Word: denishawns
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...left a lucrative job with the then-popular Ruth St. Denis company to brood and prance alone in a Manhattan studio. Results of this brooding, Graham's Manhattan concerts in 1926-29, were the first doses of modernist dance Manhattanites had ever taken. Soon, however, two other former Denishawn dancers, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, joined the procession. When famed German Modernist Dancer Mary Wigman visited the U. S. in 1930-31, the U. S. home-grown modernist dance had already taken root. But Wigman's U. S. tours added a trail of disciples to "the modernist ranks...
...pleasantness was not the idea. The mists & veils of Denishawn soon gave way to High Priestess Martha Graham's surrealistic fence-act. Frontier, and to stylized swaying and leaping by dead-pan Grahamite assistants. Favored by streamlined technique and by an early position on an anti-climactic program, mask-faced Graham's parsimonious convolutions drew bravos. So did the following Theatre Piece, in which Pantomimist Charles Weidman skittered in black tights while Doris Humphrey caressed a purple cube before a background of dismembered limbs and torsos. For a moment things looked better for the tired businessman when symbol...
Martha Graham became a leading Denishawn dancer, a Denishawn teacher. Still she felt frustrated, broke from the California studio to teach at Rochester's Eastman School of Music, left Rochester determined to free-lance her way no matter what the odds. The way at first was vague. She had had no contact with Laban or Wigman. Yet she felt the same urge to escape from pretty dancing. Striving for a vital, spontaneous expression, she took to lunging and prancing, projected a sincerity almost severe. In 1926 with $11 to her name she gambled on her first Manhattan recital. Chronically...
...other modern dancers appeared on the scene, Martha Graham seemed less of a freak. Mary Wigman visited the U. S. for three successive seasons, left pupils in her wake. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman are Denishawn products who have gone far on their own. Helen Becker, who calls herself Tamiris, dances with rare drive and energy, stomps her heels as does no one else. Harald Kreutzberg was hailed as a modern at first, partly because he was one of the early Wigman pupils. Now, despite his amazing virtuosity, purists consider him too theatrical, too obvious with his miming...
...nine young men had been trained by Shawn to help prove his conviction that "dancing is not a sissy art." He set out to form an all-male troupe as soon as the Denishawn chapter was closed. He wanted real men, not half men. So to start clean he left Manhattan, went to the Y. M. C. A. College in Springfield, Mass., where he talked to trackmen, wrestlers, footballers. Dancing, he argued, was originally a male prerogative, forbidden to women. Primitive men have always danced as a natural part of their worship. The young athletes who followed Shawn...