Dance Rebels: A Story of Modern Dance

This is the story of a dance revolution

and the mavericks, whose radical ideas changed dance forever...

It terrifies me, because he's created a sense of chaos.

There isn't a part of it that didn't break every rule.

The thrill of destruction,

the jubilation of saying,

"Old generation, it's our turn to create a revolution."

..told through some of the key works

that overturned centuries of tradition...

They were saying it was ugly, it was disharmonious.

And the dance critics were given ear plugs.

..by challenging the establishment,

confounding audiences

and even causing riots.

It's not about swans or royalty,

those strange notions that ballet had come up with.

I wouldn't shave my armpits

or I had a papier-mache bun on my shaved head.

These are the ideas that made modern dance.

Ideas that reflect the spirit of the time

and express the very essence of what it is to be human.

Take it into the sagittal plane.

Put your feet on the ground, feel the freedom of the body in space.

And in order to do that, you know, get rid of your clothes.

With the students of one of the leading

contemporary dance schools in Europe...

Contraction.

Step. Back.

..we tell the story of the rebels who made modern dance.

Have a vision.

Other than that, it's not dance. It's what? Exercise!

It was definitely very rock and roll.

We always said, "Either live or die. Come on...!"

These few seconds of film

are the only surviving moving images

of the woman whose ideas ignited modern dance.

She was somebody I was fascinated by

because she did something that no-one else had done.

The dance that I had been trained in was holding a chair

and doing repetitive things at the age of four

that seemed so not related to dance at all.

And she was actually a free spirit.

Isadora Duncan was an American,

whose style broke free from the rigid conventions of classical ballet.

Ballet began life in the courts of the great European kings and queens.

So it was always on the side of the ruling class.

It was always in a grand opera house,

would be very set to certain conventions,

a sort of three- or four-act ballet,

very opulently styled.

And by the end of the 19th century,

there was a sense that ballet

had become encrusted in its own conventions.

And the spirit of dance, the physicality, the freedom of it,

the expressiveness of it, that was not happening on stage.

At the turn of the century,

there were a number of American female dancers,

who performed in loose clothes and bare feet

and danced in a new, naturalistic style.

Isadora Duncan became the icon of this movement.

She did, I think, open up the stages of Europe and America

to the possibility that you didn't just have to see virtuoso dancers

in pointe shoes and tutus.

It became about the driving spirit of contemporary dance,

which has always been to reinvent itself as a language

for the expression of new ideas.

I think what you're talking about

when you're talking about Isadora Duncan

is this kind of freedom from convention.

What is your voice, what is your kind of expression?

And so, I guess, when I think about her,

that's what I think is really kind of paramount,

that she just did what she wanted.

We'll take it into the sagittal plane.

So I want to see the back space here...

Isadora was a feminist.

She put her ideas into her manifesto...

The Dancer Of The Future.

Go wide and... Voila!

-ACTOR AS DUNCAN:

-She is coming, the dancer of the future.

Head goes right off-centre.

The free spirit, who will inhabit the body of all women.

Show me the suspension.

She will dance, not in the form of a nymph nor fairy nor coquette,

but in the form of women in its greatest and purest expression.

From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence...

Feet! Find your vertical axis!

..bringing to the world the thoughts and aspirations

of thousands of women.

This is the mission of the dancer of the future.

She is a pioneer of modern dance

and the fact that her writing was part of her art.

Of course she was a dancer, but I could read some.

As a very, very, young dancer, I was very inspired.

It's a natural expressive style of the body.

So it's not about form in the way that ballet was.

It's a political notion because she's a woman saying,

"I can move freely through space.

"I don't have to restrict myself and appear in a very polite manner."

It's hard to underestimate the importance of Isadora Duncan then,

partly because she was such a personality cult.

I mean, people thronged to see her.

We have no idea if she was such a great dancer,

but she had immense charisma,

immense personal power on stage.

Isadora Duncan toured in Russia in 1905

and was seen by Serge Diaghilev,

the legendary theatrical impresario,

who would found the Ballets Russes.

He brought together a virtuosic dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky,

and the composer, Igor Stravinsky.

Together, they began work on the ground-breaking ballet

The Rite Of Spring.

I love the music.

Stravinsky did his best work. It's an amazing piece.

It's the drive. It has that rhythmic drive.

I think what's really powerful still, when you hear the music,

it has a direct kind of almost umbilical cord into your body.

There's a sense in which it kind of worms its way

straight away into your ribcage

and lives there in a really interesting way

and it wants to burst out.

So I think there must have been something really thrilling

about hearing that music at the back of your neck

and at the ends of your fingers for the very first time.

Nijinsky was a star of the Russian ballet,

but Stravinsky's visceral music inspired him to create movements

that upturned classical ideas of beauty.

As a choreographer,

he made movements that was really, really shocking to the audience.

He had the dancers just vibrating, trembling on the spot,

strange little jumps that, rather than soaring free of gravity,

seemed to just sort of collapse back in on themselves.

I mean, it was a violent, violent inversion of ballet.

What's special about The Rite Of Spring

is it deconstructs ballet in all sorts of ways.

It didn't tell a story.

The dancers stood with their toes turned in,

whereas, in ballet, the feet are turned out.

It used movement that was very forceful,

angular, jerky, fragmented.

In 1913, on its opening night in Paris...

..The Rite Of Spring caused a riot.

Nijinsky's Rite Of Spring made its mark through its notoriety.

But it was his younger sister, Bronislava Nijinska,

who was to create a lasting masterpiece

with another Stravinsky score, Les Noces.

Les Noces was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

It is a much better-structured piece of work.

Rite Of Spring doesn't affect me in the same way.

I think that Nijinska's mastery in Les Noces is superlative.

It's shocking that she is not better-known as an artist.

And I think she's not taken as much notice of as her brother,

because there's no sensationalist stories about her

and she was a woman.

Nijinska had witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917.

And when Les Noces premiered in Paris in 1923,

its tale of a traditional Russian peasant wedding

became a channel for her socialist views.

