Evolution of Dance

Famous song by pioneering Hip-Hop group, Salt-N-Pepa.

Knowledge

    Modern Dance was founded in Germany and is also known as aesthetic dance. Aesthetic dance is a dance focusing on the nature of art, beauty, and taste while appreciating creation. It is widely based off of nature and majority of all ballets are nature inspired. It focused on Somatics which includes body therapies, bodywork, body-mind integration, body-mind discipline, movement awareness, and movement education. All these traits enable a dancer to enhance kinaesthetic awareness along with using sensory awareness to modulate movement range to uncover the potential for new mobility.  Ruth St. Davis founded “pseudo-exoticism” which is the fascination of other cultures. Martha Graham was an American modern dancer whose influence on dance is compared to “Picasso’s influence on the modern visual arts”. She was said to have been the one who brought modern dance to the 20th century. She spent her entire life as a dancer and was very talented. She traveled the world and received many prestigious honors. An example of that was that she was the first dancer to ever perform at the White House and received the Key to the City of Paris to Japans Imperial Order to the Precious Crown. She established the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance where she choreographed till her death. This company is the oldest dance company in America, where it was founded in 1926. It inspired and helped create many famous dancers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Here, she codified the technique of modern dance, which was later coined “The Graham Codified Technique”.