The Social, Political and Historical contect that influenced Mats Ek in making his production

In the 1950's in Sweden it was an odd place, stuck between 2 great countires who threatened each other.
Capitalism - An individual has rights and can make the best of themselves.
Communism - Equalling out the classes of people.

Sweden made it clear it was neutral but had to become military to protect itself.
In the 1960's people in Sweden were encouraged to be detectives and look out for war in their own country. The Swedish welfare states were created (people who were less well off were supported) The country was finacilally well off.

1980's - Giselle was choreographed. The health care systel (IMPORTANT BECAUSE OF THE THEMEMS OF MENTAL HEALTH EK USED IN HIS GISELLE)
The health care in Sweden changed, moved on from being focused on the patient and their quality of care and equality to. This made people with mental health feel unsupported. It had changed in the way patients felt - they felt unsupported and negative.

Nederlands Dans Theatre

Nederlands Dans Theater

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT; literal translation, Netherlands Dance Theatre) is a Dutch contemporary dance company. NDT is headquartered at the Lucent Danstheater in The Hague. In addition to the Lucent Danstheater, NDT performs at other venues in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam's Het Muziektheater and Nijmegen's Stadsschouwburg.

NDT was founded in 1959 by Benjamin Harkarvy, Aart Verstegen and Carel Birnie together with a group of 18 members of the Dutch National Ballet (which was directed by Sonia Gaskell). Their intention was to break away from the more traditionally oriented Dutch National Ballet (Het Nederlands Ballet). NDT focused onto new ideas and experimentation with the exploration of new forms and techniques of dance.

In 1961 the Nederlands Dans Theater got subsidy from the city of The Hague and from the government. In the 1960s the NDTs repertoire comprised classical dance with a strong influence by American modern dance. The NDT got unprecedented recognition and success with the guidance of different persons like Hans van Manen and Jiří Kylián as artistic directors. In the first years of the 1970s there was no clear policy because of various conflicts within the board of the NDT. That changed when in 1975 Jirí Kylian entered the board as artistic leader.

The Nederlands Dans Theater is based in the Lucent Danstheater at the Spui in The Hague since 1987.

Many of the founding NDT dancers have made their mark on Dutch ballet and dance:

• Gérard Lemaître was knighted Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Beatrix. He retired in 1982 but returned as dancer of the NDT III company till 2006.
• Charles Czarny, Martinette Janmaat and Mabel Alter became well known ballet teachers at the conservatoires and dance academies in Rotterdam and Amsterdam
• Martinette Janmaat was artistic director for the Contemporary dance department at the Nationale Ballet Academy in Amsterdam.

Artistic directors

• Benjamin Harkarvy (1959–1969) as choreographer and artistic co-director (with Hans van Manen). He went on to be the co-director of the Dutch National Ballet and from 1992 he became the director of the Dance Division of The Juilliard School in New York.

• Hans van Manen (1961–1970) He was connected to the NDT from 1960 till 1971 as a dancer (till 1963) and after that as a choreographer and artistic leader. He was also a freelancer at the Nationaal Ballet, as a choreographer. He came back in 1988 as house choreographer at the Nederlands Dans Theater. His repertoire comprises more than 110 ballets (two of which were written for the Nederlands Dans Theater).

• Jaap Flier (1970–1973) became the new artistic director. For this job he stopped dancing but once in a while he made choreographies himself.

• Hans Knill (1975–1977) has worked together for 2 years as artistic director with Jiří Kylián.

• Jiří Kylián (1975–2004), the second artistic director, brought unprecedented recognition and success to NDT. His time as artistic director was from 1975 to 1999 – after he stepped down as artistic director, he remained with NDT as chief choreographer and artistic adviser.^[1]

• Marian Sarstädt (1962-1972/1999-2004) has been a dancer and a staffmember of the artistic council as adjunct-director and she made a great contribution to the NDT.

• Anders Hellström (2004 to September 2009) trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet School and danced with the Royal Swedish Ballet and the Hamburg Ballet. He also danced with William Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt from 1993-1999 before taking over as Artistic Director of Sweden's Goteburg Ballet.

• Jim Vincent (James Francis Vincent Jr.) (2009–2012) He danced for the NDT from 1978 till 1990. After that he went to Spain where he danced from 1990 till 1994 and he was the adjunct-director. After this he worked in Lyon (Opera ballet) and Disneyland Resort Paris (director "corporate and Special Events"). In 2000 he became artistic director of the Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. And in 2009 he became the artistic director of the NDT.

• Paul Lightfoot, who danced with NDT since 1985, and who is resident choreographer since 2002, has been appointed artistic director as of Januari 2012.

Mats Ek - Training and Background

Mats Ek was born 18th April 1945 and he is still alive. Mats Ek's mum was called Birgit Culberg and she was a choreographer and his dad was called Anders Ek and he was an actor. Mats Ek was born into a performing arts background. Mats Ek later became manager of the Culberg ballet. In 1962 he studied dance with Donya Feuer in Stockholm. He studied dance for a few years but preferred theatre. From 1966 - 1973 he worked as a stage director and assistant at the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden and the Marionette theatre in Stockholm. In 1972 he returned to dance and in 1973 he began dancing with the Culberg ballet. He didn't go into choreography un til 1976. From 1980 - 1981 he became a memeber of the Nederlands Dans Theatre. From 1985 - 1993 he was a solo director of the Cullberg ballet, he then continued to choreograph independently after.

His dances were dramantic and very character like. He worked as a director for years so he had a good understanding of lights, props. His productions have lots of lights ect because of his history.