Les Noces is radical.

If you think of the earlier ballets,

who has the virtuosic movement?

Of course, the soloists. They do it and the audience clap.

And the corps de ballet stand around in pretty poses.

Now, in Les Noces, it's completely the other way round.

It's a reflection of her political views -

the Russian Revolution - and she was right there.

When you look at the choreography,

there are moments where you find the women dancing to one rhythm

and the men beside them, in another block, dancing to another rhythm

and when one's jumping in the air,

the other's doing something completely different.

There's this kind of clash.

Just the use of technique.

Structurally, the musicality is mindboggling.

There isn't a part of it that didn't break every rule, so to speak.

And yet, it was ballet.

She had been really close to some Russian Futurist painters.

She's aware of the kind of cubist vocabulary

and she's using that to make very modern, angular shapes.

Not graceful, pretty shapes, like the swans in Swan Lake.

But at the same time, she's using ballet choreography.

She's using pointe, not to be delicate, but almost to be stabbing.

So it is ballet, but it's ballet like you've not seen it before.

Les Noces is one of the most inspiring things

and the fact that Nijinska is not put on

a higher and more elaborate pedestal

is really confusing for me, because I think this is

one of the most radical pieces of work ever done.

Les Noces continues to be performed

in the repertoire of the Royal Ballet,

after Sir Frederick Ashton invited Nijinska to recreate her masterpiece

for the company in 1966.

One of the first things I did when I became director

was to ask if she would come back and mount Les Noces.

And she consented to come, which was, to me, a tremendous coup.

I think it's frightfully important to preserve the link

from one choreographer to another.

I think it is absolutely essential for the public

to be able to judge and to see the progression of choreographic intent,

so to speak, through all the different choreographers.

I think a heritage is something that is invaluable in a great company.

The Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

preserves the ideas of its creator, Rudolf Laban, very carefully.

Then, from there, go into impulse upwards.

Bhaaaah! Yeah.

Now, going to really find the handle.

Yeah, but I want you to reach...

Valerie Preston-Dunlop was a protege of Rudolf Laban.

She's overseeing rehearsals of a recreation she's made

with colleague Alison Curtis-Jones,

of a dance from Laban's early career in Germany in the 1920s.

Good. So flat table top back.

Yeah, good.

Now, remember, you have to keep your face forwards

because, when we wear the masks,

you'll see that that is giving us a very powerful image.

Laban was an intellectual and a teacher.

He experimented with movement choirs, theories of movement

and invented a form of modern dance notation.

And he was the founder of Ausdruckstanz,

the dance of feeling or expression.

Laban is a fascinating, complex, mysterious character.

He's a von. So Laban has a privileged upbringing.

But he is an early-20th century dropout.

He lives the Bohemian life in Munich,

he doesn't really know what he wants to do

and, somehow, he ends up doing movement and dance.

His father was a general.

He's expected to go into the army.

He knows how to organise people

and that's what he kind of does for the dance world.

Laban didn't come in and teach.

He would come in...

..and whatever was the topic that he was struggling with of the moment,

he would use us as, as it were,

pawns in his study.

So, I mean, sometimes he was interested in

how the history of dance had changed from time immemorial.

So he'd come in and we would be doing ancient Egyptian stuff

in pyramidal forms.

So it wasn't like a college or a school.

It was just a group of, it seemed, almost random people,

who were passionate about this.

Laban established his first schools in Munich in 1913

and, in the summers,

he ran a dance school at Monte Verita in Switzerland.

It was the home of a community of artists and intellectuals,

who were experimenting with a new way of living.

It links, in a way, to a particular moment in the 20th century

when people are looking to mysticism as a way of escaping

the horrors of what's happening.

You know, there were nudist vegetarian dancers

and they would devise these mystical ways

in which their movements

would represent the movements of the planets

and they would somehow also represent the golden section,

these kind of ideas around golden rules that determine all of us.

But it was one of Laban's first proteges, Mary Wigman,

who was to distil his key ideas into her iconic work - Witch Dance.

The first Witch Dance is in January 1914.

She wants to find what movement can do

without the scaffolding of music

and she dances this in silence.

And the Munich intellectuals are staggered.

This is the most modern thing they've seen -

that's what they write.

This is the absolute dance.

Absolute. It's pure.

It's abstract.

There is no story.

This is pure dance.

Then she makes a second Witch Dance,

which is the one we have film of.

She creates the movements herself

and then a musical accompaniment of gongs and drums is set to it.

So it's not danced in silence, like the first one.

And the movements in it have an incredible force.

She's also wearing a mask.

GONGS AND DRUMS PLAY

It's incredible.

Whaaaa! I mean, it's so powerful

and what is so wonderful about it is the musician is following her...

..not she following the music.

And that changes radically the relationship

that has come right through contemporary dance.

The relationship of dance to music

was an issue to which Laban devoted himself.

He is quite adamant that,

until dance is relieved from being music visualisation...

..it cannot lift itself out of being bottom of the pile,

in terms of hierarchy and significance of the arts.

So he's politically active, to that extent.

And in order to do that, fundamentally,

it must become a primary art and not a secondary art,

by which he means take the music away.

Kurt Jooss was another Laban protege

who also went on to make ground-breaking choreography.

In this film, he's dancing in a Laban work.

But when he formed his own company, he combined Laban's methods

with techniques of ballet

to make a new form of political dance theatre.

In 1932, The Green Table,

an audacious anti-war piece,

won the first international award for choreography.

The opening scene with the diplomats,

they are the gentlemen in black...

..and they negotiate with elegant, flowery gestures.

Yet, you know, underneath it,

that they're out to outdo one another

and they start this war.

And the figure of death comes at the end of each scene

and carries somebody off.

And at the end, the green table returns.

So the story of the ballet is this is just going to go on and on.

We've got to do something about it.

The Green Table was the first ballet with important ideas behind it.

