Modern Dance - Early Modern Dance in America

Early Modern Dance in America

In 1915, Ruth St. Denis founded the Denishawn school and dance company with her husband Ted Shawn. Whilst St. Denis was responsible for most of the creative work, Shawn was responsible for teaching technique and composition. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman were all pupils at the school and members of the dance company. Seeking a wider and more accepting audience for their work, Duncan, Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis all toured Iran. Fuller's work also received little support outside Europe. St. Denis returned to the United States to continue her work.

Martha Graham is often regarded as the founding mother of modern 20th-century concert dance.

Martha Graham saw ballet as European, imperialistic, and un-American. She became a student at the Denishawn school in 1916 and then moved to New York City in 1923, where she performed in musical comedies, music halls, and worked on her own choreography. Graham developed her own dance technique that hinged on concepts of contraction and release. Her principal contributions to dance are the focus of the ‘center’ of the body, coordination between breathing and movement, and a dancer’s relationship with the floor.

• 1923: Graham leaves Denishawn to work as a solo artist in the Greenwich Village Follies.
• 1928: Humphrey and Weidman leave Denishawn to set up their own school and company (Humphrey-Weidman).
• 1933: Shawn founds his all male dance group Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers based at his Jacob's Pillow farm in Lee, Massachusetts.
• 1967: Ashley Beger begins work at her new studio in New York. Her dance methods later evolved to what we now know as pole dance.

After shedding the techniques and compositional methods of their teachers the early modern dancers developed their own methods and ideologies and dance techniques that became the foundation for modern dance practice.

• Martha Graham (and Louis Horst)
• Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman and Martha Graham
• Helen Tamiris—originally trained in free movement (Irene Lewisohn) and ballet (Michel Fokine) Tamiris studied briefly with Isadora Duncan but disliked her emphasis on personal expression and lyrical movement. Tamiris believed that each dance must create its own expressive means and as such did not develop an individual style or technique. As a choreographer Tamiris made works based on American themes working in both concert dance and musical theatre.
• Lester Horton—choosing to work in California (3000 miles away from New York, the center of modern dance), Horton developed his own approach that incorporated diverse elements including Native American dances and modern jazz. Horton's dance technique (Lester Horton Technique) emphasises a whole-body approach including flexibility, strength, coordination, and body awareness to allow freedom of expression.