ABSTRACT
Modern dance was born as a radical reaction to the formal decorum and limited vocabulary of ballet. Ballet may have provided consummate exercises for 'shaping and moulding man's exterior', in the words of ballet, but to the pioneers of modern dance it was at the cost of disconnecting the outside from within. Modern dance, aims at expressing from the 'inside out'. In Graham's terms, the task was to create a 'technique for revelation of experience', for a kind of 'movement expression' 'timed to the present moment', reactive and 'sensitive' to inner emotional 'impulses' that could 'mirror' and 'reveal' the person, without unnecessary constriction from balletic conventions and manners. Ballet builds on the idea of emotional expression as communicative transactions, through a system of emblematic body movements that have their origin in a ritualised social code of etiquette.