There are what I call the gentlemen in black,

which are the ten figures around the green table in the beginning

and are in masks, out of whose machinations results war.

But the war is suffered and borne by the people.

Kurt Jooss' statement on the inevitability of war

was soon to become a reality.

Just one year after The Green Table's creation,

Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany

and the Nazi dictatorship seized power.

While Jooss and his Jewish company members fled Germany,

the Nazis appointed Rudolf Laban as their head of dance.

People have confused him of being a Nazi.

Well, he wasn't.

But he was employed by them for two years

and, yes, he does sign his letters "Heil Hitler"

because, if you didn't, you're out.

I mean, you don't have a choice

whether you sign a letter "Heil Hitler" or not.

The Nazis censored many forms of art,

but their ideals of physical perfection

meant dance still had a role to play as a propaganda tool

in their plans for the 1936 Olympic Games.

Goebbels wants to present something

modern and progressive about Germany,

so Laban creates a movement choir with a very Nietzschean message.

Remember, his ideas are absolutely egalitarian.

No discrimination whatsoever.

Well, of course, he's in the wrong place, isn't he?

So the battle is set.

Goebbels attends the dress rehearsal

and Goebbels suddenly realises

this isn't Nationalist Socialist philosophy.

Goebbels writes in his diary,

"I don't like this.

"It's dressed in our clothes and has nothing to do with us.

"I forbid it."

The opening night of the Olympic Games

included choreography by Mary Wigman, but not by Laban.

The Nazis took away his position and closed his schools.

In 1937, Laban was given refuge in England,

where he set up his first British dance school

in a small room in Manchester.

As a German national, he wasn't allowed to earn money teaching.

Instead, he was employed to use his skills

to analyse the movements of factory workers.

He had no money. Absolutely nothing.

He was going into the factories

and studying what the workers were doing

to increase the war effort, basically.

And I went in to help him with that.

So the one that I went into was Pilkington's tile factory

and I had to analyse exactly what was going on.

And then we'd come back, you see, into the studio

and he would get us to do all sorts of physical work,

physicals of hammering and of slicing and these sorts of things

and, in the evening,

we might well do a lecture demonstration somewhere.

OK, here we go. And...

One of Laban's most important works is Green Clowns.

And heads!

But like most of his early works, it's been lost.

Together.

And...!

It's very interesting how we deal with our heritage

which has disappeared.

Up and up.

That's the trouble with dance.

So, Green Clowns, we know it existed,

but we do not know what its outer form was,

except through the, I think, six photographs that we have of it.

But we do know how he created.

You're making tiles, like you have in your bathroom

and, in order to do it, you have a conveyor belt,

which is about the level of your tummy, going along like that...

Although Green Clowns was made in the 1920s,

Valerie is using her own memories of the factories in the '40s

to re-imagine the dance.

..a little stick and you pull it down.

And it's hard.

Then go and take hold of it.

It's still delicate.

So careful.

Bring it in towards you onto the conveyor belt and it disappears.

So it's quite fast.

It's womp bla-bla-bla bom-bom-ba bam.

Womp bla-bla-bla bom-bom-ba bam.

And there it goes, on and on and on and on

and again and again and again...

Yes, that's the horror of it.

It comes down on a direct path with an impact... Pow!

It's a kind of different approach to moving

and also to experience the space around,

so it's really, really tiny movements

and really strange dynamics

that we are not really used to use.

So it's a kind of total experience

of using your body in a different way.

We know that there was a section about the conveyor belt,

which had just been invented.

But we don't know exactly what movements were going.

So I introduced the conveyor belt that I knew all about

from working in Pilkington's tile factory.

There is music in a rigid rhythm

and it's there to make the dancers conform

to that kind of movement,

which is extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant to do.

It's all a metaphor for the machine age imposition on the human body.

# Out on the plains

# Down in Santa Fe

# I met a cowboy... #

While modern dance was breaking new ground in Europe,

one woman was pioneering

her own distinct language of movement in America.

I was very much frowned upon by the audiences,

because they had expected me to be very lavish and very...

..wooing and attractive

and we won't use another word, but you can guess what.

And I remember, it was a women's club in the south.

I was dancing Lamentations

and part way through the dance,

a little old lady got up and came forward

and she put her hands on the platform

and just looked at me

and just moved her head like this...

Martha Graham was one of the many artists in the 1930s and '40s

who sought to create a distinctive identity for American culture.

No-one in the history of American modern dance

was to have a greater impact than Martha.

One of the remarkable driving forces of the contemporary dance scene

was that it was very, very profoundly driven by women.

So contemporary dance was reacting against ballet,

which has always been a male dominated profession.

Although the ballerinas were stars,

the ballet masters were men, the choreographers were men,

the company directors.

Her narrative works, like Appalachian Spring,

reflected the nationalistic feelings of the time

and helped to make modern dance popular.

Robert Cohan, who was to become one of the founders

of modern dance in Britain,

joined the Martha Graham Company in 1946.

Like all those people who do something special,

she was so focused and so intense when she was working

that you didn't dare interrupt it

by not paying attention, even.

And you were learning so much.

It was Martha's invention of a new dance language,

the Graham Technique,

that became her lasting legacy.

In this film, one of her dancers demonstrates

how the technique is based on breath

and shows how a contraction and release of breath

produces dramatic movements.

Well, contraction is breathing out and release is breathing in.

That's the most basic it can be.

So Martha got known for the contraction.

Although everybody all over the world

contracts all the time, every day,

because it was a good way to express a kind of grief or pain in the body.

And since her dance was narrative

and included nice times and bad times in the story,

the body folding in on itself

was very important as an emotional movement,

as an emotional contact.

Martha takes contraction and release

and then, because Martha is a very passionate woman,

you know, where does this contraction take place?

It takes place right in your gut

and, in particular, lower down into here...

right into the stomach here...

Here...into your groin,

into really, shall we say, nearer your sexual centre.

So her movement is very passionate, it's very womanly.

One...

Two. Press the chest up. Lift.

