By Matt McDermott

One of the reasons the pioneers of the modern visual and performing arts rejected the classical tradition was to create an art for a wider audience: an art that didn’t require an elite education. Ironically, the modern and contemporary arts continue to be seen by mass audiences in Chicago and elsewhere as less accessible than the predecessors against which the pioneers rebelled. Modern dance companies continue to work hard to cultivate their audience, even though modern dance arguably ranks among the most American of modern art forms.

For me, the explanation requires that I take a tangent to America’s most unique, great art form, jazz. I remember vividly remember listening to the music of John Coltrane for the first time. I was dazzled by the sounds, but at the same time the music seemed to be shrouded within something akin to static. With repeated listening (I was hooked), that “static” fell away and the instruments instead resonate crisply, with clearly defined notes and intentions. With repeated listening, unique expression became clarified.

This is not to suggest that the strategy to grow the audience for modern dance in Chicago lies in a larger audience spontaneously deciding to attend more performances. To return to my experience, my ears had context in the music of the jazz greats preceding Coltrane. What carried me through to a better understanding of Coltrane’s music was a familiarity with the tradition of individual genius as it is expressed in jazz history. Most of us can take greater risks with music: we have a broader context.

Growing the audience for modern dance in Chicago will require more of us to develop equivalent references: footholds we can use to follow the dancers along their creative ascents. A familiarity with the pioneers of modern American dance provides a vocabulary that can be brought into the performance, replacing the “static” I first heard in Coltrane with the context of the formative history of the art of modern movement. This article is by necessity incomplete, as it is written by a member of the developing audience.

At the end of the article, a list of a few of our city’s excellent dance companies is offered, though we hope you will explore further. Chicago boasts over 100 dance companies.

Loie Fuller (1862-1928)
A Chicago (Hinsdale) native, Loie Fuller’s dance style may be familiar to Chicagoans by the historic dance performances of MOMENTA, including their performance of works such as “Fire Dance” in association with the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at the Art Institute. She was famous for silk costumes combined with her self-designed multi-colored lighting and significant for her emphasis on improvisation and natural movement.

This is an historical recreation of the Loie Fuller dance, "Evening in Grenada," by dancer/choreographer Jody Sperling.

Loie Fuller moved to Paris where she performed at the Folies Bergere and developed friendships with artists, poets, and scientists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Stephane Mallarme, and Madame Curie. An innovator in more than one field, Fuller possessed many patents related to stage lighting: chemical mixes for gels and slides, for example. She was also responsible for introducing Paris to one of the most flamboyant characters in American cultural history: Isadore Duncan.

Isadore Duncan (1877-1927)
Isadore Duncan was perhaps one of the most notorious American expatriate artists of the twentieth century. Like Loie Fuller, Isadore Duncan rejected formal approaches to dance and performed in an improvisational style like her initial Parisian mentor. However, her dancing was seen as primitive: she danced barefoot, wearing tunics and scarves, being greatly influenced by ancient Greek culture. Her influence was spread through her teaching (she established multiple schools): with the innovator as teacher coming to emerge afterwards as a major theme in modern dance history.

Like many artists of her time, Duncan was influenced by Nietzsche. He encouraged her existing obsession with ritual and the primitive. She strove to develop dance as “a non-vocal manifestation of the human psyche and an affirmation of the human spirit.” Through her example, she influenced generations of dancers to follow their own individual visions, and is often referred to as a founder of modern dance.

Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968)
Ruth St. Denis was strongly influenced by her interest in non-Western cultures: particularly India, Egypt, and Japan. She combined this interest with a dramatic sensibility influenced by her exposure to the work of the famed English actress Sarah Bernhardt and became known for her melodramatic acting style in dance.

Perhaps her greatest influence came through the dance school, Denishawn, she co-founded with Ted Shawn, in 1915, which counted Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham among its students. The school also served to codify early modern dance in solos that are still performed as part of the repertoires of many dance companies. Her influence is perhaps best expressed in her quote: “I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what is too deep to find for words.”

