The birth of modern dance

The early modern dance pioneers of the 1920's through the 1940's broke boundaries by not only creating new ways of movement and examining new themes, but by literally changing the way people thought about dance.

Instead of embracing forms that descended from courtly fashion, modern dancers constructed artistic statements on the basis of real life or fundamental human themes. For these choreographers, dance represented freedom, wide-open spaces, industry, and boundless energy.

"Art reflects life," proclaimed Martha Graham. The early moderns examined form and content, determined methods for composing dance, developed new movement vocabularies, and commented on larger cultural concerns.

By the 1950's, however, many in the field felt the inspiration of early modern dance pioneers had declined into formulaic and derivative dances. "Seemingly, we had reached a dead end," choreographer Murray Louis wrote in Inside Dance, "and some said that modern dance had died."

Then in the 1960's, widespread attitudes of rebellion and change influenced a new generation of choreographers who became known as the postmodern generation. Postmodern dance experimented in ways that had more in common with the dada movement in art than the architectural or literary movements of postmodernism.

The new artists rejected the compositional forms created by people like Louis Horst and Doris Humphrey, and hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art.

Any movement was dance, and any person was a dancer, with or without training.

This view caused some to suggest that postmodern dancers had lost much of what was valuable to dance. Murray Louis states, "Permissiveness became the definition of creativity . . . the work, the fear, the work, the dedication, the work [was] all gone, all gone. So much will have to be rediscovered."

Others felt that the 1960's broadened the scope of possibility for dance, and that the rejection of form and content was necessary to strip dance of built up pretension and move it forward in exciting ways.

A New Beginning >>