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Dancing with Body, Soul and Mind
The first Beijing International Dance Festival is being held at the Tianqiao Theater of Beijing from May 9 to 25. It’s a festival to showcase Chinese and international modern dance. The festival features a broad range of both China-based and international dance companies, including Hong Kong
City Contemporary Dance Company, Guangdong Modern Dance Company, Battery Dance Company from the U.S. and Tanztheater Staatstheater Braunschweig from Germany.
Modern dance in China has gained momentum only in recent decades. Meanwhile, this serious theatrical dance form featuring creative free body movements has a history of more than a hundred years in the West.
The beginnings of modern dance
Developed in the 20th century, primarily in the United States and Germany, modern dance resembles modern art and music in being experimental and iconoclastic. Its pioneers were Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis in the United States, Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman in Germany. Each
rebelled against the rigid formalism, artifice, and superficiality of classical academic ballet and against the banality of show dancing. Each sought to inspire audiences to a new awareness of inner or outer realities, a goal shared by all subsequent modern dancers.
Isadora Duncan shocked or delighted audiences by baring her body and soul in what she called “free dance.” Wearing only a simple tunic like the Greek vase figures that inspired many of her dances, she weaved and whirled in flowing natural movements that emanated, she said, from the solar
plexus. She aimed to idealize abstractly the emotions induced by the music that was her motivating force, daringly chosen from the works of serious composers including Beethoven, Wagner, and Gluck. Although Duncan established schools and had many imitators, her improvisational technique was too
personalized to be carried on by direct successors.
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