ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the new range of contents emergent from experimental approaches to movement for dance composition. Attempts to define the meaning of the terms used to label 'alternative' and 'experimental' approaches in dance composition are fraught with difficulty. In Britain, the term 'new dance' has been coined for the experimental practice extending from the early 1960s to the present. Learning how to stylise movement content through an understanding of particular techniques such as those of Graham, Hawkins and Humphrey, or ballet, jazz and social dance forms, also constitutes an important part of the discipline of dance composition. Methods of coming to know new and different dance vocabularies are discussed in the chapter on resource-based teaching/learning of dance composition. Attention has been given to two extremes composers who deal with movement as theme and composers who take up political and social issues or attempt to deal with psychological behaviours in some way.
