Sooooo also ich weiß ehrlich gesagt noch nich so wirklich was ich hier hinschreibn soll drum bekommt ihr jetzt erstmal meine supercoolen Dance.-Essay zu lesen:-D

                                                                                                          Janina Moeller



Essay : Comparison and contrast of the dance artists Graham,Cunningham and Limon and their paticular dance styles



To begin with, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Jose Limon are all really popular dancers and have been very important to the development of modern/contemporary dance. In the following essay I will compare and contrast, and also reflect upon them and their paticular dance styles.

Martha Grahams technique was more than just a record of movements, she gave the dancers a new possibility to use their body as an instrument of expression. Her concern was the apocalypse of emotions and inner meanings:"I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements [...] I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with exitement and surge". For her, dance was an ästethique medium for the detection of the personalized, inner language. It was a form of individuality and strongly connected with religion. Art and life were building an undividable unity like it can be seen on her words:"the instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument trough which life is lived...the human Body". The thought that movement stems of the person's mind, builds an important part of the Graham training. The dancers shall trade on the truth of their movements. With her exercises, not only the musculature, balance and correct direction of the movements are trainend, but also the meeting with the inner itself through the movement. The principles of martha grahams technique were developed in the fifties. Every practical movement has its own philosophy and history. In Grahams technique all movements start in the centre of the body and then spread out into the extremities. However, the movements always revert back into the centre of the body. Her most important and characteristic techniques were contraction and release, which describe the respiration, the spiral, which should give the dancers a strong feeling and the Fall-on-the-floor-technique. And last but not least, the mental training!

Another important dancer was Merce Cunningham, an early student of Graham, whose dancestyle, also developed in the fifties, was still more modern than Graham's. Many dancer and choreographer viewed his works as a borderline between the modern and the postmodern dance. His choreographies were often not understood by the audience. In a few of his works the relationship between music and dance was not really important to him. He saw music and dance as two different layers. If there were twelve or fifteen dancers at the same time moving on the stage, they do not move in a synchronised manner, but rather individually. For the audience this was often very stressful. Like Graham, he said that, for a dancer, really dancing his movements, is not just having control over his body, but also he has to understand the movements. He wants to get to know the movements, but he did not want do dance them like Graham had done it. In contrast to his earlier teacher  Martha Graham, he tried to make his movements understandable through his logic, and not pictorial. His techniques demand a maximum of flexibility from dancers. The movements were trained rythmically, with regards to their shape, direction and dynamic. The Cunningham-technique does not have a central rule for a certain form of movement, every movement, even if it's foreign and unusual, should be tried. In contrast to the ballet-technique, the center of movement in the his technique is found in the lower part of the back. Cunningham fixed analogue to the five ballet-positions is five fundamental directions of movement: upright, curve, tilt, arch and twist. In this technique, the dancer's body is in a dynamic state of suspense and relaxation. Another important technique aspect and principle of the Cunningham-technique is the isolation-technique.Thereby the legs, the upper body, the pelvis, the arms, the hands, the head and the feet were moved independently from each other into different directions, with different rythms and independant dynamic. Merce Cunningham uses as one of the first of the Aleatorik, a style of composition consisting of elements of happenstance. With this, Cunningham aims to further realise the complexity of the movements, the finer differentiation. His goal was making possible the most incredible combinations. 

On the other hand,Jose Limon, a Mexican-born dancer and choreographer who died in 1972, leaving his company as the first major modern dance group to carry on beyond the life of its founder. Limon was a towering and charismatic man who believed first and foremost in the ability to communicate through his art. He once described his vision of modern dance as "a state of mind, a cognizance [recognition] of the necessity of the art of the dance to come to terms with our time." Furthermore Jose Limon said, "American dance is not merely a style or idiom. It is a potent idea. When its contemporary personalities retire, the idea will persist." . Warm-up begins with isolations. Fingers twist and curl, and energy moves into rolling wrists. Head circles lead up to weighted torso movements. Eventually the entire body springs into fall and recovery, "like a wave of water traveling through the spine." During center work the legs drop into the floor, and the dancers rebound, suspending in the air on releve. In across-the-floor sequences, small, contained jumps, in which the arms are held high, transition into sweeping spirals, with bodies pulled taut as they turn.  "Keep moving. Keep breathing."...although simple, this captures the Limon technique's expressive power.

So as one can see, all the three dancers have their different dance styles and techniques, but are also similiar on one point, the sort of dance and the feelings expressed while dancing.



Bibliography
- de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Graham
- www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/graham_m.html
- de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merce_Cunningham
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Limón
- people.smu.edu/zhammer/
- www.tanzprojekt-muenchen.de