Mats Ek

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Mats Ek (born 18 April 1945) is a leading Swedish dance and ballet choreographer, dancer and stage director.^[1] He was the manager of the Cullberg Ballet from 1985 to 1993.
Ek was born in Malmö in 1945, the son of the Royal Dramatic Theatre actor Anders Ek and famous choreographer Birgit Cullberg.
At 17, he followed a summer dance course (modern) taught by Donya Feuer. He pursued theatrical studies at the Marieborg Folks College in Sweden. From 1966 until 1973, he acted as the director for the Marionett Theater as well as the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
In 1972, Ek joined the Cullberg Ballet. In 1975, he formed part of the corps de ballet for the Ballett der Deutschen Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. And in 1976, he made his first choreography titled The Officer's Servant for the Cullberg Ballet. In 1978, Ek became, together with Birgit Cullberg, artistic director of the Cullberg Ballet, until 1985 when the responsibility became his entirely. This position he fulfilled until 1993. During the season 1980-1981, he was associated with the Nederlands Dans Theater as dancer as well as choreographer.
In some of Ek's former choreographies, traditions of Kurt Jooss and of his mother, Birgit Cullberg may be apparent. He uses classical as well as modern dance techniques. Social engagement of psychological dilemmas combined with subtle humor, form the basis of his choreographies. For Ek, movement is a means of individual expression. Aesthetic value is not his first priority.
He has for thirty years been a highly esteemed choreographer throughout the world. He studied dance and theatre and directed theatre at the Marionette Theatre, the Stockholm City Theatre and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. In 1973 Mats Ek joined the Cullberg Ballet as a dancer. Three years later he began choreographing for the company with immediate success. Saint George and the Dragon, Soweto and The House of Bernarda belong to his earliest ballets. From 1981 until 1993 Mats Ek was the artistic director of the Cullberg Ballet, succeeding his mother Birgit Cullberg. Mats Ek's extensive production of ballets includes more than twenty works for the Cullberg Ballet, among them the sensational reworks of the great classics like Giselle (1982), Swan Lake (1987) and Carmen (1992). After leaving the Cullberg Ballet, Mats Ek became guest choreographer with major international dance companies. He created Sleeping Beauty for the Hamburg Ballet (1996), A Sort Of for the Nederlands Dans Theater (1997), and Apartment for the Paris Opera (2000). Several of Mats Ek's ballets have been adapted for television, two of them received Emmy awards.
Mats Ek is also acclaimed for his choreographic theater works, Don Giovanni (1999) and Andromaque (2001) at the Royal Dramatic Theatre being two of them. With his latest choreography FLUKE, premiered in November 2002 at Dansens Hus in Stockholm, Mats Ek has once again created a work for the Cullberg Ballet, this time in cooperation with the Pork Quartet.
In 2006, he won the Prix Benois de la Danse.

The main features of Contact Improvisation are:

- It is a mixture (Aikido + Modern Jazz = Contact Improvisation)
- A great force of Gravity
- Be as fluid ad water
- Be as light as air
- Be grounded like a rock
- Be sparkling like a fire
- Be daring
- Very trusting with your partener.

Contact improvisation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Contact improvisation (CI) is a dance technique in which points of physical contact provide the starting point for exploration through movement improvisation. Contact Improvisation is a form of dance improvisation and is one of the best-known and most characteristic forms of postmodern dance.

"Man Walking Down the side of a Building"

My thoughts on this are it is very strange. It will be impressive for some people but others will find it boring. When I first watched it I was like "WOW" as it is very clever but I wouldn't class it as performing dance.

Trisha Brown

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Trisha Brown (25 November 1936, Aberdeen, Washington, U.S.) is a postmodernist American choreographer and dancer.
Trisha Brown, the most widely acclaimed choreographer to emerge from the postmodern era, first came to public notice when she began showing her work with the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Along with like-minded artists including Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Simone Forte, she pushed the limits of what could be considered appropriate movement for choreography thereby changing modern dance forever. This “hot-bed of dance revolution,” was imbued with a maverick spirit and blessed with total disrespect for assumption, qualities that Ms. Brown still exhibits even as she brings her work to the great opera houses of the world today.

Brown was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and received a B.A. degree in dance from Mills College in 1958. Brown later received a D.F.A. from Bates College in 2000. For several summers she studied with Louis Horst at the American Dance Festival, then held at Connecticut College. After moving to New York in 1961, Brown trained with dancer Anna Halprin and became a founding member of the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater in 1962. There she worked with experimental dancers Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton. In 1970 she cofounded the Grand Union, an experimental dance collective, and formed the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Her company soon became one of the leading contemporary dance ensembles. Brown received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1991.

 

Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934, San Francisco) is an American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her work is classified as minimalist art.
Rainer was born in the Richmond district of San Francisco to parents, Joseph and Jeanette, who considered themselves radicals. As a child, she was sent to live at Sunnyside, a boarding institution in Palo Alto, with her older brother Ivan for several years. Her parents visited them each Sunday in their 1938 Pontiac Sedan. By 1941, she moved back with her parents at the age of seven to a new house in the Sunset that she describes as "an unfamiliar neighborhood of white protestant working class families." From the age of twelve, she had been "exposed to the heady commingling of poets, painters, writers, and Italian anarchists." She went to Lowell High, and after graduation, she attended San Francisco Junior College for a year, then Berkeley for a week. She dropped out of college by the end of September 1952.
At a very young age^[vague], her father introduced her to films, while her mother introduced her to ballet. While she was still at Sunnyside, her mother enrolled her in dance classes. Rainer writes,

I am five or six when my mother enrolls me in a dance school a few blocks from Sunnyside. After being taken to the school several times, I am expected to walk there by myself once a week...All the little girls are able to touch the backs of their heads with their toes. It seems to me that I am the only one who can't.

Rainer found herself hanging out at the Cellar around 1955, where she would listen to poets accompanied by cool jazz. It was here that she met Al Held, a painter. He introduced her to various artists whom were natives of New York. It was in August 1956, that she followed Al to New York at the age of twenty-two.

Rainer was one of the organizers of the Judson Dance Theater, a focal point for vanguard activity in the dance world throughout the 1960s, and she formed her own company for a brief time after the Judson performances ended. Rainer is noted for an approach to dance that treats the body more as the source of an infinite variety of movements than as the purveyor of emotion or drama. Many of the elements she employed—such as repetition, patterning, tasks, and games—later became standard features of modern dance.
In her early dances, Rainer focused on sounds and movements, and often juxtaposed the two in arbitrary combinations. Somewhat inspired by the chance tactics favored by Cunningham, Rainer’s choreography was a combination of classical dance steps contrasted with everyday, pedestrian movement. She used a great deal of repetition, and employed narrative and verbal noises (including wails, grunts, mumbles and shrieks, etc.) within the body of her dances.

Yvonne Rainer said 'No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroci. No to the trash imagery. No to the involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or been moved.'

