Isadora Duncan was the main person to start this revolutionary movement away from the ballet scene to create this new dance, which is now known as contemporary. She laid down the basics for other practitioners to build upon.
Isadora Duncan’s ideal for the future dancer is that it should be a woman as it was mostly men that were the main dancers. In today’s society, dance is seen as being an activity for all genders. But the person to develop contemporary dance would not be a woman, but was Rudolf Laban, who would go on to create dance notation. With these two practitioners they both created something that would be used in the future by others, but Isadora Duncan created this freedom of dance while Rudolf Laban allowed dance to be preserved in writing.
Like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham developed contemporary dance. However Martha Graham created a new technique with the human movement to release more emotion into her dance, with the use of contractions and breaths but Isadora created this movement without making any new techniques because she went against the ballet norms.
Just like the ideas Rudolf Laban about dance and music, Merce Cunningham created his dance separately from music that had been composed. Merce wanted dance to not tell a story but just be simply dance. Nonetheless, Akram Khan’s pieces usually tell a story.
Over the years, there have been multiple changes to get to the contemporary style that we have today. And as the years go by, our definition of contemporary dance could be changed by the current developers or even the future developers.
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