Dance Research

Martha Graham 

Martha Graham (1894 – 1991) was an American dancer and choreographer, best known for creating her own technique.

Graham got most of the inspiration through her father, who was a doctor, as she believed in the fact that the body could express senses through movement and dance.  After watching a dancer called Ruth St. Denis perform at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles, Graham went on to study at a junior college, then began studying at Denishawn School of Dance and Related Arts, founded by St. Denis herself, along with her husband.

After improvising a technique, known as ‘Graham Technique’, Graham pursed dance professionally, and then appeared in a dance production named ‘Xochitl’, playing the part of an Aztec maiden who’d been attacked.  Critics began to recognise Graham’s talent after her stunning performance in the role.

    

After leaving Denishawn in 1923, Graham began teaching at the Greenwich Village Follies.  Three years later, she Created her own dance company named ‘Martha Graham Dance Company’, in which she began teaching her own technique and experiments in her form of dance.

Some of Grahams most famous productions included ‘Frontier’, ‘Lamentation’ and ‘Appalachian Song’.  Nearly all of these works involved tension and relaxed, in which Graham called ‘contract and release’.

Even though her technique was often described as ‘ugly’, Graham’s work soon became popular over a long period of time, in which it gained multiple recognition worldwide, and is now taught in various countries.

Merce Cunningham 

Merce Cunningham (1919 – 2009) was an American dancer, who was best known for creating advanced designs of complex movement in the world of dance.

Cunningham became interested in dance by studying the plausible of unconsidered phenomena, as a network.  Along with this, he was also influenced by the quest of movement, as free from available emotion.  Moreover, Cunningham established a technique called ‘Choreography by Chance’, which consists of preferred movement are put into a sequence by aimless methods.

Cunningham took an interest to dance at 12 years old, and after high school, he went on to study at the Cornish School of Fine and Applied Arts.   Then, he went on to progress his dance studies with dancer and choreographer Lester Horton in 1938 at Mills College, and then in 1939, went on to attend Bennington College.  Furthermore, he was invited by well known dancer and choreographer at the time Martha Graham, to join her dance group, where he performed in many diverse roles, as a soloist.  Cunningham has also worked as a choreographer on various films and created a performance called ‘Locale’ in 1979.  He has also been part of a television show called ‘Gateway’ in 1967.

Shortly leaving Graham’s dance group, Cunningham became interested in choreography in 1943, and, a year later, produced his first  production as a chorographer, named ‘Root of an Unfocus’.  Afterwards, he went on to choreograph ‘Mysterious Adventure’ in 1945.

Root of an Unfocus:

                

Cunningham then formed his own dance company in 1952, and ever since, has gone to choreograph many different productions before his death at the age of 90.

Development of Contemporary Dance

For this task we were put into groups of around seven or eight, and we were each given a dance practitioner to research.  After gathering the research about our practitioner we were tasked with discussing what research we managed to find.  The practitioner that I was given was Doris Humphrey.

Below is the information that I’ve managed to gather.   We also came up with some questions to answer about our own practitioners and what practitioner we could also look into.