1958, 
U.S.A.)
She works for Saint Denis as a
teacher and dancer, participating
in the company tours around
America and Asia till 1926.
 
He associates with the dancer
Charles Weidman and the pianist
Pauline Lawrence to create the
Humphrey - Weidman company
(1927 – 1944)
develops an original dancing
technique by observing the
 gravity and
relationship between
human body. He associates with the
dancer Charles Weidman and the
pianist Pauline Lawrence to create
the Humphrey - Weidman company
(1927 – 1944)
. This notion is resumed in her
famous sentence: “Movement is
situated on a tended arc between
In 1944, she stopsdancing because
of arthritis and José Limón, who has
joined the Humphrey-Weidman
group since 1928, creates a new
company for which she continues
working as an artistic director.
 Jose Limon (José
Arcadio Limón, 1908 -

1972, Mexico - U.S.A.)

He is responsible for spreading Humphrey’s

technique in Europe.

Some examples of that are his pieces “La

Malinche” (1949), “Carlota” (1972) and “The
Pavane of the Moor” (1949).
 Martha Graham (1894
- 1991,
U.S.A.)
Graham enters the Denishawn
school and company in 1916
and becomes the most famous
and monumental pupil of this
seedbed.
She develops her own training
technique, which will reach a world-
present time.
wide success till the
These are some of its principles: -
Focus on the ‘center’ of the body.
-Coordination between breathing and
movement. - Relationship with the
floor.
 Alternation between two movement
intentions: “contraction and release”.
  Alvin Ailey (1931 -
1989, 
U.S.A.)

has an important place in modern

dance history for being the
choreographer of the ‘black
modern dance
His most famous choreography is

entitled “Revelations” (1960) and is
considered a master piece that
gathers his most renowned
aesthetical choices: lyricism, use of
ethnic music (negro spirituals in the
case), Graham technique, spirituality
and revolutionary ambience.
Alwin Nikolaïs (1910 –
1993, 
U.S.A.)

Designer, composer and

choreographer, Nikolaïs is
one of the most popular
modern dance artists
around the world.
These are some of his main aesthetic
choices:
 Any point in the body can be the ‘center
 being is just
for movement’. - Human
another element among the moving
universe.
 Body undergoes several metamorphoses
and becomes abstract: accessories, tissues,
big sticks…
 Improvisation and composition are part
of the technical training. The student is
responsible of exploring his own body.
 Contemporary Dance

We could say that both ballet and modern
dance are ancestors of contemporary dance.
Ballet creates the general concert dance
frame work and technical knowledge used
or refused by contemporary dance. Modern
dance is at the same time its ‘anti-reference’
and kind of ‘mother in law’.
 Merce Cunningham
(1919 – 2009,
 USA)
is a student of Martha Graham. After
being a main dancer in her company
for several years, he starts an
independent career as a choreographer
in 1942. Accompanied by John Cage’s
music, he presents a solo entitled
“Totem ancestor”, which opens his
period of individual research.
Some of his ideas:
 Dramaturgical and compositional

perspective: - Abstraction: Movement is
expressive and enough beyond any
intention. There’s no need to tell a story or
reflect something.
 No figurative or emotional references.
 Away from the need of communicating
something, from preestablished formal
elements or coming from an interior
impulse.
To compose in space and time
without a goal. – 
Immobility (as silence) is a sufficient
aesthetical experience. - Chance as a
method for making aesthetical
choices: throwing coins or dice,
using the ‘I Ching’.
- Multiple and simultaneous actions.
Musical perspective:

 Independence between
dance and music.
Scenic frame perspective:
Deconstruction of rules of perspective
 by court ballet:
and symmetry defined
breaking of scenic space conceptions of
front, center and hierarchies: space is
equal at any point, fragmented and
exploded.
No hierarchy between dancers.
The audience is free to see in its own
manner and with its own looking
choices.
Out of theaters: non conventional
spaces. 
Inventor of the ‘EVENT’: sequence
of dances whose dramatic structure
or content is never stable, with no
sense of logical syntax or
construction (ancestor of what is
later called happening).
 Technical-interpretative perspective:
- Virtuous dancers in a new sense.
 Mastery of tempo and movement length
by inner perception.
Ability to dance with great speed and
changing of rhythm and directions in an
unpredictable way.
Capability of adapting and memorizing
sequences.
 Rhythmical diversity without equivalent.
 Philosophical perspective:
 -Abandonment of the ideas of the ‘inspired
artist’, the piece of art as an expression of

