Modern Dance

Modern Dance Free Essay, Term Paper and Book Report

Modern Dance Modern dance began at the turn of the 20th century, primarily in the United States and Germany. Modern Dance resembles modern art and music in being experimental and iconoclastic. The starters of modern dance in the U.S. were Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis. The starters of modern dance in Germany were Rudolf Von Laban and Mary Wigman. All of those people rebelled against the rigid formalism, artifice, and superficiality of classical academic ballet, and against the banality of show dancing. They sought to inspire audiences to a new awareness and outer realities ("Modern Dance: The Beginnings of Modern Dance.") Modern Dancers use their bodies as instruments to express such emotion as passion, fear, joy, or grief. Over time modern dance has helped to integrate various styles of dance more than American musical comedy, which draws on ballet, modern tap, and ethnic folk dancing. Dancers today use broader range of techniques, styles, and source materials than ever before (“Spotlight Biography”) When Isadora performed modern dance for the first ......Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music,[1] used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in ordinarily inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind).

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be...