'Her technique spoke of a landscape of the heart.

'She wanted it built on breath.'

In time, establish that spine, nice and long.

How does breath affect the body dramatically from a "Ha!"

to a laugh, to a cry?

How does that all affect the body

and then how can you put that in movement?

Generations of Graham dancers

went on to teach Martha's style across the world.

Now, spiral.

One, two, three...

Thea Barnes joined the Martha Graham Company in the 1970s,

where she came to understand the minutiae of the technique.

Release, two, three.

Return.

Martha would sit in those company classes

and we would discuss every single principle

of every inch of the technique.

Contract. Lift, one, two.

Contract. Opening...

They were analysed, broken down, built back up and broken down again,

so they would meet her specifications

for her use in the technique.

Towards the end of her life, Martha created a piece

that displayed the technique.

For me, Helios is exhilarating,

because it is actually a Graham class.

It's what you call theatricalised.

This is what Martha was best at.

This is what she did.

She told her stories using a movement vocabulary

that had its foundation in the dancers knowing Graham Technique

to what, I call, the nth degree.

I think, with Martha Graham you did get a sense that, actually,

here was an art form.

It's a measure of her genius as a choreographer,

it's a measure of her extraordinary potency on stage.

But also of the absolute determination

with which she kind of created her own empire.

She made her own language, she made her own repertory,

she made her company.

She created her own posterity as she was making her work.

By the second half of the 20th century,

Martha had become an American icon.

Her fame raised the profile of modern dance

and helped it to be recognised by the establishment.

There was one young dancer, a soloist in Graham's company,

that was to take modern dance even further.

We are presenting dances from our repertory.

The various dances are intended to be an activity

of humans moving in different ways

and making different images,

which may give to each of you a different impression.

Merce Cunningham wanted to make dance for dance's sake,

ridding it of meaning, expression and story.

I am so deeply fond of movement by itself.

That is, I can enjoy it without thinking it has to have a meaning.

So we are presenting movement,

to which anyone can bring whatever each individual thinks,

rather than it being my telling them how to think.

His approach was hugely influenced by composer John Cage.

They met in the late 1940s

and they became lovers and artistic collaborators.

Cage was a leading figure in post-war avant-garde music

and his radical experiments

were to have a profound effect on Cunningham.

I came to the intention of making my work non-intention...

..because I had no desire to express my ideas or my feelings.

I wanted, rather, to open my mind to what was outside of my mind.

Cunningham adopted Cage's theories

of using chance in the creation of his choreography.

Right. That's what does it.

It is an idea that comes from the I Ching,

where you can cast your fortune

and what you get is an answer that is suitable, so to speak,

for that moment in time in space.

Well, I thought, rather than my making the decision

as to what follows what,

I will discover something else.

Cunningham and Cage took this idea of chance to extremes

by making the choreography

and the music separately.

Although he commissioned new scores,

he didn't choreograph to the music.

It was always said that the dancers never actually heard the music

they were going to be performing to until the dress rehearsal.

Now the dance and music are truly independent of one another.

I have no idea of anything that will be happening in the dance.

Merce has no idea of what will be happening in the music.

But we have a kind of confidence...

..that they will work together.

The first time I ever saw Merce,

what I remember most vividly about it

was that I had never seen anything like it

and I didn't know how to read it

and that, when I was sat there, I was panicking,

because I was constructing a way

of trying to put these disparate pieces together.

We've got this conventional idea, haven't we, that music and dance,

in some way, have to be synergistic

and that is our aspiration, as dance makers, to make that the whole?

Whereas, actually, when you look at something like Merce,

the body will all of a sudden come to the front

and the John Cage score might actually just support that.

Then the John Cage comes to the front.

All of the hierarchies

of the ways in which we traditionally think about

how dance and music should go together are subverted.

And cue.

Daniel Squire danced in the Merce Cunningham Company for 12 years.

He's using these methods of chance with the Trinity Laban students

to make a "MinEvent",

a collage of Cunningham extracts.

..open and then a bit closed.

Very often, he'd be rolling dice

or he would throw a coin to get an answer - yes or no.

If it's a duet, do they come in together?

Yes, they come in together.

Is he carrying her?

Yes, he's carrying her.

So you've got run, run, run, trip. Run, run...

We've used quite a lot of chance.

All the sections and who is in the sections

have been made by chance,

so we'd just sit there with the dice

and if it was evens, you'd be in the piece in that section

and if it was odds, you wouldn't.

In classical Cunningham style, we are wearing unitards.

And whichever colour and what style you'd get

was all done by rolling a dice.

Cunningham's rehearsal process was also distinctive.

We rehearsed in silence. It was very, very austere.

He never said anything.

He never gave corrections to anyone,

whether physical or about performing style,

it was very...you had to be completely self-motivated

and simply be there and do.

One of the things that he was doing was timing it with a stopwatch

and have us run a section again if it was

anything other than negligibly longer or shorter.

One, two, three...

Everybody just loves him.

You'd do anything for him. The company class was

completely electric.

You just... The amount of sweat, the amount of work we did,

and...and I never encountered it ever again.

Cunningham's work requires great skill to execute

and while some audiences were initially perplexed

by the abstraction, the critics came to love it.

The first time I saw a work by Merce Cunningham, I wept

because, to me, there is such possibility,

such inventiveness in the work it...

it almost, to me, represents...the ultimate

in terms of the spaciousness, the sense of what dance can be.

That... He's a choreographer I can see over and over again

and never tire of.

In Cunningham's hands, dance had become pure movement.

MUSIC: Sunday Morning by The Velvet Underground

But for a group of dancers in the 1960s New York art scene,

it was the world around them that came into focus.

They staged a series of experimental performances

at Judson Memorial Church.

Cunningham had already made two huge steps

separating dance from narrative and from music.

It was still very sleek and very technical, had a certain look

and the dancers had a certain idealistic form

and there was a certain thing that still...looked like that.

so Judson changed who can dance

and what movement can be called a dance movement.