an individual and an evaluation criterion
based on beauty or expressive qualities. -
Order inside disorder.
 Never the two same ‘events’: not about
fixing, but about reflecting flexibility of life.
 Reflecting life: no linearity, no classical
dramaturgy, things don´t happen only in a
successive way but also simultaneously
 No politics, no narrative, no argument,

no theme, no intention.
 Creative freedom.
 ZEN influence: “non obstructive
quality” of things, they can coexist in
nature without interfering with each
other.
 Dance to be danced or to be seen, not to
be analyzed.
The ‘postmodern’ dance:


 To understand the so called ‘postmodern’
dance, it is important to remember the social
context in which it develops. The 1960s in the
U.S.A. are years of questioning of the historical
‘truths’ and ideological principles that rule
over the social, political and artistic fields.
Society starts a process of opening to the
recognition of plurality, relativism of
knowledge and subjectivism of perception.
Some of the postmodern dance features are:
Course Module - “Anything goes” (time of
subjectivism), which means that everything
proposed is valid. 
- Questioning of ‘modern’ dance principles
and history (in the early times), and
recovering of its heritages and acquisitions
(later).
 Search for the degree zero of movement:
exploration of daily life movement as a
sufficient aesthetical experience and denial of
the importance of technical virtuosity.
- Substitution of aesthetic judgment by
 ). - Intention of approaching dance (arts) to life and big audiences
(dance in the streets, performers that are not dancers…).
 - Search of a lack of expression by the dancer. - Identification of


social and ideological marks in the body and its movement.
 - Refusal of the pretention of creating a vocabulary, repertory or
style.
 - Questioning of the value of the notion of ‘author’ of an art
piece.
 - Performance: doing something more than representing it.
Dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists have the same status
within it. Frontiers between artistic genres become undefined.
 - Importance of improvisation.
 - Exploration of repetition as a compositional method.
 - Artists (dancers) react against the consumer society, the wars
held by the U.S.A., the art market and the elitism of its
conventional places
Butoh

Butoh is the name given to a
group of performance
practices that could be
considered as a type of
Japanese contemporary dance.
 Some of the butoh’s common features are: -Use of taboo
topics.
 -Extreme or absurd environments. -Slow hyper-controlled
motion.

 -Almost nude bodies completely painted in white. -Upward
rolled eyes and contorted face. -Inward rotated legs and feet.
 -Fetal positions
 . -Playful and grotesque imagery.
 -Performed with or without an audience. -No set style:”
There are as many types of butoh as there are butoh
choreographers.” (Hijikata).
 It may be purely conceptual with no movement at all.
 - Its technique uses some acquisitions from the traditional
Japanese knowledge, like the control of energy, which
translates into an insistent rhythm (close to Nô Theater) and
strong expressivity.
 Pina Bausch (1940 - 2009, Germany):
 Heir of the German expressive dance, Pina
Bausch receives her dance training at the

Folkwang School in Essen, under the
supervision of Kurt Jooss. She is engaged
there as a choreographer since 1973, thanks
to what she creates the Wuppertal
Dancetheater. Under this name, although
controversial at the beginning, her company
gradually achieves international recognition
because of the proposal of a new form of
show that shatters the world of dance as
much as the world of theater.
 According to contemporary dance history, these are some
of the features of her work:
 -Combination of poetic and everyday elements. -Shows


where there’s mixture of musical hall, operetta and
happening.
 -Recurrent subject: the human loss within social systems
that are stereotypical and hypocrite.
 -Denunciation of codes of seduction.
 -Repetition and non linear narrative.
 -Refusal of creation of ‘characters’ in a theatrical sense, but
use of voice and theatrical gestures.
 -Virtuous dancers, daily trained in classical ballet.
Ballet and contemporary dance (art) ideas:
While at the origins of modern and
contemporary dance, ballet appears often either

as a model to refuse or as a foreign field, the
second half of the XX century sees classical and
contemporary dance into a position of reciprocal
interest. From the point of view of some
contemporary dance cases, ballet will be an
allied that serves mostly for the technical
development of performers. From the
perspective of ballet, contemporary dance ideas
will mean the access to huge creative and
experimental issues, as much as the possibility
to experience technical alternatives.
