ABSTRACT
Contemporary physical practices have been shaped by a number of different generic strands. Most notable among these are the influences of early twentieth-century dance, mime, theatre and circus practices. Scholar Elizabeth Dempster analyses the development of modern dance and suggests that traditional structures of movement were redefined at the beginning of the twentieth century to create ‘new languages of physical expression’ (Dempster 1998: 223). This expression was one which shunned the uniformity of balletic movement; as Dempster notes, dancers such as Isadora Duncan, Löie Fuller, Ruth St Denis and later Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, though often inspired by ancient forms of dance, ‘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’ (Dempster 1998: 223). This emphasis on personal expression forms a distinctive feature of much devised physical work. It is often, though, and such is the case of the early innovators cited here, that the physical practices developed are inspired by other influences such as social, political or anthropological concerns. For example, the work of early modern dancers was created as a reaction to the climate of postwar conditions.