Yvonne Rainer - Trio A

The Judson Dance Theatre

Judson Dance Theater

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Judson Dance Theater was an informal group of dancers who performed at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, Manhattan New York City between 1962 and 1964. It grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John Cage. The artists involved were avant garde experimentalists who rejected the confines of Modern dance practice and theory, inventing as they did the precepts of Postmodern dance.

The first Judson concert took place on July 6, 1962, with works created by Steve Paxton, Fred Herko, David Gordon, Alex and Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Summers, William Davis, and Ruth Emerson.

Seminal dance artists, musicians and visual artists who were part of the Judson Dance Theater include:

Trisha Brown Jessica Cargill Lucinda Childs Philip Corner Judith Dunn Malcolm Goldstein David Gordon Sally Gross Deborah Hay Fred Herko

Tony Holder Meredith Monk Aileen Passloff Steve Paxton Yvonne Rainer Carolee Schneemann Jen Scoble Elaine Summers James Waring

Developments in dance practice that can be traced back to the Judson Dance Theater include:

• contact improvisation
• dance improvisation
• dance for camera

Post Modern Dance

Postmodern dance is a 20th century concert dance form. A reaction to the compositional and presentation constraints of modern dance, postmodern dance hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocated novel methods of dance composition.
Claiming that any movement was dance, and any person was a dancer (with or without training) early postmodern dance was more closely aligned with ideology of modernism rather than the architectural, literary and design movements of postmodernism. However, the postmodern dance movement rapidly developed to embrace the ideology of postmodernism which was reflected in the wide variety of dance works emerging from Judson Dance Theater, the home of postmodern dance.^{[citation needed]}
Lasting from the 1960s to the 1970s the main thrust of Postmodern dance was relatively short lived but its legacy lives on in contemporary dance (a blend of modernism and postmodernism) and the rise of postmodernist choreographic processes that have produced a wide range of dance works in varying styles.
Postmodern dance led to:

• contemporary dance
• dance improvisation
• contact improvisation
• dance for camera
• the concept of all movement as dance
• the postmodern choreographic process

Postmodern dance was an American dance movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Like other cultural phenomenon of the time, it was a rebellion against traditional ideas and assumptions. Postmodernists questioned the established parameters of dance and pushed dance and art to new levels. The movement was short-lived, but it planted the seeds for new genres in dance and performance art.

The postmodern dance movement grew out of the modern dance movement, which began in the early 20th century in America. By the 1950s, dancers began to move past the rigid formality and traditions of genres like ballet and modernism and develop new styles. The most famous of these pioneers was probably Anna Halprin, who based her choreography on real experiences, not classical works. Her group, the Dancers Workshop, usually avoided traditional technique and often performed outdoors instead of on a conventional stage. Another modern dance pioneer, Robert Dunn, believed that the process of art was more significant than the end product. Merce Cunningham experimented with the relationship between dance and music and created choreography that was unrelated to the music it was accompanied by.

Rudolph Laban

Born	15 December 1879 Pozsony, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	1 July 1958(1958-07-01) (aged 78) Weybridge, England
Field	Choreography, dance theory
Movement	Expressionist dance
Influenced by	Heidi Dzinkowska
	Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) is widely recognized as the most important movement theorist of this century. As an Austro-Hungarian choreographer, dancer, teacher, philosopher, and writer, he worked alone and in collaboration with such great figures of European modern dance as Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss. He developed an internationally used movement notation (Labanotation), while uncovering the basic principles of movement structure and purpose. Rudolf Laban was born on December 15th, 1879, in Bratislava, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, an officer in the army, had hoped that his son would follow the same career. However, after a short time spent in a military school, Rudolf Laban decided that his real interest was art and, from 1900 to 1907, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. While there, he became concerned with stage design, drama and dancing. He appeared with a troupe in Montmartre, at the Moulin Rouge, under the stage name of “Attila de Varalja,” taken from his full name – “Varaljai vereknyei esliget falvi Laban Rezso Keresztelo Szent Jano Attila.” Between 1905 and 1910, Laban carried out research into ancient dances, rituals, and movement habits. As a youth, he had traveled in North Africa as well as the Near East – wherever his father was stationed as governor – and he was thus acquainted with oriental and slavic civilizations. His observations of various cultures, dances and work patterns provided a basis for his future work. Laban’s first experiments with dance script also date back to these early years in Paris. He also worked on theatre architecture, decor and costumes. Twenty year later, in an international competition, he received a gold medal for his model design of a dance theatre. For three years preceding the war, Laban was director of the Lago Maggiore summer festivals at Ascona, Switzerland, where he headed a self-sustaining art colony. Here he conceived the ideas of natural dance for all people and started the idea of movement choirs. He sought dance drama in contrast to the formal mime and technique of classical ballet. Here also he began his investigations into space patterns and harmonies. The open air theatre which Laban started to build was interrupted by the war. He left Ascona and also Munich, where he had been producer of the winter Art Festivals, and sought refuge in Zurich where he lived from 1915 to 1918 and where he established his own school and put on many productions. During these years, his research stressed more and more the nature of rhythms and space harmonies. Between 1919 and 1923, Laban founded schools in Basel, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, Rome, Vienna, Paris, and other European centers. Each was called a Laban School and was placed under the direction of a former Laban master pupil. In subsequent years, he established many movement choirs in addition to those that were branches of the already existing Laban schools. He experimented with speech choirs and put on such productions as Faust and Prometheus. His works ranged from compositions for “Kammer Tanz” (small chamber groups) to works for huge movement choirs: from lay works to theatre and concert dance. In 1926, Laban’s Choreographic Institute moved from Wurzburg to Berlin. At the end of this year he traveled through the United States and Mexico, lecturing in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. During this visit, he started Irma-Betz on the study of script. As the first student in America she paved the way for the future development of notation in this country. In 1927, Laban founded an organization for dancers who, up to that time, had had no individual standing. He achieved for them an independent union through which he provided a center where standards could be set and where artistic and educational matters could be discussed. He also concerned himself with questions of copyright for dances. Late 1928 saw the publication of Laban’s book Schrifttanz which presented his recently crystallized system of movement notation, Kinetography Laban. The notation was publicly recognized at the Dance Congress at Essen and soon after the Society for Script Dance was formed. Its magazine, Schrifttanz, was published by Universal Editions in Vienna for about four years. Laban’s idea for Schrifttanz was not a script for dance, but written dance, dance that could be reconstructed from the written form. In 1929 Laban directed a tremendous pageant of Crafts and Guilds in Vienna, using 10,000 performers, 2,500 of whom were dancers. At this time he also produced a movement choir of 500 for the Mannheim Festival and made the first experiments with sound tracks for dance films. He now united his central school with the Folkwangschule in Essen and became its director, having Kurt Jooss, one of his former pupils, in charge. In 1930 Laban moved to Berlin to become director of movement for the Allied State Theatres. Following Hitler’s rise to power, Laban’s teachings fell into disfavor as being too universal and not purely nationalistic. In 1936, an open-air production was prepared for 1,000 performers, the parts being notated and sent to the sixty participating choirs in different cities to be rehearsed ahead of time. The dress rehearsal was attended by Goebbels who said: “In Germany there is room for only one movement, the Nazi Movement.” As a result, the performance was cancelled, and Laban’s work in Germany came to an end. He went to Paris and remained inactive for a while, due partly to illness. He did, however, lecture at the Sorbonne and at the International Congress on Aesthetics. Early in 1938 Laban went to the Jooss-Leeder Dance School at Dartington Hall in England. There he recuperated and worked quietly on his research which, at that time, was centered on the psychological effects of movement. He lectured on the art of movement and on the history of dance. At the outbreak of the Second World Ware, he retired to Wales to continue his research. However, in 1942 he was called on to work in a new capacity. Up to this time films had been used for movement analysis in industry, but now that films were unobtainable, industrialists were interest to learn whether Laban’s system could be used for their purposes. Thus he moved to Manchester to work with F.C. Lawrence, one of England’s leading industrialists. As a result of their work together, they jointly wrote Effort, a presentation of their findings. During the years 1942-1955, Laban continued his work in Manchester, applying his theories and analysis of movement in terms of effort to various fields. After the war, his interest turned to educational dance. In 1946, Lisa Ullman, who had been his close associate during these years, opened her Art of Movement Studio in Manchester. It became the training center in England for educational dance, the curriculum being based on Laban’s space harmonies and his theories of exploration of expressive movement through effort patterns. Laban lectured at the Art of Movement Studio at Leeds University, and also produced plays for the Children’s Theatre at the Bradford Civic Playhouse under the direction of Esme Church. In 1946 the Laban Art of Movement Guild was founded to perpetuate his work, to form an organization through which it might become more widely known, and to provide a center for all those working in the Laban methods. In 1953 Laban moved to Addlestone, Surrey, to an estate in the Thames valley where there were facilities for housing not only his own work and archives but also the Art of Movement Studio. Since then, the Laban Art of Movement Trust, created with the sole aim of giving a permanent home to Laban’s work, was set up. For this purpose, the premises at Addlestone were given to the Trust, and the Art of Movement Studio was incorporated. Laban put his collection of materials at the disposal of the Trust, making accessible to the public, the wealth of charts, manuscripts, and models which were the result of years of research. With the wide facilities at Addlestone, he extended his investigations and their practical applications to the many fields of human activity in which movement plays an important part. Laban died on July 1, 1958. He is buried in Weybridge, England.