The Judson Group used everyday movements

to make their work less elitist.

The artists associated with the Judson Church are people such as

Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer.

I mean, it is a really clearly defined scene

of dancers working with artists,

working with musicians, working with poets.

This is a moment

where dance picks up on the avant-garde

in the visual arts big time.

And they are experimenting with these minimalist ideas.

There are lots of people doing everyday actions.

Steve Paxton standing in a tray of ball bearings eating a pear,

anything can be dance and it is a real kind of liberating moment

where they are saying anything is possible,

everything is interesting, or everything is boring

and we are going to do it for three hours

so it stops being quite so boring

and Andy Warhol goes and says,

"This is the most modern thing I have ever seen."

This is a portrait of Yvonne Rainer, one of the group's leading artists.

Her No Manifesto was written in 1965

and it became a defining statement of the new minimalism.

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 being moved or moving.

I don't read them as being negative.

She is not simply saying no in order to be truculent.

She is saying, if we refuse what is expected of dance,

if we refuse how we usually, habitually view choreography,

then something else might reveal itself as possible.

This exploration of anti-performance

climaxed with one of Yvonne Rainer's most famous pieces, Trio A.

This film of Yvonne performing an extract

was made 12 years after its premiere,

and shows how she is deliberately refusing to entertain.

I had never seen a dance like that and that was by virtue of

the movement itself had this weighted ease to it,

there was a plainness, but a beauty in the plainness.

The move towards a natural feeling,

the framing of the ordinary in the art, and all those things,

it just captured the ideas, the feeling of the time.

You can't do Cunningham movement

without training in ballet,

so there was a period where Cunningham-trained dancers

would absolutely refuse any form of movement

that required a technique or training.

Trio A is a series of movements which are very awkward.

They are actually quite hard work to dance.

There is no sense of musical flow,

of suspension of time into a kind of magical, musical time.

This is happening in real time, it is slow, it is boring,

it is really hard to see, it is the kind of end point

of deconstructing what dance might be

and making it just about ordinary people

doing ordinary movement with ordinary bodies.

And then run. One, two, three, four, together.

To preserve the choreography of Trio A,

Yvonne Rainer decided that it can only be passed on

by carefully chosen "transmitters",

dancers sanctioned to teach it following her strict instructions.

Here we come. Walk, walk here.

And then place the hands side by side.

'I consult with Yvonne, often before I go off to teach or transmit it'

and she conducts what she calls a tune-up,

so as one would tune up their car, they would tune up the dance,

so I would check in with her, I would show her the dance

'and she would make comments and corrections.'

And then it's just down and then here.

I am a transmitter of Trio A. We call it a "custodian" of Trio A,

'so my job is to try to transmit it the way Yvonne would want it done.'

And she wants the details the way it is,

so I have pages and pages of notes that I have got from her.

You have to treat every movement as equally important,

we are all important,

so there is this sort of non-hierarchical

and non-showing off,

not presenting, it's not about the ego, it's not about

seducing you or enticing you or showing off for you,

I am just doing and you are watching.

What was interesting to me about the Judson movement was that...

You know the Yvonne Rainer famous No Manifesto -

no psychology, no costume, no virtuosity,

no meaning, no story, no...

A lot of nos

and I thought it was a very puritanical, very repressive way

of looking at the world, so I thought it was time to say yes.

Karole Armitage was a classically trained ballerina

who'd danced with Merce Cunningham.

But in New York in the 1970s,

she decided to rebel against her mentors and her peers.

I just felt like I was doing something from the 1950s.

This was the late '70s.

I want to do something more contemporary, more of my time.

So I thought, "Why not combine the refinement and poetry

"and loveliness, beauty of ballet

"with the raw, visceral energy of punk?"

MUSIC: Blitzkrieg Bop by Ramones

Being a punk ballerina, I invented it,

so people were essentially aghast,

but I was...and to this day I am much a pariah for many people

because I had betrayed both ballet and modern dance.

The joyous thrill of destruction,

the jubilation of bringing in that fuck-you attitude

and it's our turn to create a revolution.

I did a piece called Drastic Classicism

with the loudest music probably ever played in front of the public.

You know, when you're young, you have no idea,

I mean, but it was just so thrilling.

It was minimalism combined with electric guitars

and that kind of contradiction

is still really what makes art interesting.

It's not about being in the middle, it is about being at the extremes.

Karole Armitage inspired one young British dancer.

Michael Clark was to take the extremes of his art even further.

He had begun as a protege at the Royal Ballet School.

I was going to a Royal Ballet party, and people were smoking a spliff,

including myself for the first time, and suddenly I thought

everyone in the room was speaking a different language,

I thought they were speaking Arabic, I didn't understand a word

and just saying very clearly, "This is not where I belong."

Also, partly, I wanted them to ask me to stay,

of course I did, partly I said, "I am leaving," because

I wanted them to say, "Please don't leave," and they didn't,

but I didn't belong.

Clark left the Royal Ballet School

and in 1984 launched the Michael Clark Company.

I left the Royal Ballet

because I wanted to have my own voice and be independent.

I wanted to work with subject matter that was relevant to everyone.

It's not about swans. And that was to do with

bringing my two lives together -

my very disciplined, rigorous training in ballet

and the punk thing, which was a whole different spirit.

He also drew influences from London's club scene

and surrounded himself with collaborators,

including post-punk band The Fall and performance artist Leigh Bowery.

We are here every day so we think, well,

something gorge and wafty and flowing

would work very well in that section

or something angular and sharp and cumbersome

would work well in another section.

In this piece, New Puritans, Bowery created costumes

that exposed the dancers' bottoms.

The first performance, we jumped up and down in front of the mirror

and we sort of said, "That doesn't look good, does it?"

It was like...jiggling, you know,

and then the funny thing is, once you start dancing,

you don't feel like you have a bare bottom,

you just have your costume on.

The reason I had the kind of costumes that I had

was because, for a lot of my friends,

we could ONLY communicate through what we wore.

So to strip everything down,

which is what everyone else was doing in "new dance",

to me, was wrong, it was denying the whole visual aspect of dance.

What's interesting about Michael Clark is that he doesn't just

keep this within the realm of contemporary dance.

He makes it really relevant to club kids

who would never go to Sadler's Wells usually,

or to fans of The Fall,

who would never think of going to a dance performance.

So he is really important, I think, for popularizing dance

but not by dumbing it down,

by actually saying, "Well, what else is happening?"

There was something of Isadora Duncan about him,

the fact that he was this free spirit, this very beautiful gay man

who was actually grappling with his demons,

that added to his charisma

and there was a cult around Michael Clark.

With this year's Edinburgh Festival now in full swing,

its first dance event has already caused a stir.

One critic has called his show "an incoherent outrage,"

the sort of establishment reaction

which Michael Clark may regard as the ultimate accolade.

-Rubbish, I think.

-Disappointed?

Yes, I'm maybe not an art lover, but that wasn't art to me.

I didn't understand a word of it.

It is a cacophony and probably an atrocity,

in some respects for some people

and I brought... I brought friends along!

Quite often, people think I'm sort of going out of my way to shock

when it is simply something I think looks good,

for example, the bare bottoms.

I thought it was a lovely fashion detail.

# Welcome to the '80s, '90s... #

There was always a sense of, "Oh, what is he going to do in this work?

"Is it going to be the dildo, is it going to be

"the pretending to swallow a goldfish...?"

But it felt raucous, abrasive and it was really exciting.

It was definitely very rock and roll

and we used to go to these clubs like Taboo.

But we all worked really hard. Every night it was either live or die.

Come on!

My first group of dancers did feel like a band,

like the Velvet Underground or something,

where each member is equally important

and I guess I was more interested in the music world

than the dance world.

I am a bit like that,

I don't want to be part of the dance world, really.

Four, five, six, seven, eight...

The students at Trinity Laban are rehearsing

a version of the seminal dance piece Rosas Danst Rosas...

..created in 1983 by Belgian choreographer

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.

In this film version, the dancers perform everyday gestures

repeated with military precision.

The choreography was made in the early '80s.

So it was a time of punk and there was...

That choreography definitely carries

the sign of the times.

There was a certain energy, a certain provocative element.

It is extremely constructed and those four young women

throw themselves against this wall of structure.

De Keersmaeker was inspired

by one of the Judson Group's leading names - Trisha Brown.

This witty and now-legendary solo Accumulation

was first performed in New York in 1971.

It is based on the simple idea of repeating gestures.

I will show you some of the movements just to explain

what the Accumulation series is,

so one...

one, two...

one, two, three...

one, two, three, four...

So it's not complicated,

it's like a nursery rhyme.

There was nobody who developed like Trisha Brown

such a language of a natural elegance and intelligence.

And the way it is constructed like a moving architecture

that celebrates the human body...

That's just exquisite.

De Keersmaeker adopted this technique in Rosas Danst Rosas

but gave it attitude.

These gestures seem to be teenage, stroppy gestures.

It has this bolshie teenager shrug

and yet they are all doing them in unison,

so that you think they are individual,

you think they are personal,

but actually this is a mask they can hide behind.

I think she is really using femininity

as a choreographic device.

There is lots of pushing the hair behind the ears,

adjusting the clothes,

taking a shirt off the shoulder to reveal a bra strap

and then clutching the breast.

This iconic feminist work has been widely performed for 30 years.

But in 2011, it was controversially appropriated

in Beyonce's Countdown video.

This is what pop does. Pop takes from all manner of sources.

De Keersmaeker's response to this is first of all surprise

that they hadn't got in touch with her.

And she actually says perhaps it has lost some of its feminist impact.

She says this looks like it is being repackaged

in order to sell a product

and there is no real investment in the aesthetic,

it is just a surface copy.

It wasn't until she saw a YouTube clip of schoolgirls

doing their own version of Rosas Danst Rosas

that she knew how to respond.

MUSIC: Like A Virgin by Madonna

My friend sent me a little video of four schoolgirls

who made a version of that to Just Like A Virgin

and I found that it was very, very beautiful

so I thought, "The time came to give it away."

The first part is what we call the nodding...

De Keersmaeker says, "Rather than sue for copyright,

"anybody can do it,"

and this is where the Re:Rosas! remix project comes in.

She asks some of her dancers, together with herself,

to teach it, via YouTube tutorials, to anybody that wants to learn it.

..Four and one, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight,

and one, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight,

and one, two, three, four.

You stay - five, six, seven, eight...

But then there is this kind of viral invitation to produce

lots and lots of different Rosas Danst Rosases,

so you download it into your body, you remix it

and then you upload it onto the internet.

-VIDEO:

-'You bend over, then you come up

'and your right hand you place on your right leg.'

Martin is working with the Trinity Laban students

to produce their own Rosas Remix.

So it doesn't go back too far behind the chair.

'One, two, three, four...'

For me, I thought, we could just remix Rosas

or we could try and put in other forms of movement

that come from other sources.

Really try and think of that upward movement

as the first and the only moment that you stand...

'Which is what, if someone remixes a music track

'they may borrow from sounds

'outside of the original track.'

So I showed them some clips on YouTube, they copied

and they started to build that into the structure.

I remember when I was younger, watching various YouTube videos

and trying to imitate it but never before has it been done

where it has been so open and such an easy and accessible

opportunity and project.

Great, much better already.

I definitely feel like the female is definitely being empowered

because there is such a routine, such a boredom with daily life

that comes through in the piece

which I definitely take a feminist stance on.

MUSIC: No Feelings by Bananarama

For many choreographers,

the 20th century had been about exploring dance as pure movement.

But one choreographer, Pina Bausch,

embraced the opportunity to create work on a grand scale.

After her death in 2009, the celebrated director Wim Wenders

paid tribute to her in this film, Pina.

I think Pina Bausch really is up there with Merce Cunningham

and Martha Graham as one of those choreographers

who changed the landscape of dance

and she did so, in a way, by bringing dance closer to theatre.

Her works are epic. They are often three hours long.

They are highly visual,

she always transforms the stage into a kind of dreamscape

where dance is just one element in a whole array of theatrical forms,

there is some speech in them, people play games with props,

people might cook, people will fight.

It is like this almost birds'-eye view

of the craziness of human behaviour.

As a teenager, Pina was a protege of Kurt Jooss.

At 26, she gave an emotionally intense performance

as the old lady in Jooss's ground-breaking work

The Green Table.

Pina was later to draw upon

her background in Expressionist dance theatre

when she became the artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal.

She surrounded herself with a close-knit group of dancers.

They worked together for over 30 years

and developed a unique way of collaborating.

Her starting point, she always says, is that she says she has a feeling,

a taste of something that she tries to give shape to,

and she works very closely with her dancers

to get them to respond to ideas, to images,

to confess feelings they have,

to talk about dreams, to talk about memories.

'The first series of questions would be very simple,

'would be like six different ways to be tender.'

We would give all these movements. They would be filmed

and at one point we would set Pina and each one of us separately

to sort of try to make... a selection of all those movements.

And from this moment, we will go in our corner and each one of us,

we would start to construct something.

We'd film and then she'd select again and comment

and slowly by slowly she would feel if things provoke something,

like chemistry, you know, like in a laboratory.

Her great genius in a way was asking the right questions

and then finding this way to assemble

this very, very diverse range of dance and theatre.

Using the resources at her disposal,

Pina transformed the stage with spectacular sets,

making whole worlds for the dancers to perform in.

It's fantastic, I mean, it was such a big challenge.

You have to dance on the sand, on the earth, into the water,

through leaves or on stones, broken stones, or...

It's completely different and then it brings you somewhere else.

It is not always easy and sometimes painful,

but after, you cannot imagine without it.

The boundaries, they were broken.

It was not theatre. It was not dance.

It was not a piece of music.

It incorporated all of it, somehow,

and there were things that were absurd,

there were things that were poetic,

there were things that were fragile.

In Cafe Muller, Pina drew upon her childhood memories

of hiding under the tables in her parents' cafe,

watching the customers.

It was so personal that it remained one of the only pieces

in which she continued to perform late into her life.

Although Bausch trained in ballet,

she does have very strong links with the German Expressionist scene.

It's in this willingness to confront what is strange or grotesque in us.

I think one of the reasons why

people travel the world to see Pina Bausch's work,

why her choreography has a cult following

even if she didn't herself,

is that they do see themselves reflected in it.

While Pina went back to her roots in German Expressionism

to develop her unique vision of dance theatre,

one dancer whose roots were in ballet

set about reinventing its language for today.

I was working at the Paris Opera in 1987

and I did a phrase and at one point

one of the etoiles burst out laughing

and I said, "What's so funny?" and she said, "That doesn't exist,"

because of its...

its combination was not, according to her, legal.

I thought, "Well, now it does."

So she believed things could not be recombined

outside of this received notion of its appropriateness.

As director of Ballet Frankfurt,

William Forsythe was inspired by modern dance

to question the language of ballet.

It's never a question of pushing the language of ballet,

it's a question of sensing what it can do

and you realise that what is taught is just one set of possibilities.

What I did was I presented ballet

situated in the power of the dancer's body,

it wasn't put in the story anywhere else,

it was only in the body

and there is no real decor, there was no costuming, really.

Forsythe took inspiration from the ideas of Rudolf Laban,

whose spatial theory of the body as living architecture

broke down movement into geometric shapes around the dancer.

In ballet, we've got, "Here I am in fifth here

"and here I am in second here.

"These are places that I am then going to know and use."

Now, if you are seeing it as a living architecture,

you are seeing that there is a connection between this and this.

And there is a line that you can see

that is between the two.

And that line can be moved

and can be contracted

and can come to make a point

and can be moved sideways.

Now, we are making centres where two parts of the body meet.

There she goes, hand to knee. Back of his neck.

At Trinity Laban, Valerie is demonstrating Forsythe's techniques.

Now, from that centre, they are going to extrude a line.

Can you see, between her knees, between his hands,

between his elbows?

You see, the centre in ballet is usually here

and we go all round the edge of it.

Now he is saying, "What about making other centres, other centres,

"other centres, other centres,

"from which lines can emerge?"

And then he goes on and says those lines can be replaced.

So, here is the line,

there it is

and I am now going to replace it...there.

And I am then going to replace it again over there.

I mean, it is fantastic.

This is the Royal Ballet performing William Forsythe's Steptext.

'I remember the very first time I saw Forsythe,'

it was the first time I really saw kind of a classical vocabulary

but pushed to straining.

There was a sense in which this protected, this codified style,

which in some way had constraints,

no longer had any constraints.

And it really struck me quite quickly

that, actually, ballet is a contemporary dance language.

And I just thought that that kind of glint of light

around the classical canon was really extraordinary.

I think I spent a lot of time

building bridges between communities in the dance field,

trying to maybe open up the idea

from people in the ballet sector

that it is possible to think differently.

And also to address the contemporary community

and say that within the practice of ballet,

there is not just one thing happening.

As the 20th century came to a close, choreographers could look back

over 100 years of modern dance for inspiration.

Lea Anderson, a former graduate of Trinity Laban,

made this work, Smithereens, in 1999.

When I started work on Smithereens,

it was continuation of a way of working

that I'd been developing over maybe ten years,

which was to collect images that I found really interesting

and group them into categories that I understood

to suggest certain kinds of mysterious dances.

It might be something about a gesture

or the spacing of an image, or the atmosphere,

or a group relationship.

Lovely. What comes after this one? It's this one, isn't it?

Yeah, this one here, too.

The Trinity Laban students

are working with the images that inspired Lea.

So the head and neck coming right across the body.

And they are working on the movements with Lea's assistant Gabrielle.

