ABSTRACT
Major innovation in dance has occurred largely outside the ballet academy. The radical redefinition of concert dance which began at the turn of the twentieth century was a movement initiated by women artists working independently of traditional structures to develop new languages of physical expression. The early modern dance was a repudiation of the tenets of nineteenth-century ballet, including its emphasis on spectacle and virtuoso display. It was an avowedly female-centred movement, both with respect to the manner in which the body was deployed and represented and in the imagery and subject matter employed. The early-modern dancers were asking that the body and its movement, along with the place and context of dance, be looked at in new ways. They inherited no practice; the techniques and the choreographic forms they developed were maps and reflections of the possibilities and propensities of their own originating bodies. In the early 1900s dancers such as Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Maud
Allen and Ruth St Denis constructed images and created dances through their own unballetic bodies, producing a writing of the female body which strongly contrasted with classical inscriptions. These dancers, creating new vocabularies of movement and new styles of presentation, made a decisive and liberating break with the principles and forms of the European ballet. The modern dance genre is now most closely identified with the choreographic output of the second generation of modern dancers – Mary Wigman, Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham – and the training systems they developed. It is to this body of work that the following discussion refers. Modern dance is not a uniform system, but a corpus of related though
differentiated vocabularies and techniques of movement which have evolved in response to the choreographic projects of individual artists. Common to these contrasting styles of dance – and it is this that allows us to group otherwise disparate works under the banner of ‘modern dance’ – is a conception of the body as a medium and vehicle for the expression of inner forces. The spatial and temporal structure of these dances is based on
emotional and psychological imperatives. The governing logic of modern dance is not pictorial, as in the ballet, but affective. For the modern dancer, dance is an expression of interiority: interior feel-
ing guiding the movement of the body into external forms. Doris Humphrey described her dance as ‘moving from the inside out’ (Cohen 1972); for Graham (1950: 21-2) it was a process of ‘making visible the interior landscape’. This articulation of interior (maternal) spaces creates forms which are not, however, ideal or perfected ones. The modern dancer’s body registers the play of opposing forces, falling and recovering, contracting and releasing. It is a body defined through a series of dynamic alternations subject both to moments of surrender and moments of resistance. In modern dance the body acts in a dynamic relationship with gravity.
For Humphrey the body was at its most interesting when in transition and at a moment of gravitational loss, that is, when it was falling. Modern dance has often been termed ‘terrestrial’, that is, floor-bound and inward-looking. As such it has been negatively compared with the ballet and the aerial verticality and openness of that form. But, as Graham has stressed, ‘the dancers fall so that they may rise’. It is in the falling, not in being down, that the modern body is at its most expressive. The modern body and the dance which shapes it are a site of struggle
where social and psychological, spatial and rhythmic conflicts are played out and sometimes reconciled. This body – and it is specifically a female body – is not passive but dynamic, even convulsive, as Deborah Jowitt sees it:
