Bare feet and silk light rebelled against ballet's corset
Late nineteenth-century concert dance in Europe and the United States tossed out pointe shoes and ballet's limited step vocabulary. Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Maud Allan chased freer motion; Martha Graham later forged contraction-and-release technique still taught worldwide. Postmodern artists of the 1960s then rejected modern formalism itself.
Modern dance is usually framed as a Western concert genre that rose around the turn of the twentieth century as both social expression and a pushback against classical ballet. Historians also tie the shift to industrial middle-class leisure and a new cult of fitness after Victorian rules loosened. Early Modern American practice (roughly 1880–1923) featured Duncan, Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and Eleanor King changing the look of dancing before named techniques hardened. Central Modern choreographers (about 1923–1946)—Graham, Doris Humphrey, Katherine Dunham, Charles Weidman, Lester Horton—built distinct training systems that studios still teach.
Duncan, born 1877, centered motion in the torso, danced barefoot with loose hair and flowing dress, and mixed Greek, folk, and athletic skips and leaps; she dismissed ballet as empty gymnastics. Fuller, born 1862, turned burlesque skirt dancing into patented gas-lighting effects on translucent silk, using gels and chemical luminescence. St. Denis, born 1879 and shaped by Sarah Bernhardt and Japanese dancer Sada Yacco, staged popular Asian-inspired mythologies and, with Shawn in 1915, founded Denishawn, where Graham, Humphrey, and Weidman trained. Graham moved to New York in 1923 and made feeling—heightened bodily awareness—the core of her method.
Europe added Expressionist lines through Mary Wigman, François Delsarte, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's Eurhythmics, Rudolf Laban, Kurt Jooss, and Harald Kreutzberg. Depression-era radicals staged economic and fascist crises; Hanya Holm brought Wigman and Laban ideas to New York in 1931 and helped found the 1934 Bennington American Dance Festival. Later innovators—José Limón's 1949 Moor's Pavane, Merce Cunningham's chance procedures with John Cage from 1944, Erick Hawkins's kinesiology-based school in 1951, Paul Taylor's company from 1954, Alwin Nikolais's multimedia obstacles—kept rewriting what counted as modern. By the 1960s postmodernists answered with contact improvisation, release, and performance art.
Source: Modern dance
