Merce Cunningham, 1970.Jack Mitchell
Believing that all movement was potential dance material, Cunningham developed a style that embraced an extraordinarily wide spectrum, from natural, everyday actions such as sitting down and walking to virtuosic dance movements. Elements of his style even had a close affinity to ballet: jumps tended to be light and airy, the footwork fleet and intricate, and the leg extensions high and controlled. He placed greater emphasis on the vertical and less emphasis on the body’s weight and the force of gravity. Like those of Graham, many of Cunningham’s movements centred on the back and torso, but they tended less toward dramatic contractions and spirals than toward smaller and more sharply defined tilts, curves, and twists. The arms were frequently held in graceful curves and the feet pointed.
Cunningham’s phrases were often composed of elaborate, coordinating movements of the head, feet, body, and limbs in a string of rapidly changing positions. The arrangement of performers on stage was equally complex: at any one moment there might have been several dancers, in what seemed like random groupings, all performing different phrases at the same time. With no main action dominating the stage, the spectator was free to focus on any part of the dance.
While Graham’s works were usually structured around the events of a narrative, Cunningham’s works usually emerged from the working through of one or more choreographic ideas, whose development (i.e., the ordering of movements into phrases or the number of dancers working at any one time) might then have been determined by chance. Deriving its movements from such formal origins did not mean that Cunningham’s works lacked expressive power. One of his pieces, Winterbranch (1964), started out as a study based on moving into a space and falling, but it produced a powerful effect on audiences, who variously interpreted it as a piece about war, concentration camps, or even sea storms. Cunningham believed that the expressive qualities in dance should not be determined by a story line but should simply rise out of movement itself. “The emotion will appear when the movement is danced,” he claimed, “because that is where the life is.” Postmodernism
During the 1960s and ’70s a new generation of American choreographers, generally referred to as postmodernist choreographers, took some of Cunningham’s ideas even farther. They also believed that ordinary movement could be used in dance, but they rejected the strong element of virtuosity in Cunningham’s technique and the complexities of his phrasing and structure, insisting that such a style interfered with the process of seeing and feeling the movement clearly. Consequently, the postmodernists replaced conventional dance steps with simple movements such as rolling, walking, skipping, and running. Their works concentrated on the basic principles of dance: space, time, and the weight and energy of the dancer’s body.
Catherine Wheel, a modern dance choreographed by Twyla Tharp, 1981.Martha Swope
Postmodernists discarded spectacle as another distraction from the real business of movement. Costumes were often ordinary practice or street clothes, there was little or no set and lighting, and many performances took place in lofts, galleries, or out-of-doors. Narrative and expression were discarded, and the dance structures were usually very simple, involving either the repetition and accumulation of simple phrases or the working through of simple movement games or tasks. In Tom Johnson’s Running Out of Breath (1976) the dancer simply ran around the stage reciting a text until he ran out of breath.
Most avant-garde modern-dance companies have been quite small and have occupied a position on the fringe of the dance world, attracting only small and specialist audiences. Although “mainstream” modern dance now attracts large audiences in both Europe and North America, it too was for many decades a minority art form, often playing to only a handful of spectators. Modern-dance companies were then, and still are, relatively small. Partly because they lack funding, they tend to use less elaborate costume and staging, and they perform in small theatres where contact with the audience is close. The musical
West Side Story (1961)Fight scene from West Side Story (1961).© 1961 United Artists Corporation
All That JazzBen Vereen (centre left) and Roy Scheider (centre right) in All That Jazz (1979), directed by Bob Fosse.© 1979 Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; photograph from a private collection
Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey in Cabaret (1972), directed by Bob Fosse.© 1971 Allied Artists Picture Corporation; photograph from a private collectionPerhaps the most genuinely popular of all the subgenres within ballet and modern dance are the dance forms associated with the musical, such as tap, jazz, ballroom, and disco. In musicals of both stage and screen, dance is an essential ingredient along with song, acting, and spectacle. Although the dancing is often mechanical and unoriginal, in the work of such dancers and choreographers as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly it can rise to the status of a genuine art form. Sometimes, as in Jerome Robbins’s choreography for the dances of the rival gangs in West Side Story (1957), it creates a powerful dramatic effect. Other innovative choreographers include Agnes deMille, whose dances in Oklahoma! (1943) were the first ever used to advance the plot, and Bob Fosse, particularly known for his work on the film All That Jazz (1979).
Indian classical dance
The six recognized schools of Indian classical dance developed as a part of religious ritual in which dancers worshipped the gods by telling stories about their lives and exploits. Three main components form the basis of these dances. They are natya, the dramatic element of the dance (i.e., the imitation of character); nritta, pure dance, in which the rhythms and phrases of the music are reflected in the decorative movements of the hands and body and in the stamping of the feet; and nritya, the portrayal of mood through facial expression, hand gesture, and position of the legs and feet.
A dancer practicing garba dance, Ahmadabad, Gujarat state, India.Philip Game/Alamy
The style of movement in Indian classical dance is very different from that of Western ballet. In ballet the emphasis is frequently on the action of the legs—in jumps, turns, and fast traveling steps, which create ballet’s characteristic qualities of height, speed, and lightness—while the body itself remains relatively still and the arms simply frame the face or balance the body. In Indian dance, however, the legs are usually bent, with the feet flat rather than lifted and pointed. Jumps are usually low (though light), and the dancer rarely covers much ground or performs intricate steps, the complexity of the footwork lying more in elaborate stamping rhythms. (These stamping rhythms enhance the musicality of the dance; many dancers wear bells around their ankles, supplying their own accompaniment as well as counterpoint to the rhythms beaten out by the musicians.) The torso, face, arms, and hands are extremely active. The head is quite mobile, with subtle changes of direction and a characteristic side-to-side movement emphasizing the dancer’s changing facial expressions. The movement of the torso is graceful and fluid, shifting from side to side or turning on the axis of the spine, while the movement of the hands and arms is subtle and elaborate, every gesture having a narrative function. Indian dancers have a vast repertoire of gestures through which they express complex events, ideas, and emotions. There are, for example, 13 gestures of the head, 36 different glances, and 67 mudras, or hand gestures, that can, in various combinations, yield several thousand different meanings.