Birgit Culberg

Birgit Cullberg

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Birgit Cullberg (3 August 1908 – 8 September 1999) was a Swedish choreographer. The daughter of bank manager Carl Cullberg and Elna Westerström, Cullberg was born in Nyköping and married from 1942 to 1949 to actor Anders Ek. She was the mother of Niklas Ek, Mats Ek, and Malin Ek.
Cullberg studied ballet under Kurt Jooss-Leeder and Lilian Karina and at The Royal Ballet, London (1952–1957). In 1960, Cullberg was appointed director and choreographer at the Stockholm City Theatre. Some of her choreographies were premiered at the Royal Opera in Stockholm.
Cullberg gained international recognition by founding the Cullberg Ballet in the 1960s. On her retiring in 1985, her son Mats Ek took over the ballet company. The Swedish Arts Grants Committee instituted the Cullberg scholarship in her honour, and she was awarded an honorary professorship at Stockholm University, where she had studied when she was young. She also received the French honour Commendeur des Arts et Lettres and the Italian honour Cavaliere Ufficiale.

Birgit Cullberg, a pioneering experimental choreographer in Sweden who earned an international reputation through her intense dramatic ballets and vigorous social-protest pieces, died on Wednesday in Stockholm, where she lived. She was 91.
Although Miss Cullberg was a disciple of the German Expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss, her own style fused modern dance and ballet. She was resident choreographer of the Royal Swedish Ballet from 1951 to 1957, and her most famous works were danced by ballet companies throughout the world.
Among these was her acknowledged masterpiece, ''Miss Julie,'' based on the August Strindberg play; it had its premiere in Sweden in 1950. Restaged to great acclaim in 1958 for American Ballet Theater, ''Miss Julie'' was a triumph for Violette Verdy in the title role, as the Swedish aristocrat who seduces a butler, and for Erik Bruhn as Jean, the butler. Mr. Bruhn virtually made the role his own for 20 years through his astonishingly powerful portrayal.
Ballet Theater staged three other Cullberg works, including the haunting Lapp tale ''Moon Reindeer.'' In 1958 the New York City Ballet presented Miss Cullberg's ''Medea'' with Melissa Hayden in the title role. In his review, John Martin, dance critic of The New York Times, wrote, ''There is not a superfluous phrase, a meaningless gesture, an item of mere decoration in the choreography from end to end.''

The Green Table - Youtube Videa

'The Green table' - Kurt Jooss

The Green Table

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The Green Table is the masterpiece of German choreographer Kurt Jooss, and his most popular work, depicting the futility of peace negotiations of the 1930s. It was the first play to be fully notated using kinetography Laban (Labanotation). It is in the repertoire of ballet companies worldwide, where it has been staged by Jooss himself.
Since his death in 1979, his daughter Anna Markard has been responsible for stagings of the work.