Doris Humphrey (1895-1958)
Doris Humphrey was a precocious Chicago talent, opening her own dance school at the age of eighteen before studying at Denishawn. She began to quickly learn choreography and works from this early period are still performed. Humphrey’s choreography investigated the body and gravity, producing what is known as her principle of fall and recovery.

With Charles Weidman, she formed the Humphrey-Weidman company, which extended the expression of modern dance to social concerns. Her formalist contributions likewise carried her beyond the solo performer to re-integrating both large groups and the sculptural shapes of the human form into modern dance.

Martha Graham (1894-1991)
It would be intimidating for even a seasoned dance critic or historian to offer a brief introduction to her work. Her influence on dance and the wider cultural community remains that of one of the giants of twentieth-century arts. Her approach is summed up succinctly in this quote of hers: "I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements . . .I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge."

For Graham, ballet's concern with flow and grace left behind more violent traditional passions. Graham believed that through spastic movements, trembling, and falls she could express emotional and spiritual themes ignored by other dance. Her dancing and choreography exposed the depths of human emotion through movements that were sharp, angular, jagged, and direct. She desired to evoke strong emotions, and achieved these visceral responses through the repetition of explicitly sexual and violently disjunctive movements. She freed the art of dance by providing a new dance language and new concepts. She also revolutionized dance lighting, stage designing, costuming, and music.

To briefly address her physical technique, Graham identified a method of breathing and impulse control she called "contraction and release." For her, movement originated in the tension of a contracted muscle, and continued in the flow of energy released from the body as the muscle relaxed. This method of muscle control gave Graham's dances and dancers a hard, angular look, one that was very unfamiliar to dance audiences used to the smooth, lyrical bodily motions of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. In her first reviews, as a result, Graham was often accused of dancing in an "ugly" way.

Below is a short essay written about being a dancer that Martha Graham read on NPR around 1953.

An Athlete of God
by Martha Graham

This essay aired on NPR circa 1953.
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God.

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

I think the reason dance has held such an ageless magic for the world is that it has been the symbol of the performance of living. Many times I hear the phrase "the dance of life." It is close to me for a very simple and understandable reason. The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived: the human body. It is the instrument by which all the primaries of experience are made manifest. It holds in its memory all matters of life and death and love.

Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths. Then I need all the comfort that practice has stored in my memory and a tenacity of faith. But it must be the kind of faith that Abraham had, wherein he "staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief."

It takes about 10 years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. There is the study and practice of the craft in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body is shaped, disciplined, honored and in time, trusted. The movement becomes clean, precise, eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it. This might be called the law of the dancer's life -- the law which governs its outer aspects.

Then there is the cultivation of the being. It is through this that the legends of the soul's journey are re-told with all their gaiety and their tragedy and the bitterness and sweetness of living. It is at this point that the sweep of life catches up the mere personality of the performer and while the individual (the undivided one), becomes greater, the personal becomes less personal. And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and in the act of dancing. All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic, powerful, rich in meaning.

In a dancer there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength. In a thinker there is a reverence for the beauty of the alert and directed and lucid mind. In all of us who perform there is an awareness of the smile which is part of the equipment, or gift, of the acrobat. We have all walked the high wire of circumstance at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as he does. The smile is there because he is practicing living at that instant of danger. He does not choose to fall.

"Modern" Chicago Dance Companies

Here is a short list of dance companies at whose performances you can explore the individual and group expression of modern dance and choreography. With over 100 dance companies in Chicago, we can only make a few suggestions, then urge you to explore on your own.

Adler Danztheatre Project
http://www.danztheatre.org/adler.html

DanceLoop Chicago
http://www.danceloopchicago.com

Hedwig Dances
http://www.hedwigdances.com

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago
http://www.hubbardstreetdance.com

Leopold Group
http://www.leopoldgroup.org

River North Chicago Dance Company
http://www.rivernorthchicago.com