Laura Ruede's Analysis

Influenced primarily by cultural roots and incredibly opportunity, Dunham had the luxury of studying in the West Indies as well as anthropological study of other cultural style dances. The West Indian experience changed forever the focus of Dunham’s life and caused a profound shift in her career. This initial fieldwork began a lifelong involvement with the people and dance of Haiti. And, importantly for the development of modern dance, her fieldwork began her investigations into a vocabulary of movement that would form the core of the Katherine Dunham Technique. Though many of Dunham’s primary influences lies within her multicultural experiences, Mark Turbyfill also seemed to play a large role in her future dance career, giving her private lessons despite his doubt in the opening of her student company (Kaiso! 187). Katherine Dunham has been list as an influence to “everyone from George Balanchine to Jerome Robbins, Alvin Ailey, Bob Fosse and Twyla Tharp. American dance, including ballet, modern dance, Hollywood and Broadway, would not be the same without her” (Aschenbrenner 226).

Lori Arviso Alvord was raised in a small town on an Indian reservation. She left her traditional Indian life to attend Dartmouth followed by Stanford University Medical School and became the first Navajo woman surgeon. After overcoming the challenges of the operating room, Dr. Alvord realized that something was missing from the contemporary medical care. The contemporary medical care did not teach a health care provider how to look at a person as a whole. She felt that a western doctor cure but did not necessarily heal their patients. This extraordinarily talented doctor showed how she merged the modern science with ancient tribal ways to recovery and wellness. After years of experience as a surgeon, she was able to use her unique perspective

From kindergarten until high school, I was a member of the Jean Wolfmeyer School of Dance. Up to 5 days per week, I would be at the dance studio taking classes, rehearsing for shows, and helping out in the less advanced classes. Regardless of skill level, Jean never hesitated to speak the brutally honest truth about students’ performances and she never settled for anything less than perfection. Jean would often preach that she is only the instruction manual and she cannot make us good dancers, we had to do that for ourselves. However, it was not her critique or teaching alone that motivated dancers to perform well, it was her relentless work ethic and commitment to her studio. As a 70 year-old women, Jean held classes as much as 7 days per

Title of exhibition: “Circle of Dance,” Name of curator: Cécile R. Ganteaume; Artists/Exhibit Designers: Gerry Breen, Susan Stieff.

“What are you even doing here? I have never seen such flawed technique in all my years as a choreographer.” The words echoed throughout the medical college auditorium. Impelled by the admonishment in front of my peers, I persevered in my endeavor to improve upon my dancing prowess and by the final year of medical school was leading the college dance team. The above mentioned undertaking further spawned an interest for the discipline of Latin Ballroom which lead to participation at the national level. The unwavering focus and persistence even in the face of unfavorable odds is more broadly reflective of my approach towards learning, both academic and extracurricular. This has been instrumental in achieving stellar academic outcomes including being ranked nationally in the top 0.0004 percent in the premedical test and the top 0.6 percent in the common aptitude test for management training.

As ballets were about telling stories or formulating movements, modern dance broke the rules and started to focus more on individual expressions. Loie Fuller (1862 – 1928), Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), and Ruth St. Denis (1877-1968) were pioneering women who took a stand and used their dance performance to speak up for women’s rights. Using dance, they significantly contributed to the Feminist movement in which they embraced self-expression and creativity so that women could be acknowledged in the dance field and in the society as a whole. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they found for women’s rights by “taking dance to a new form, and creating dances to speak directly and intimately to the viewer” (Au 89). Loie Fuller, Doris Humphrey, and Ruth St. Denis demonstrated the transformation of dance with their innovation of costumes and stage lighting, incorporation of foreign cultures into performance, and creation of natural movements and individual expression that rejected the formal structures of ballet to deform a woman’s body, allowing women to be free from stereotype of a traditional woman.

With 15 years under her feet, Johnson is a Dance major going into her sophomore year at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette under the training of Marie Broussard, Kenneth Jenkins and Dina Melley. She practices many styles of dance but

21st of May, California State University of Long Beach held the CSULB Dance In Concert at Martha B. Knoebel Dance Theater with the collaboration and choreography by the CSULB dance faculty such as Colleen Dunagan, Rebecca Lemme, Sophie Monat, Andrew Vaca, and featuring guest Laurel Jenkins and Doug Varone. From the show, the dances represented through various genre such as contemporary, contemporary ballet, and modern dance. The element of contemporary defines as a collaborative style that includes modern, jazz, ballet, and hip hop. All these styles of dances were shown by connections after each intermission. In particular, I will concentrate mostly about contemporary dance out of all the dances in the concert and talk about the effects on three out of six performances. The performances reflects mostly on how we describe life and nature and partially define life to every aspect of the emotion were being introduced by the dancers.

Gloria Anzaldua is among the many feminist theorists that has moved into the realm of addressing post-modern identities. In Gloria Anzaldua’s articulation of the new mestiza consciousness, she makes the argument of identities as multiple, hybrid, and more specifically created as a result of the Borderlands. However, according to Anzaldua, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities to achieve social and political change.

One of my first literacies I learned started as a simple extracurricular activity my mother put me in to keep me out of the house and out of her hair. I started learning a literacy of dance through taking classes. At three years old I start ballet and tap combo class, from there I continued taking more classes in different styles and taking more advanced classes. By dancing for 15 years I learned and acquired extensive knowledge of the art. I started to learn and take class at Marta Jackson School of dance, I continued my training for fifteen years, until my senior year of high school. I danced on my high school dance team, at other studios, in different local productions and even in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

She studied different types of dance and incorporated them into her own technique. “Called the matriarch of black dance her groundbreaking repertoire combine innovative interpretation of caribbean dances,traditional ballet, African rituals and African American rhythms to create the Dunham technique” (“Katherine Dunham Biography” 2). Dunham technique is continued to be taught at schools and companies all over the world. Her travels to other countries always inspired her choreography. “She is credited for bringing caribbean and African influences to a European-dominated world” (“Katherine Dunham Biography” 2). Dunham’s use of different world influences innovated dance and created more significant choreography. Dunham not only changed how she danced; she created an entirely new

Tiana Woods is an ambitious second-year undergraduate student studying Political Science and Dance. She is currently attending Columbia University as a Kluge Scholar. Tiana started her learning journey in the East Orange School System at the Little Ones Preschool. Her Preschool teachers cultivated in her a passion for reading. Ever since then she has loved to tell stories through different art forms. Dance being her favorite platform through which to do so. For Tiana, there is something magical about being able to instantly connect with people of different backgrounds through movement. That's the beauty behind artistry in dance—movement can be interpreted in so many different ways, by so many different people. But it will always inspire. Tiana

Mrs. Farrell’s book is quite technical when it comes to the lengthy descriptions of the dances she rehearses and performs; from a dancer’s view these varied conclusions of the types of movements she was dancing is quite astonishing. In fact, it adds a whole new level to the imagination that can come alive in a person’s thoughts when they read an expressive book. Although the technical explanations will excited, astound, and reveal how much passion and deep meaning ballet had in Suzanne Farrell’s life, but a reader, who may not be involved in the arts will be unfamiliar with the ballet and musical terms in

Frontier (1976)- with Introduction by Martha Graham. Perf. Martha Graham. YouTube. YouTube, 24 June 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2012. .

Sally Banes is an American writer and dance historian and critic. She is also a professor of theater history and dance studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Banes has written multiple books and contributed to many documentaries and films. The book Moving History / Dancing Cultures, which Banes contributed to, includes the article “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater”. This book was published in 2001.