The Pioneers of Modern Dance: My Firsthand Experience

Recently I was talking about the different teachers I had studied with as a young dancer between the ages of 15 and 21.  I hadn’t thought of it before in quite these terms, but I am old enough to have had firsthand experience with most of the shapers of modern dance.  These were amazing pioneers forging new traditions in dance from the 1920’s into the 1960’s and some beyond.  Here is a list of these pioneers and a few sentences describing my experience with them, in the order I met them.

Ted Shawn  (1891-1972) of Denishawn – He and Ruth St. Denis founded a company where a number of the pioneers got their first experience and opportunity to build long-term collaborations.  I heard Ted Shawn speak at Jacob’s Pillow when he introduced the program that I went to see when I was a camper at a nearby camp.  Jacob’s Pillow’s history goes back to 1933 when Shawn and his group of men did their first performance in a barn that still exists and is used for classes and performances today.  Here’s a link to learn more about the founding of Jacob’s Pillow.  The camp I attended was called Belgian Village and was located in Cummington, MA .  I was there on a scholarship teaching dance to the younger campers.  I can remember sitting in the Jacob’s Pillow theatre and being awed by both Ted Shawn’s inspiring words and an amazing performance that included modern dance, ballet and ethnic dance.

Martha Graham  (1894 -1991) – I first met her at the age of 15 when she came to Pittsburgh for the premiere of her movie  A Dancer’s World, which you can watch on YouTube.  It is a wonderful introduction to her and her technique.  Jeanne Beaman, my modern dance teacher in Pittsburgh, hosted a reception for Martha following a private showing of the film.  I have a clear memory of being introduced to her and her encouraging me to come to NYC and take the Xmas course even though I was very young. I did go a year later, and from that time on, Graham technique was my favorite way to train. That was not the only time I had classes directly with her.  She taught a week of classes at the six-week summer program at the American Dance Festival which I attended twice. There were also occasions when she taught at the New York studio.  She, the technique she developed, and how she choreographed her pieces were a major influence on me!

Helen Tamiris  (1902-1966) – I auditioned for her in 1958 at Perry-Mansfield Camp and was accepted into a piece she choreographed during the three weeks she was there. Martha Clarke and I were the only two younger-than-college-age dancers who were part of her piece Dance for Walt Whitman. (I’ve written before about Tamiris and Dance for Walt Whitman; here is a link to that blog. The fact that Tamiris recognized my abilities reaffirmed my commitment to be a dancer. She also influenced significantly my understanding of choreographic elements.  Currently Elizabeth McPherson, a member of Avodah Dance Ensemble during seven of the years I directed the company, is working on a book about Tamiris.  When Elizabeth spent three weeks at the artist residency program  I hold at my home, we spent many hours talking about Tamiris, and it was great fun for me to learn new things about her life.  I was so glad that we were able to stage some of Tamiris’s choreography when Elizabeth set Tamiris’s piece Negro Spirituals for the Avodah Dance Ensemble.

Charles Weidman (1901-1975) – I was part of a class he taught in kinetic pantomime at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College in 1960.  He staged a demonstration that we performed in a Festival program.  It was during one of his rehearsals that Martha Hill, the chairman of the dance department of Juilliard, saw me rehearsing and remembered me from an audition I had taken for Juilliard about six weeks before. She found me after class and asked me to reaudition.  I hadn’t made that first audition, but she felt I now would get into the school.

Martha Hill  (1900- 1995) – I mentioned in the last paragraph that she encouraged me to reaudition for Juilliard, which I did about a year later.  While I didn’t have a lot of direct contact with her while I was at Juilliard, the program that she developed at Juilliard and my two years as a student there shaped me as an artist.  The tools and ability to focus on my “art” carried over from dance to painting and filmmaking. I have tremendous respect for the role she played in the development of dance education in colleges.  Elizabeth McPherson has written an excellent book about her, and here is a link to a blog I wrote about the book.

 Louis Horst (1884 – 1964) – I took my first of three composition classes from him in the summer of 1961, at Connecticut College.  In Pre-Classic Dance Forms, he encouraged me to continue with him, even though I wasn’t yet a student at Juilliard. I did so (as a special student), continuing to take his second-year course, Modern Forms.  By mid-semester I had become a full-time student at Juilliard.  The following year I took his third and final formal course, Group Forms.  I loved his classes.  His demanding insistence that we follow the clear form of different musical dances instilled a discipline and focus on how I used movement in dance pieces. His second-year course began a long appreciation of art and how much we can learn from different periods of art history.  A good example of how this later influenced me can be found in how I used a painting as a basis for I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Here’s a link to a blog where I go into detail about this.  Last fall, Nancy Bannon was here on an artist residency working on a play about Louis Horst and Martha Graham, and I learned lots of interesting things about Louis’s life.  She shared with me a wonderful book by Janet Soares about Louis that I look forward to reviewing in an upcoming blog.

There are two pioneers from the period that I didn’t get to study with directly although I did study with their disciples.

Doris Humphrey (1895 -1958)  – Her name is associated with Charles Weidman (they formed together The Humphrey-Weidman Company) and with Jose Limon (she mentored him when he was her student, and when she retired from her own company, she became Artistic Director of his Limon Company).  I took classes in Limon technique at Juilliard and sometimes had a class directly from Limon.  Although I wasn’t fond of the technique, I loved Limon’s choreography as well as pieces that I saw of Humphrey’s.  In particular, Humphrey’s Water Study (1928), The Shakers (1931), and Passacaglia (to Bach’s Music) are among my favorites.  Passacaglia was revived at Juilliard during the time I was there.  I am so glad that I got to see Jose dance in The Moor’s Pavane along with Betty Jones, Lucas Hoving and Pauline Koner.  Some of his other pieces that have created a lasting memory are There Is a Time and Missa Brevis.

While I did not study directly with Humphrey, her philosophy and writing did have an influence on me, such as her movement exercises of fall and recovery.  “She called this the arc between two deaths.  At one extreme an individual surrenders to the nature of gravity; at the other, one attempts to achieve balance.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Humphrey).  Her book The Art of Making Dance (1958), which I read several years after it was published, was also helpful to me, and it was a regular reference book in my library.  I keep in mind to this very day her statement that the last seconds of a piece of choreography are most important.  For me, that reminder carries over to all art forms.

Hanya Holm (1893 – 1999) One of the dancers that she strongly influenced, Don Redlich, choreographed a piece that I was in while a teenager in Pittsburgh.  It was interesting working with him, but I don’t remember anything unique about the experience that I can trace back to Holm.  I do remember loving her choreography in My Fair Lady which I saw shortly after it opened with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in 1956.

Writing this blog has felt like a journey down memory lane.  I am grateful to have experienced firsthand so many of the modern dance pioneers.  I welcome readers who may have worked with some of them to share their experiences in the comment section.