History
The Green Table was created in 1932 for the "Concours international de chorégraphie" in Paris, in which Jooss had been invited to participate. The originality of the piece won him the first prize and marked an important step in his career.
He left Essen in Germany, where since 1927 he had directed the Volkwangschule's dance department and experimental dance group and, since 1930, the ballet company of the Opera as well. He founded the Ballet Jooss, a private company which toured Europe and performed his dances, including The Green Table.

[edit] Plot outline

Lasting about 30 minutes and subtitled "A dance of death in eight scenes", The Green Table is a commentary on the futility of war and the horrors it causes.
It opens with a group of diplomats (the Gentlemen in Black) having a discussion around a rectangular table covered with a green cloth. They end up pulling guns from their pockets and shooting in the air, thus symbolizing the declaration of war.
The next six scenes portray different aspects of wartime: the separation from loved ones in The Farewells, war itself in The Battle and The Partisan, loneliness and misery in The Refugees, the emotional void and the atmosphere of forced entertainment in The Brothel, and, finally, the psychologically beaten and wounded survivors in The Aftermath. The ballet then ends as it began, with the "Gentlemen in Black" around the green table.
Throughout these episodes the figure of Death is triumphant, portrayed as a skeleton moving in a forceful and robot-like way, relentlessly claiming its victims.
The dance ends with a repeat of the opening scene, a device the choreographer uses to show his mistrust in the talks of the diplomats; completely indifferent to the ravages of war, they continue their hypocritical negotiations.

Analysis
The inspiration for the dance, originally conceived as a solo, was provided by the medieval "Lubecker Totentanz", a sequence of pictures portraying different types of people dancing with Death. Jooss gave it a contemporary setting and added the political content which reflected his and many artists' concerns during Germany's Weimar Republic.
He then worked closely with the designer, Hein Heckroth, and the composer, Frederick Cohen, to build the piece. Jooss, in fact, advocated a form of dance-theatre, in which the choreography is dramatic and develops from a libretto (often his own).
Choreographer, composer, and designer combine their efforts to produce a coherent work in which all the elements, in harmony with each other, convey the feelings and ideas more powerfully.
This concept of a unified work of art, previously theorized by Richard Wagner and, in the 18th century, by Jean-Georges Noverre, was popular among German artists in the early 20th century.
Examples are found in the visual arts, for instance in the work of George Grosz and the Herzfelde brothers, or in the theatre of Erwin Piscator and his dramaturgical collective.
The Green Table reflects a concern for social issues and the problems of that era (shared by many artists contemporary with Jooss) such as political corruption and militaristic policies.
Its style, with its cutting irony, caricature, and boldness of language, has much in common with Expressionism, which flourished in the first decade of the 20th century. The cynical structure of the dance, for example, is a formal expression of this dry humour: the diplomats repeat their routine with total indifference to the real consequences of their decisions. The seriousness of their discussion is negated by the music that Jooss chose to accompany this scene: a playful tango. He also dressed the characters in masks, which gave them a grotesque look, and created movements that are exaggerations of naturalistic movement, such as gesticulating while talking, or nervously pacing up and down while thinking.
The costumes and props were chosen for their symbolic qualities: a flag for the hopeful soldier, a red dress coupled with a white scarf for the partisan, or the skeleton-like costume of Death.
Jooss mastered the visual outlook of his compositions with great skill; again the scene of The Gentlemen in Black provides an example of how the choreographer directed the audience to focus on a particular point of interest, which may be a dancer located on a higher plane than the rest of the group, or someone keeping still while everybody else is moving (or vice versa), or simply a convergence of the compositional lines.
His use of space for expressive purposes, as well as the foundation of his technique, stemmed from his formative training as Rudolf Laban's student and assistant. Together they explored the interrelation between space and the body, with its various movement qualities reflecting different mental states and feelings. Jooss integrated Laban's findings and his free-style approach to dancing with the discipline of classical ballet training. The result was a new technique that emphasizes the use of the body as an expressive whole.
This technique was to be absorbed and further developed by Jooss' students, among whom were Birgit Cullberg and Pina Bausch.
The Green Table is a mature example of this technique. It uses elements of classical ballet, such as turn-out, demi-pointe, extensions, turns, arabesques, and other ballet steps. However, there is no pointe work or any other feature that could suggest virtuoso display. The gracefulness, elegance, ethereal quality, and other affectations of classical ballet are eliminated.
As with the choreography of Antony Tudor, every step is used, not for its formal look, but for its intrinsic expressive value, and the meaning it conveys is often reinforced by the position of the hands: rather than the relaxed wrists of ballet, Jooss uses stretched palms, fists, reaching hands, and so on. The focus of the dancers also varies, shifting towards the centre of drama, rather than being primarily towards the audience, as in ballet.
The resulting style, called by Jooss "Essentialism", tries to capture the essence of each movement or pose, its inner motivation.
Death, for instance, moves with sharp, direct, string, and angular movements, cutting through space, advancing, or pacing with clockwork regularity. In contrast is the style of the Profiteer: he has a swift and agile way of moving, his back usually curved, his cunning nature further accentuated by the indirectness of his focus and his multidirectional spatial patterns.
Such elements combine to make The Green Table a truly innovative work and the depth and universality of its humanistic content give it a timeless and meaningful quality.

Kurt Jooss

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Kurt Jooss (12 January 1901, Wasseralfingen, Germany – 22 May 1979, Heilbronn, West Germany) was a famous ballet dancer and choreographer mixing classical ballet with theatre; he is also widely regarded as the founder of dance theatre or tanztheater. Jooss is noted for establishing several dance companies, including most notably, the Folkwang Tanztheater, in Essen.

From a young age Jooss was interested in singing, drama and visual arts, he also played the piano and was a keen photographer. He began his career in the 1920s and from 1920 to 1924 studied under and danced lead roles in the choreography of Rudolf von Laban (who was a trained visual artist and developer of dance theory). Jooss used narratives and modern theatre styles to make performable works of Dance Theatre, further developing the work of Laban. Within a year of leaving Laban, Jooss took the opportunity to establish his own dance company called, Die Neue Tanzbühne. It was here Jooss met Fritz A. Cohen, the Jewish composer who worked with Jooss on many of his famous pieces.

Jooss and Fritz (or Frederick) Cohen shared the belief that choreography and musical composition should evolve together to give expression of the dramatic idea in unified style and form. In 1925 Jooss and Sigurd Leeder joined a group of artists and opened a new dance school called "Westfälische Akademie für Bewegung, Sprache und Musik". Jooss and Leeder went to Paris in 1926 to study Classical Ballet with Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova.

In 1927 Jooss and Leeder’s work Dance of Death was criticised for being too avant-garde; this resulted in the theatre of Münster changing personnel and programs. Because of this, many of Jooss’s colleagues left. The same year Jooss moved the "Westfälische Akademie" to Essen, and it became the Folkwang Schule.

Jooss disliked plotless dances and preferred themes that addressed moral issues. Naturalistic movement, large-scale unison and characterisation were used by Jooss to address political concerns of the time. His most important choreographic work, The Green Table (1932), had won first prize at an international competition for new choreography in Paris in 1932. It was a strong anti-war statement, and was made a year before Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany.

In 1933 Jooss was forced to flee Germany when the Nazis asked him to dismiss the Jews from his company and he refused. Jooss and Leeder (and doubtless Fritz Cohen and other members of his original company) took refuge in Holland before resettling in England. After touring in Europe and America, Jooss and Leeder opened a school at Dartington Hall in Devon.

In 1934, whilst in England Jooss added new works to his repertoire, including Pandora (1944), contained disturbing images of human disaster and tragedy, which was later interpreted by some as foretelling the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan a year later.

Jooss left England in 1949 to return to Essen, Germany. Jooss continued to teach and choreograph for 19 years. One of his students from this period was the choreographer Pina Bausch.

He retired in 1968 and died 11 years later in 1979 from injuries sustained in an automobile accident.

Kurt Jooss works are still performed today especially The Green Table. Anna Markard, (Jooss' daughter) supervises companies that perform his works, conserving authenticity of the author of Dance Theatre.

Timeline of Modern Dance

Loie Fuller (1862 - 1928)

Isadora Duncal (1878 - 1927)

Ruth St Denis (1880 - 1968)

Ted Shawn (1891 - 1972)

Martha Graham (1894 - 1991)

Merce Cunningham (b. 1919)

Yvonne Rainer (b.1934)

Steve Paxton (b.1939)

Trisha Brown (b.1936)

Pioneers of modern dance

The pioneers of modern dance are Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey.

Loie Fuller - She rebelled against taking shoes off, allignment earth/bare sole
Isadora Duncan - Bare foot, egyption and Greek art style of dance
Ruth St Denis - Exotic dancing, cultury and greeky
Martha Graham - Solo dancer, her dancers looked identical to her
Doris Humphrey - her technique from 'fall and recovery' became foundation of her teaching.

My views on the Contrast between ballet and Modern dance

Modern dance is more abstract than ballet, ballet is very techniqual and detailed whereas Modern dance is more relaxed. Ballet is a lot more stricter than modern dance, whereas modern dance is very much of your own interpretation - there isn't set moves that you have to learn the names of, they are just natural angles of the body.
The reason that modern dance and ballet are very different is because modern dance is a rebellion of ballet. Martha Graham, Loie Fuller, Ruth St Denis ect wanted modern dance to be a rebellious style from ballet.

Ted Shawn

Ted Shawn dancing with his wife Ruth St Denis.

Ted Shawn (21 October 1891 — 9 January 1972), originally Edwin Myers Shawn, was one of the first notable male pioneers of American modern dance. Along with creating Denishawn with former wife Ruth St. Denis he is also responsible for the creation of the well known all-male company Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. With his innovative ideas of masculine movement he is one of the most influential choreographer and dancer of his day. He is also the founder and creator of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts.
Ted Shawn was born in Kansas City, Missouri on October 21, 1891.^[1] Originally intending to become a minister of religion, he attended the University of Denver. There he caught diphtheria, which led him to take up dance in 1910 to regain his muscle strength. Shawn's dancing was discouraged by the University, which still had a Methodist affiliation, and was the cause of his expulsion the following year.
Shawn did not realize his true potential as an artist until marrying Ruth St. Denis in 1914.^[2] St. Denis served not only as partner but an extremely valuable creative outlet to Shawn. Soon after their marriage the couple opened the first Denishawn School in Los Angeles, California, where they were able to choreograph and stage many of their famous vaudeville pieces.^[3] A very famous piece of advice that Shawn used to give to his dancers was "When in doubt, twirl."^[4][5]
The following year Shawn launched a cross-country tour with his dance partner, Norma Gould, and their Interpretive Dancers. Notable performances choreographed by him during Denishawn’s 17-year run include Julnar of the Sea, Xochitl and Les Mysteres Dionysiaques.^[6] The school and company went on to produce such influential dancers as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman.^[7]

Together, Shawn and Ruth St. Denis established the principle of Music Visualization in modern dance —- a concept that called for movement equivalents to the timbres, dynamics, and structural shapes of music in addition to its rhythmic base.
Although Denishawn came to an end in 1929 due to tough circumstances both in Shawn’s and St. Denis’ marriage as well as the economy, Shawn’s second dance group Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers were soon to follow in his dancing career.^[6] The new all male company was based out of Massachusetts near his then home of Lee. In creating this company Shawn was hoping to make America become more aware, and accept the importance and dedication of the male dancer along with his role in the arts. It was with this new company that Shawn produced some of his most controversial and highly skilled choreography to date. With works such as Ponca Indian Dance, Sinhalse Devil Dance, Maori War Haka, Hopi Indian Eagle Dance, and Dyak Spear Dances he was able to showcase performances that all stressed the male body movement.^[6] His love for the relationships created by the men in his dances soon translated into love between himself and one of his company members Barton Mumaw which lasted from 1931- 1948. He also had another partner following Mumaw, John Christian whom he was with from 1949 until his death in 1972.

