Birgit Cullberg

Birgit Cullberg, who has died aged 91, was one of the most prominent representatives of the realistic dance drama that emerged postwar. Her 1950 ballet of Strindberg's Miss Julie became one of the most staged and popular ballets created in modern times. She was a pioneer of ballet created for television, winning two Prix Italia.

Cullberg only started her professional training at the age of 27 and had her roots in the central European dance that emerged between the wars. She could easily have been a painter or a writer. She studied painting, and later literature at Stockholm university in the early 1930s, when her passion for dance was taking over.the Cullberg Ballet was founded in 1967 by the Swedish government. She was its artistic director until 1984 when her son Mats Ek took over.

Merce Cunningham

MERCE CUNNINGHAM (1919-2009) was a leader of the American avant-garde throughout his seventy year career and is considered one of the most important choreographers of our time. Through much of his life, he was also one of the greatest American dancers. With an artistic career distinguished by constant innovation, Cunningham expanded the frontiers not only of dance, but also of contemporary visual and performing arts. His collaborations with artistic innovators from every creative discipline have yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music, and visual art.

“If a dancer dances – which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else’s dance – but if the dancer dances, everything is there. . . Our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom. . .”

Merce Cunningham (1952)

http://www.merce.org/about/biography.php

Trio A

First created in 1965 by Yvonne Rainer Filmed in 1978

Yvonne Rainer

Born: November 1934
Rainer is well known as a dancer/choreographer who said that "Anything is dance". Rainer also created a dance called Trio A, Trio A is one of Rainer’s most famous pieces of choreography and was initially part of a larger work entitled The Mind is a Muscle. Rainer’s minimalist aesthetic stripped dance of its drama and entertainment value in favor of presenting the body and its movements as objects. It can be performed as a solo or duet etc. and is performed by people of all ages, shapes, condition and so on. Trio is a very simple piece that is famous for it's very mono-toned movements, lack of technique and for the fact it looks improvised.
A famous quote from Yvonne Rainer is:

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-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator, No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

Post Modern Dance

Post Modern Dance begun during the 1960s, postmodern dance hailed the use of everyday movement as valid performance art and advocated novel methods of dance composition. A dance company called Judson Dance Theatre are an example who worked with Post Modern Dance. 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. 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.

They performed at various places, and most not necessarily on stage, they believed dance could happen anywhere and they had non traditionalist audiences.

The Judson Dance Theatre took on dancers of all shapes, sizes, ethnicity etc. (Unlike, for example, ballet where they prefer a certain look with their dancer) some of which were not even professionally trained. 

Kurt Jooss - The Green Table

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)(portrayed by the other characters in the piece, with the exception of Death) 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.

Mats Ek's Giselle

Mats Ek
Music by Adolphe Adam

Swedish choreographer Mats Ek ranks world-wide as a specialist for telling old ballet stories in new forms. Giselle, one of the great ballets of the 19th century, tells of the unrequited love of the country girl Giselle. Duke Albrecht, disguised as a peasant, wheedles his way into her affections until she is forced to realize that he is in fact in love with Bathilde. Giselle loses her mind and dies of a broken heart.

To the traditional music by Adolphe Adam, Mats Ek has created a completely new choreography in his own, modern idiom. He transferred the plot to the present day. The betrayed Giselle does not awaken to a spectral existence as a wili, but rather finds herself in a mental institution. But even in this radically contemporary version, the essence of the work is retained, and the spectator becomes a witness to the shattering purification process which Albrecht lives through.