Martha Graham : The Mother Of Contemporary Dance

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).

Throughout the world, there have been several different dances created and people do not fully know the origins of the dances. For example, the twist was created by Chubby Checker in the 60s. There have been several different ways to show the rhythmic ability as a whole and the most different thing that people were doing was several different ways of dancing. In the late 1700s and the early 1800s, African Americans were starting to do different dances as a whole. However, they were not fully called as a dance or as they were referred to as contra dances, reels, and jigs when the cadence was called out. The difference was when there was a change in general if there was no cadence, then the African Americans would be dancing. African Americans

Graham started teaching a group of dancers in 1926 who had eventually become interested in her work. That was the start of the Martha Graham Studio. Martha Graham pushed

She later moved back to New York and resigned from Daly's theater company. She began performing on her own with limited success. In 1899, she performed Rubaiyat and shocked the audience with her skimpy costume (it showed her bare arms) and with the movement of her dance (Splatt 34). It was the beginning of her "new dance" and was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Martha Graham was one of the most influential figures in American modern dance, and her techniques and styles are still practiced today. She became widely known throughout all ages and decades. Her first debut was in the 1920's. As time went on, she became more experienced and wiser in the modern dance field. Martha Graham, whose style was considered controversial, became one of the finest choreographers and dancers in the dance world.

This weekend Christina Wehner is hosting the En Pointe Blogathon, a three-day event celebrating films that spotlight that beautiful and centuries old form of dance known as ballet. One of the most overlooked Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films of the 1940s - The Unfinished Dance - just so happens to revolve around ballet, and so I have chosen to call attention to this rarity as well as to Ballerina ( 1937 ) which was based on the same story.

On April 24, 1903, one of the founders of American modern dance was born to parents who emigrated from Russia. Helen Tamiris, originally Helen Becker, grew up in New York, New York on the Lower East Side. In her lifetime, she danced, choreographed, and helped initiate modern dance. Later in her life, she moved to the “Great White Way,” otherwise known as Broadway, to choreograph many shows.

Besides Isadora Duncan, there were other pioneers of modern dance such as Alvin Ailey who was born in Rogers, Texas on January 5, 1931 to Alvin Ailey Sr. and Lula Elizabeth Ailey. It wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles at age 12 that he was exposed to dance. He fell in love with dance after witnessing a series of performances, specifically by the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the Ballet Musse de Monte Carlo, being inspired by a series of dance performances. He then began taking dances lesson with another pioneer of modern dance, Lester Horton, who had founded the first racially integrated dance company in the United States. It was Horton who also became Alvin’s mentor at the beginning and throughout his career in dance. However, when

Ruth Denis was born on the 20th of January, 1879 on a family farm located in Newark, New Jersey. Ruth lived with both her two parents, Ruth’s father was a persistently unemployed machinist. Ruth St Denis’s mother (Ruth Emma Denis) on the other hand was a physician, renowned for being Ruth’s motivation. She taught Ruth the basic foundations of ballroom and skirt dancing and at the age of 10, Ruth performed her first solo performance produced by her mother. Denis then began truly committed herself to dance, including training of Delsarte technique, ballet lessons with the Italian ballerina Maria Bonfante, social dance forms and skirt dancing.

After her father died in 1914, Martha finished college and began to study dance at Denishawn in Los Angeles. Here, she toured with the man that ran this school, Ted Shawn, and his company in a production based on an Indian legend. About 10 years later, Martha left the company to do solo dances for a company called the Greenwich Village Follies. She had her first independent concert in New York City during 1926. She performed 18 different dances with her and 3 other women.

Beginning with her best students from the Eastman school of Music, Graham started her own (now famous) school for contemporary dance; The Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in New York, where she continued to teach and express her own unique style. Graham mainly believed in expression through dance so she tried very hard to create movement that focused on the realness of life; her dance movements flowed with beauty and emotion. Modern dance is freeness and the ability to express joy, sadness, and determinedness and without Martha Graham’s influence on the art of dance, modern dance simply wouldn’t be the same as it is today. Graham also introduced the use of moving scenery, the use of props as symbols and dance that was combined with speech. These were all large changes and opened more possibilities and experiences to the world of dance. Graham also got rid of the classic ballet folk dress and instead often chose a classy straight black dress for her movement pieces.

"American Masters: Martha Graham, About the Dancer." PBS. PBS, 16 Sept. 2005. Web. 17 Nov. 2012. .

Dance is an ever evolving form of art; in much the same way that one can categorize and differentiate between eras and styles of architecture one can also do so with dance. These eras at times have sharp delineations separating them from their antecedents, other times the distinction is far more subtle. Traditional forms of dance were challenged by choreographers attempting to expand the breadth and increase the depth of performance; preeminent among such visionaries was Seattle born dancer and choreographer Mark Morris. Mark Morris' began as one of the millions of hopeful individuals attempting to simply make a career in dance; he not only succeeded but managed to have a lasting effect on the entire landscape of dance.

Watching the video “A Dancer’s World” made me want to become a professional dancer. Martha Graham’s dancers showed how delicate, defined, sharp, smooth, and astatic a choreography can be. It illustrated how much hard word and dedication it’s needed, but the results will always be beautiful. Also Martha Graham explained how dancing with a partner can be. She also talked about males as dancers, but in her video she demonstrates how men danced with females using physical contact. The techniques and how the piece turns out to be. Both genders jumped a lot through out each piece of performed and that’s something loved. During a piece, there can be both gender dancing separately doing their own thing. The techniques are used differently by males

Mary Wigman had influence over Germany for modern dance as she began working with Rudolph Laban and she created a dance school in Dresden for students to learn something new which was in fact a creative experience that is an expression of emotional impulses. She wanted her dancers to be conscious of the impulses that lay within themselves and how to express them. Her movements wanted to create a cathartic function to dance in ancient societies and will be remembered for their tragic, dark character and introspective dances that reveal vibrant, vital and passionate inner states of being. It was in fact the rise of the Nazi political party in Germany in the 1920s ended the German modern dance movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wigman Wikipedia 14th December 2017