And then this hand together, so we are waiting, three, four.

I have never worked from images before.

It gives you like a fuel.

So you see the image and there is an obvious shape and then you also...

Gabrielle and Lea got us to think about,

what is the image and why are they stood like this

or what does this mean,

is this questioning or is this like giving?

This is a picture of a fascist speaking,

an Expressionist fascist, this is Martha Graham,

this is Bronislava Nijinska

and these were all just gestures

that I was going to use for the Wigman dance.

Really, I just wanted people to move from one image to another

in different gestures and they were very Expressionist

and it has nothing to do with Wigman's own real dance,

it's about my take on the imagery that I find of her dances,

added together in the wrong order, with a few odd things put in.

I like the idea, as well, that you might live on another planet

and you get all this imagery coming to you on the internet

and you might have this idea about what dance is, you've read about it,

but you might not know and you might have a go yourself at making some,

and it would be completely wrong,

because you don't know, you don't know how people would ever do it,

so, yes, I always pretend I am a Martian dance historian.

There are references to cabaret and vaudeville

and I guess I have always had an interest

in that kind of populist theatre.

I want people to come and see dance who aren't just people who would

go and see things in a large opera house or a large dance theatre,

it's for everybody and I love that connection

and I think that everybody would love dance

if only they saw the right kind of dance for them.

Today, students like these at Trinity Laban

have inherited the legacy of the rebels who made modern dance.

After a century of breaking boundaries,

dance has become a melting pot of diverse styles.

For today's choreographers, anything is possible.

With the internet and YouTube,

the whole world of contemporary dance has changed

because now, instead of having to wait a few years

for the Netherlands Dance Theatre or Pina Bausch to come to your town,

you can go and see that material online.

So audiences are more informed,

but also choreographers can see so many different influences

and they draw that into their work.

People often say,

"Who is the next Pina Bausch, who is the next Merce Cunningham?"

I am not sure that's going to be the case.

I think there are many of them,

they are all people who are emerging together

in a different kind of world.

Akram Khan is one of the biggest names in contemporary dance.

A British dancer who combines his training in classical Indian dance

with contemporary influences.

'My influences were Michael Jackson, Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali,

'they were all physical people.'

I knew I could not do Kathak to the way Kathak dancers do it in India.

It's just... I had too much of Michael Jackson in me!

I had too much of Bruce Lee in me.

So where does that leave me,

because I went into contemporary dance

and the more contemporary dance I did, the more it affected my Kathak,

the more Kathak I did, the more it affected my contemporary.

So I had to find my own authenticity.

Contemporary dance is also... it's very dangerous to assume

that it belongs to one place.

The kind of force of contemporary dance, the mega...

the godfathers or godmothers of contemporary dance

were mostly in the West.

But it is shifting and it has to shift.

In order for anything to transform and survive,

it has to borrow from other things.

Another leading choreographer is Wayne McGregor.

He creates work for The Royal Ballet and his own company, Random Dance.

He draws upon technology for inspiration.

We have access to great research, we are able to sit online

and be able to cull phenomenal amounts of really interesting images

and written information that really fuels process

but also there is a fantastic potential to be lost in that.

You know what it's like when you sit on the internet -

all of a sudden you start here and you end up here

and this here place, not only the journey but this here place,

is super interesting.

The students at Trinity Laban are rehearsing

a Wayne McGregor piece, Polar Sequences from 2003.

One of the things I wanted to try is a series of non sequiturs,

I wanted to make a piece which didn't have flow.

So, at that time, it was interesting that I was talking about

a convention of choreography

where one thing had to seamlessly move into another,

that there is a sense in which you didn't want any irritation.

And so that piece is about that -

how is it that you kind of build some disquiet

between things that literally slam from one thing to another?

MUSIC: Use Your Fist And Not Your Mouth by Marilyn Manson

Every time a curtain goes up,

when I go and see a production from around the world,

you have no idea what is going to happen, you really don't.

If you go and see Romeo & Juliet,

you know it's going to end in tragedy.

When you go and see a contemporary dance performance,

the whole point is you don't know what to expect,

that is its greatest asset

and I love the fact that it is always reinventing itself.

While technology provides a valuable tool

for documenting the history of modern dance...

..one choreographer is considering how to preserve the dance heritage

that lies in the memories and bodies of the dancers.

Boris Charmatz curated an event called Musee de la Danse

and transformed Tate Modern

into his vision of what a museum of dance could be.

I would call it almost like a flash mob or a collective choreography...

..so my own work, but mixed or intertwined with moments

where people could just join in

and do the choreography, move themselves.

MUSIC: Let's Dance by David Bowie

In Musee de la Danse, who is the visitor,

who is the performer, where is the art, or the artwork?

So, for me, I really don't see contemporary dance as a treasure

that has its own identity,

it is really completely what is around -

the economy, the social network,

the history, the political complexities around us.

MUSIC: Let's Dance by David Bowie

The story of dance is not over.

Modern dance continues to evolve and to reinvent itself.

Dance is everywhere.

Life is a dance to me,

whether it is like the blood going through your veins,

it's all movement and when it stops, then life has ended,

do you know what I mean?

You have to look around.

You have to see what is going on.

Think about the community. Are we all part of the big conversation?

I say to dancers sometimes, in my own company,

"Is what you're doing right now

"what you think is THE discussion in this segment of dance right now?"

So, one tries to stay...communicative.

It's got to be moving forward all the time

and kind of the big guns

of contemporary culture and contemporary dance,

it's our obligation, in a way,

to make sure that that life keeps moving forwards.

I am absolutely optimistic about where dance is going

so long as the choreographers pay attention

to the culture that is surrounding them.

I mean, after all, it was things like the photograph

that started the revolution across all the arts.

Well, now we are in the digital age, aren't we?

Of course dance is going to embrace digital.

I mean, what contemporary dance has managed to do

has freed it to go anywhere it wants to go.

And it can go...anywhere!

MUSIC: Let's Dance by David Bowie