Ruth St Denis

Ruth St. Denis
Born	January 20, 1879(1879-01-20) Newark, New Jersey
Died	July 21, 1968(1968-07-21) (aged 89)
Nationality	American
Field	modern dance

 

 

Ruth St. Denis (January 20, 1879 – July 21, 1968) was an early modern dance pioneer.
Ruth St. Denis founded Adelphi University's dance program in 1938 which was one of the first dance departments in an American university. It has since become a cornerstone of Adelphi's Department of Performing Arts.
Career began after seeing an image of an Egyptian goddess with a cigarette, she became obsessed with the East and the Orient. This obsession led to her career producing cultural pieces, although these pieces were lacking in authenticity, were extremely entertaining for the audience.
Her early works are indicative of her interests in exotic mysticism and spirituality. She believed dance to be a spiritual expression. Many companies currently include a collection of her signature solos in their repertoires, including the programme, “The Art of the Solo,” a showcase of famous solos of modern dance pioneers. Several early St. Denis solos (including “Incense” and ”The Legend of the Peacock”) were presented on September 29, 2006, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A centennial salute was scheduled with the revival premiere of St. Denis' "Radha," commissioned by Countess Anastasia Thamakis of Greece. The program's director, Mino Nicolas, has been instrumental in the revival of these key solos. Radha was originally performed in 1909 to music from Delibes opera, Lakme. This piece was a celebration of the five senses and adored by upper class women who at the time were fascinated with anything of the orient.

One of her more famous pupils was Martha Graham, who attended Ms. St. Denis' school of dance, Denishawn, that she had started with her husband, Ted Shawn. Doris Humphrey, Evan Burrows Fontaine and Charles Weidman also studied at Denis Shawn, and Graham, Humphrey, Weidman and the future silent film star Louise Brooks all performed as dancers with the Denishawn company. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn were also instrumental in creating the legendary dance festival, Jacob's Pillow.
For many years, Denis taught dance at a studio in Hollywood, California just north of the Hollywood Bowl. In 1963 she teamed with Raymond D. Bowman to bring the first full-length Balinese Shadow Puppet play to the United States. The performance was held at her studio and lasted more than 8 hours.
Denis was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 1987.
Denis wanted to try something new besides ballet, so that is why she took on modern dance. Her earlier dance career began with acrobatic, high kicking, ballet as well as acting.

 

Isadora Duncan

Duncan restored dance to a high place among the arts. Breaking with convention, she traced the art of dance back to its roots as a sacred art.^[12] She developed within this idea, free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts, folk dances, social dances, nature and natural forces as well as an approach to the new American athleticism which included skipping, running, jumping, leaping and tossing. With free-flowing costumes, bare feet and loose hair, Duncan restored dancing to a new vitality using the solar plexus and the torso as the generating force for all movements to follow. Her celebrated simplicity was oceanic in depth and Duncan is credited with inventing what later came to be known as modern dance.
Duncan's work has been moved forward through Anna Duncan and Irma Duncan, two of her six adopted daughters. This coaching and repertory has been passed to third generation Duncan dancer Lori Belilove whose lineage and performing career have earned her an international reputation as the premier interpreter and ambassador of the dance of Isadora Duncan.^[15] She founded The Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation in 1979 and The Isadora Duncan Dance Company in 1989. The Company is the premier Duncan Company performing in the world today and has performed to national and international acclaim in dance festivals around the world and in such prestigious New York venues as the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse, Whitney Museum of American Art's Equitable Series, 92nd Street Y, Carnegie Hall, Duke Theater on 42nd Street, Judson Dance Theater and Symphony Space.^[16] Photographs and articles of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company have appeared in numerous international dance publications and periodicals including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Dance Magazine, Time Out, Backstage, Ballet Internationale, Korean Times, Dancar Magazine (Brazil), Dance Magazine Australia, The Greek-American, and the book, Dance Photos, published by Dance Ink, as well as a photo layout in Fitness Magazine. The Foundation and Company's performances, master classes, workshops, and teacher training certifications enable children, college students and professional dancers to truly experience the purity, timelessness, authentic phrasing, and musicality that has been passed down to Lori Belilove and so to her dancers through the direct line of Isadora Duncan's legacy.
Duncan's insistence on more natural movement than that performed in ballet, along with the use of unrestricted costumes and utilization of emotional expression, were highly influential on other dancers. While her schools in Europe did not survive for long, her work had impact in the art and her style is still danced by a new generation of loyal followers based on the instruction of Maria-Theresa Duncan, the last of the Isadorables. Maria-Theresa co-founded the Isadora Duncan International Institute (IDII) in New York in 1977. She personally passed on the original choreography to one of her pupils, Jeanne Bresciani, who is now the artistic director and director of education of the Institute. Although Maria-Theresa died in 1987, IDII continues to educate and instruct in the original choreography, style and techniques of Isadora Duncan through the tutelage of Bresciani. Graduates of the IDII certification programs also perform Duncan's choreography and hold classes in the Duncan technique.^{[citation needed]}
The famous poet and writer Carl Sandburg in his poem Isadora Duncan wrote: "The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am."^{[citation needed]}
Duncan was inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 1987.
Isadora Duncan's life has been portrayed most notably in the 1968 film, Isadora, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Vivian Pickles played her in Ken Russell's 1966 biopic for the BBC, which was subtitled 'The Biggest Dancer in the World' and introduced by Duncan's biographer, Sewell Stokes.
Most notably, Duncan was the subject of a ballet, Isadora, written and choreographed in 1981 by the Royal Ballet's Kenneth MacMillan, and performed at Covent Garden.^[17] When She Danced, a stage play about Duncan's later years by Martin Sherman, won the 1991 Evening Standard Award (best actress) for Vanessa Redgrave. A Hungarian musical based on this play was produced in Budapest in 2008.
Robert Calvert recorded a song about Duncan on his Revenge LP. The song is called "Isadora". Salsa diva Celia Cruz sang a song titled "Isadora" in Duncan's honor. Finnish musician Juice Leskinen recorded a song called "Isadora Duncan". Russian singer Alexander Malinin recorded a song about the death of Isadora Duncan. Russian band Leningrad have a song about her on their Pulya (Bullet) album. American post-hardcore group Burden of a Day has a song titled, "Isadora Duncan" on their 2009 album OneOneThousand.

