ABSTRACT
Rebellion and exploration have been virtually a tradition since the inception of modern dance. Dating back to the first decades of the twentieth century, early modern dance choreographer Isadora Duncan rejected ballet’s verticality and grace and made dances based on the wavelike movements of nature; not much later Ruth St. Denis created an exotic movement vocabulary that balanced precariously between sensuality and religion. By the 1930s Martha Graham was developing a dance technique whose angularity and sharp impulses expressed the psychological landscape while Doris Humphrey’s fall and recovery technique emphasized the drama of the body off center. Despite these new styles of movement, the premises underlying the construction of a dance still followed centurieslong standards. We see them spelled out in mid-century composition primers. Humphrey’s 1959 The Art of Making Dances taught choreographic craft by mapping out the strong and weak parts of the stage and showing how to manipulate the elements of gesture, design, dynamics, and rhythm. Two other influential dance composition texts of the period were written by Graham’s adviser and music director, Louis Horst, who believed that dance, like music, must adhere to given forms. Dancers may have been spiraling dramatically to the floor, but they were doing so in orderly formations and in time to music.
