A New Beginning
Today we are on the verge of a new beginning in modern dance choreography. After coasting for nearly forty years on the innovations of the 1960's, an entirely new group of choreographers are creating new forms of dance.
One trend is the re-introduction of a multi-cultural approach. While pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis created dances that were inspired by themes from Greece and the Orient, artists today actively blend dance forms from all over the world. They use ballet, tap, modern, jazz, and world dance forms to create fusion dances that speak to contemporary audiences.
These highly athletic and technical works do not reject or embrace the notion of pedestrian movement as dance, they emphatically declare their interest in manipulating any kind of movement style, combined in any kind of juxtaposition.
Harold George uses tribal African dance with ballet, text, mime, and drumming to create a narrative work. In another kind of fusion dance, Stephan Koplowitz uses large architectural sites to inspire and structure a site-specific dance performance.
At the same time, purely abstract works by such esteemed artists as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown continue to influence contemporary dance. Whatever the choice, it is ultimately the creativity and innovation of the dance maker that defines the dance work.
