while Isadora toured America, the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev brought the Ballet Russes from Moscow to Paris. French ballet had fallen into decadence, so audiences were stunned by the expressive and virtuosic dancing, featuring choreography by Mikhail Fokine and performers such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova. Ballet Russes, commissioning daring sets, costumes, and music by collaborators, created a synthesis of art forms, merging contemporary values with classical tradition.3
The effect of the Ballet Russes in America over the next decades, through touring, emigration, and immigration, was a refined ballet lineage. Visionary arts patron Lincoln Kirstein invited George Balanchine to found the American Ballet Theatre in 1933 (later the New York City Ballet).4 Other Russian-trained dancers opened studios across the country, offering quality instruction. Ballet, with origins in the royal court of Louis XIV, modeled verticality (mind over body), with a high center of gravity and presentational focus. Balanchine, interfacing with the spirited American music and earthbound modern dancers of the 1930s, explored new patterns of form and movement in space, stripped of decorative detail—with his motto “Less is more.”5
Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn duet
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-35093
I am not a music dancer, I’m an idea dancer.
—Ruth St. Denis
In the second decade, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, evangelistic by nature, began collaborating. They married in 1914, and formed the Denishawn company and school in 1915 to spread dance across America. Partner dancing and orientalism were the rage, and their repertory featured both. Known for inhabiting and imitating the dances of others (Indian, Asian, Egyptian, Aztec, and Native American—whatever caught their imagination), they made theatrical dances of all forms and scales, based on images and ideas. Viewing Denishawn amplified the idea that each person has within the self the full range of what it means to be human—we are each “the other.” With a repertory both illuminating and entertaining, including sometimes thirty dances in a concert, they spent months on the road (fifty performances in a row), steaming across the country by train, collecting local dancers to fill roles.
During the 1920s to 1930s, the Denishawn School trained performers, peopled silent films, and cultivated a next generation of dancers. Daily class in California might include yoga meditation, Delsarte (a system of healthful exercises), ballet barre, cultural forms (Japanese or Indian dance), and private lessons with Miss Ruth. In 1925 to 1926, the couple embarked on a tour of Asia and India, performing their eclectic dances, and in some cases reinspiring respect for traditional forms in the regions where they toured. After the couple separated in 1931, Shawn formed a men’s company (1931–1940), taught dance at Springfield College (a preeminent school for physical education), and founded Jacob’s Pillow, an ongoing summer program in Massachusetts (Ted Shawn Theatre, 1942). St. Denis founded the dance program at Adelphi University (1938), and continued to teach and create until her death in 1968.
Martha Graham
Lamentation
Photograph by Soichi Sunami, Estate of Soichi Sunami
Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.
—Martha Graham
Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Wiedman were three of the four recognized “pioneers of American modern dance.” They performed with Denishawn for a decade before setting out on their own in the late 1920s. Musical director Louis Horst, accompanist for Denishawn and later partner to Graham, influenced the teaching of dance composition and the trajectory of contemporary composers and visual artists who would collaborate with modern choreographers. Those who worked with Graham include such artists as Jean Rosenthal in lighting design, Aaron Copeland as composer, and Isamu Noguchi in set design. John Martin, dance critic for the New York Times, was central in bringing modern dance to the forefront through his articulation of the intersection of new forms and their content, conveying their meaning to the viewer.
Martha Graham Letter to the World (1940)
Photograph © Barbara Morgan, the Barbara Morgan Archive
The man who speaks with primordial images speaks with a thousand tongues.
—Carl Jung
Graham took choreography seriously. She was the first dancer who graduated from college, attending the Comstock School in California. The daughter of a medical doctor who specialized in treating psychological disorders, Graham was financially and socially stable and secure (unlike previous American dancers). She was interested in “dancing from the inside out,” that is, exploring psychological motivations, a goal shared by many dancers at the time. Her intellectual depth and drive underscored the impeccable technique she created to support her choreography, based on the principle of contract and release. Centered in the abdomen—the creative and sexual center of the body—and amplified by breath cycles, the “inner impulse” was made manifest in passionate and expressive action.
Dancer and Choreographer: José Limón Mexican Suite (1944) Vintage gelatin silver print, titled on verso, 4 x 4¾ in. Bruce Silverstein Galleries
Photograph © Barbara Morgan, the Barbara Morgan Archive
Graham’s first company of three women formed in 1927 (the year of Isadora’s death), followed by a company of twelve women in 1929. The first male dancer, Erick Hawkins (her future husband), joined the company in 1938; this was one of many shifts during decades of work within a theater space magically lit by Jean Rosenthal. Inspiration came from many sources, including Graham’s fascination with Greece and mythology, and her longterm involvement with Jungian therapeutic principles and ideas—exploring archetypal dimensions of body and psyche.
Doris Humphrey worked with the principle of fall and recovery—pendular movement, described as “the arc between two deaths.” Breath rhythms supported musicality, lyricism, and a compositional eye. Her book, The Art of Making Dances, remains a classic. With Charles Wiedman, she formed the Humphrey-Wiedman Dance Company in 1928, with each artist focusing on her or his own repertory. Charles was best known for his humor and wit onstage, creating solos and group work for male dancers. When Doris stopped dancing in 1945 because of arthritis in her hip, her protégé, Mexican-born dancer José Limón, continued the work and developed his own artistic voice, creating masterpieces still being performed by the José Limón Dance Company.
The fourth pioneer was German expatriate Hanya Holm, a student of Mary Wigman in the lineage of Rudolf Laban. This heritage combined clear systemization of methodologies with articulation of energy states and movement qualities. While choreographing and teaching, Holm passed on these principles at her school in New York City and Colorado College summer sessions. Alwin Nikolais was a primary student, followed by his protégé Murray Louis in New York and the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Utah; both dancers reflect the Wigman-Holm tradition in their work.
Beginning in 1934, these four pioneers taught together at the Bennington School of the Dance, founded by Martha Hill (now the American Dance Festival, held in North Carolina). This festival supported the creation of new choreography and cross-fertilization of work. Each artist would teach and premiere new repertory over the six-week session in a focused, yet highly competitive environment in rural Vermont. The festival provided resources not just for performers, but also for the new academicians in dance, shaping courses in major universities. Of the original matriarchs of college dance programs, Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin–Madison established the first dance major (within physical education) in 1926, articulating