Isadora Duncan

Isadora Duncan (May 27, 1877 — September 14, 1927) was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life. She performed to acclaim throughout Europe.
Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves was the cause of her death in an automobile accident in Nice, France when she was passenger in an Amilcar, and her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle, breaking her neck.^[1]
Angela Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, California, the youngest of four siblings. Her older brothers were Augustin Duncan and Raymond Duncan; her older sister was Elizabeth Duncan. Their parents were Joseph Charles Duncan (1819–1898), a banker, mining engineer and connoisseur of the arts, and Mary Isadora Gray (1849–1922). Soon after Isadora's birth, her father lost the bank and he was publicly disgraced. Her parents were divorced by 1880 (the papers were lost in the San Francisco earthquake), and her mother Dora moved with her family to Oakland. She worked there as a pianist and music teacher. In her early years, Duncan did attend school but, finding it to be constricting to her individuality, she dropped out. As her family were very poor, both she and her sister gave dance classes to local children to earn extra money.^{[citation needed]}
In 1895 Duncan became part of Augustin Daly's theater company in New York. She soon became disillusioned with the form. In 1899 she decided to move to Europe, first to London and then a year later, to Paris. Within two years she achieved both notoriety and success. Her father, along with his third wife and their daughter, died in the 1898 sinking of the British passenger steamer SS Mohegan.^{[citation needed]}



In 1909 Duncan moved to two large apartments at 5 rue Danton, where she lived on the ground floor and used the first floor for her dance school. She rejected traditional ballet steps to stress improvisation, emotion and the human form. Duncan believed that classical ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, was "ugly and against nature"; she gained a wide following that allowed her to set up a school to teach.
Duncan became so famous that she inspired artists and authors to create sculpture, jewelry, poetry, novels, photographs, watercolors, prints and paintings of her. When the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was built in 1913, her likeness was carved in its bas-relief over the entrance by sculptor Antoine Bourdelle and included in painted murals of the nine muses by Maurice Denis in the auditorium.
In 1916 Duncan traveled to Brazil and performed at Rio de Janeiro's Theatro Municipal in August and at São Paulo's Teatro Municipal on September 2, 3 and 5 with pianist Maurice Dumesnil. Writer and journalist Paulo Barreto, known as João do Rio, claimed to have seen her dance "naked" in the forest of Tijuca, in front of Rio's most famous waterfall..^{[citation needed]}
In 1922 she acted on her sympathy for the social and political revolution in the new Soviet Union and moved to Moscow. She cut a striking figure in the increasingly austere post-revolution capital, but her international prominence brought welcome attention to the new regime's artistic and cultural ferment. The Russian government's failure to follow through on extravagant promises of support for Duncan's work, combined with the country's spartan living conditions, sent her back to the West in 1924.
Throughout her career Duncan did not like the commercial aspects of public performance, regarding touring, contracts and other practicalities as distractions from her real mission: the creation of beauty and the education of the young. A gifted, if unconventional pedagogue, she was the founder of three schools dedicated to teaching her dance philosophy to groups of young girls (a brief effort to include boys was unsuccessful). The first, in Grunewald, Germany, gave rise to her most celebrated troupe of pupils, dubbed the Isadorables, who took her surname and subsequently performed both with Duncan and independently. The second school was short lived prior to World War I at a château outside Paris. She founded the third while in Moscow in the wake of the Russian Revolution.
Duncan's teaching and her pupils caused her both pride and anguish. Her sister, Elizabeth Duncan, took over the German school and adapted it to the Teutonic philosophy of her German husband. The Isadorables were subject to ongoing hectoring from Duncan over their willingness to perform commercially; Lisa Duncan was permanently ostracized for performing in nightclubs. The most notable of the group, Irma Duncan, remained in the Soviet Union after Isadora Duncan's departure. She ran the school there, angering her mentor Duncan by allowing students to perform in public and commercial venues.
Later life
By the end of her life Duncan's performing career had dwindled and she became as notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life and all-too-frequent public drunkenness as for her contributions to the arts. She spent her final years moving between Paris and the Mediterranean, running up debts at hotels. She spent short periods in apartments rented on her behalf by a decreasing number of friends and supporters, many of whom attempted to assist her in writing an autobiography. They hoped it might be sufficiently successful to support her. In a reminiscent sketch, Zelda Fitzgerald recalled how she and her husband sat in a Paris cafe watching a somewhat drunk Duncan. He would speak of how memorable it was, but what Zelda recalled was that while all eyes were watching Duncan, Zelda was able to steal the salt and pepper shakers from the table.^[8]
In her book Isadora, an Intimate Portrait, Sewell Stokes, who met Duncan in the last years of her life, describes her extravagant waywardness. Duncan's autobiography My Life was published in 1927. Composer Percy Grainger called Isadora's autobiography a "life-enriching masterpiece." ^[

Death

Tomb of Isadora Duncan at Père Lachaise Cemetery

Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves was the cause of her death in an automobile accident in Nice, France, at the age of 50. The scarf was hand-painted silk by the Russian-born artist Roman Chatov, and was a gift from her friend Mary Desti, the mother of American film director Preston Sturges.
On the night of September 14, 1927, Duncan was a passenger in the Amilcar^[10] automobile of a handsome French-Italian mechanic Benoît Falchetto, whom she had nicknamed "Buggatti" (sic). Before getting into the car, she reportedly said to her friend Mary Desti and some companions, "Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!" (Goodbye, my friends. I go to glory!). However, according to American novelist Glenway Wescott, who was in Nice at the time and visited Duncan's body in the morgue, Desti admitted that she had lied about Duncan's last words. Instead, she told Wescott, Duncan said, "Je vais à l'amour" (I am off to love). Desti considered this embarrassing, as it suggested that she and Falchetto were going to her hotel for a tryst.
When Falchetto drove off, Duncan's large silk scarf, a gift from Desti, draped around her neck, became entangled around one of the vehicle's open-spoked wheels and rear axle. As The New York Times noted in its obituary: "Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, tonight met a tragic death at Nice on the Riviera. According to dispatches from Nice, Miss Duncan was hurled in an extraordinary manner from an open automobile in which she was riding and instantly killed by the force of her fall to the stone pavement."^[11] Other sources described her death as resulting from strangulation, noting that she was almost decapitated by the sudden tightening of the scarf around her neck.^[12] The accident gave rise to Gertrude Stein's mordant remark that "affectations can be dangerous."^[13] At her death, Duncan was a Soviet citizen. Her will was the first of a Soviet citizen to be probated in the U.S.^{[citation needed]}
Isadora Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were placed next to those of her beloved children^[14] in the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The headstone of her grave contains the inscription in French: "Ballet School of the Opera of Paris." (École de Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris)