Introduction: Modern Dance and the Birth of the Twentieth Century

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Edward Ross Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Dance

Italian Minor Theatre, 2000–14: the Development of ‘Short Forms’ and the Politics of the Stage

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (03) ◽  
pp. 195-208
Author(s):  
Silvia Mei
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Short Forms ◽  
Research Fellow ◽  
History Of ◽  
Expressive Dimension ◽  
The University

Brevity in experimental Italian theatre is not merely an expressive dimension of scenic creation, but a forma mentis, a conceptual vocation of young companies. The 2000s produced a minor theatre in Italy – first because of the reduced stage size, and second because of the brevity of works such as installation pieces. Moving from the linguistic disintegration of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, this theatre is especially inspired by the visual arts, even though its historical roots remain fragmented and art is still seen in the synthetic language of modern dance and Futurist variety. Short forms actually become a tool for crossing artistic genres and languages. Starting from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophical concept of minor literature, in this article Silvia Mei explores and analyzes work by such Italian contemporary companies as gruppo nanou, Città di Ebla, Anagoor, Opera, ErosAntEros, and Teatro Sotterraneo – all representative of what can be called installation theatre, a new theatrical wave that crosses the boundaries and specificities of artistic language, leading to the deterritorialization of theatre itself, a rethinking of the artistic work as well as its relationship with the audience. Silvia Mei is Adjunct Professor of the History of Theatre Directing and Theatre Iconography at the University of Bologna, having been a Research Fellow at the University of Turin. Her recent publications include ‘La terza avanguardia: ortografie dell’ultima scena italiana’, in Culture Teatrali, No. 14 (2015), and Displace Altofest (Valletta: Malta 2018 Foundation).

Burrowes, Leslie (1908–1985)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larraine Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Teacher Training ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Original Dance ◽  
Dance Training ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Teacher Training Colleges ◽  
British Teacher

Dancer, choreographer, and teacher Leslie Burrowes was the first British recipient of the full certification of Mary Wigman’s Dresden School, which licenced her to teach Wigman’s modern dance technique to amateurs and professionals. Before beginning her training with Wigman in 1930, Burrowes had studied and performed with Margaret Morris, whose "free dance" method belonged to the Hellenic and Duncanesque nonballetic dance techniques of early twentieth-century Britain. Burrowes rejected her original dance training in favor of Wigman’s expressionism, returning to London in 1931 to proselytize on its behalf and to serve as Wigman’s official British representative. Burrowes’ attempts to establish Wigman’s dance in Britain were largely unsuccessful, caught in the squeeze between the better-established ballet and Hellenic dance. However, she is an important figure in the development of modern dance in Britain, providing a thorough aesthetic education to some of the teachers and lecturers who, from the 1940s, were instrumental in establishing Laban-based modern dance in British teacher training colleges and schools.

Delsarte, François (1811–1871)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie J. Preston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Actor Training ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
Professional Performance ◽  
Bodily Expression

A performer and teacher of voice and movement, François Delsarte developed a theory of expression that influenced modern dance, actor training, poetic recitation, silent film, and physical culture in the early twentieth century. His ideas and methods were brought to the United States in 1871 by his student, Steele Mackaye (1842–1894), and then adapted by performers, physical culturists, and reformers into a diverse set of movements known as Delsartism. Extremely popular from the 1880s through the 1920s, Delsartism promoted physical exercises and poetic recitation for health and personal development as well as for professional performance. The movement traveled back to Europe to establish trajectories in many fields of modernist aesthetics and education, all emphasizing bodily expression, classical ideas of beauty, and a unique, improvable selfhood.

Chinese Revolutionary Ballet

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaomei Chen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Political History ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Significant Performance ◽  
The Impact

Introduced to China in the 1920s, Western ballet evolved into a significant performance genre in modern and contemporary China. Its popularity grew in the twentieth century when political history, revolutionary wars, the impact of Western cultures, and the artistic visions of a new and modern state all played a significant role in the formation of Chinese revolutionary ballet. The revolutionary ballets took over this Western classical form and transformed its aesthetics, turning an elite spectacle into a socialist realist portrayal of everyday life and its challenges. The introduction of Western ballet into China can be traced to 1894, when the first Sino-Japanese War broke out. At that time, Yu Rongling (裕容龄) traveled to Japan with her father, a Manchu aristocratic diplomat of the Qing Court. She learned modern Japanese dance before pursuing a formal training in Western ballet in Paris, and her teachers included Isadora Duncan. Yu’s quick rise to stardom on the Western stage brought her into the Qing Court, from 1904 to 1907, as a lady-in-waiting to entertain Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后), who developed an interest in Western modern dance. Yu also initiated a combination of Western modern dance with traditional Chinese folk dance, therefore paving the way for the future development of a unique choreography which blended Western and Chinese tradition.

Marga Richter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Mirchandani
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Chamber Ensemble ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
American Composer

This is the first full-length introduction to the life and works of American composer Marga Richter (born 1926), who has written more than a hundred works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance, opera, voice, chorus, piano, organ, and harpsichord. Still actively composing in her eighties, Richter is particularly known for her large-scale pieces performed by ensembles such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and for other pieces performed by prominent artists including pianist Menahem Pressler, conductor Izler Solomon, and violinist Daniel Heifetz. Interspersing consideration of Richter's musical works with discussion of her life, her musical style, and the origins and performances of her works, the book documents a successful composer's professional and private life throughout the twentieth century. The book covers Richter's formative years, her influences, and the phases of her career from the 1950s to the present. Drawing extensively on interviews with Richter herself, the book also provides detailed descriptions of Richter's scores and uses reviews and other secondary sources to provide contexts for her compositions, including their relationship to modern dance, to other musical styles, and to 1970s feminism.

Short Reviews

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-130
Author(s):  
Susan Teneriello
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
English Language ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Body Imagery ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
Critical Dance Studies

Gabriele Brandstetter's Poetics of Dance has remained unavailable to English-language readers until now. Widely considered a landmark book of dance scholarship when it first appeared in Germany in 1995, this provocative analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe is sure to continue to influence a new audience. The book's initial publication advanced the application of critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to dance that now constitute the field of critical dance studies. Caringly translated by Elena Polzer with Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series editor Mark Franko, this work remains a unique analysis of modernity that illuminates dance as an “act of transmission,” a bridge through theatre, literature, and visual arts altering relationships to how movement is reproduced and how space is conceptualized. Brandstetter's central premise expands through reading body imagery as a historically specific context from which the iconography of pictorial patterns open up perceptual concepts. The interdependency between new models and vocabularies of modern dance and literature appearing at the turn-of-the-twentieth century brace the argument that avant-garde aesthetic debates and concerns moved through body imagery and figurations in space. The poetics of free dance (and later forms of Expressionist dance appearing in Germany) as it took shape in Europe foregrounds the dancer's movement as a transformative language and symbolic system of cultural deconstruction and renewal.

Ailian, Dai (1916–2006)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Central China ◽  
Chinese Descent ◽  
Founding Director ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Chinese Dance

Dai Ailian, a woman of Chinese descent, was born and raised in Trinidad and first visited mainland China in 1941. Together with Wu Xiaobang, Dai helped pioneer twentieth-century Chinese dance, especially Chinese ballet, and modern Chinese folk and ethnic dance. Dai received early ballet training in Trinidad. In the 1930s she studied ballet and modern dance in England, where she began choreographing and performing her own work before the age of twenty. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Dai served as founding director of the Central Folk Song and Dance Ensemble, the first principal of the Beijing Dance School, president of the China Dancers’ Association, and artistic director of the Central China Ballet. Dai’s major works include Longing for Home, Sale, The Mute Carries the Cripple, Air Raid, Dove of Peace, Lotus Dance, and Flying Apsaras. Apart from her contributions as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Dai was instrumental in introducing Labanotation to China. She led the founding of the Labanotation Society of China in 1983 and produced numerous notations of Chinese folk dances, and taught China’s first generation of Labanotation experts. A bust of Dai Ailian is displayed at the Beijing Dance Academy, commemorating Dai’s life-long contribution to Chinese dance.

Hawkins, Erick (1909–94)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gay Morris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
The 1950S

Erick Hawkins was a major twentieth-century American choreographer who created a poetic form of modern dance based on free-flowing movement. He also was an early proponent of objectivist or plotless dances that did not attempt to express an emotion or intellectual concept, but existed for their own sake. Hawkins had three distinct phases to his career: the first in ballet as a dancer and fledgling choreographer with Lincoln Kirstein’s interwar American Ballet and Ballet Caravan, then between 1939 and 1950 as a dancer and choreographer with the Martha Graham Company, and finally, from the 1950s onward, as a dancer, choreographer, and director of his own company and school. It was in this final and longest phase of his career that Hawkins created a personal movement vocabulary and a sensuous dance whose goal was direct, unmediated experience.

The Social Life of Dances

Valuing Dance ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 89-140
Author(s):  
Susan Leigh Foster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Wild West Shows ◽  
Studio Instruction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Dances ◽  
Private Studio ◽  
Historical Moment

Chapter 3 pursues the thesis that commodity and gift forms of exchange are interconnected and inseparable. It does this through an examination of three case studies: hip-hop, private dance studio instruction, and powwow. The recent histories of these three examples is examined alongside some of their antecedents at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hip-hop is located along a continuum with the early twentieth-century African American social dances that fueled a dance craze taking place in the urban United States. Private studio instruction is traced back to the social and modern dance instruction offered by entrepreneurial teachers who codified and sold those dances. Powwows are connected to the Wild West shows and other exhibitions of Native dances that brought Native peoples into greater contact with one another and with white audiences. Analyzing the development of these dance practices over time enables a more focused inquiry into the values and belief systems that infuse dance in a given historical moment and the ways that these connect to larger systems of shared values. Each example also calls attention to the way that commodification yields values that collude with forms of social and political domination including racialization and racist ideologies, Orientalism and exoticism, and colonial settler logics.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document