Contemporary Dance: Evolution and Transformation of a Style

Contemporary dance is a blend of Western and Eastern dance styles, distinguished by its sensuality and expressiveness. The human body is seen as a resource used to express experiences and feelings long buried inside.

Later, contemporary dance began to spread in the 1950s through the combination of contempo and modern. Modern was a relatively new direction at the time, distinguished by its rejection of classical ballet foundations. Contempo, on the other hand, stood out for its absence of rules and boundaries.

Dancers are allowed to perform according to their inner mood; a large part of the dance is pure improvisation. Each contempo performance became unique because each performer has their own ways of conveying emotions and delivering information to the audience.

The term 'contemporary' itself appeared in Europe in the 1970s, and by the 1980s the dance style opened in Russia.

Young dancer Isadora Duncan attended ballet school, where she was taught simple basic movements. The girl differed from other students in her own opinion, so she always found opportunities to dispute certain movements taught at the school.

The teacher insisted that ballet movements are beautiful in themselves, look aesthetic, and are distinguished by their fluidity. Duncan found nothing beautiful in this and argued that a movement becomes beautiful when meaning is put into it, when a person channels feelings through their body.

Then the teacher said that even the lines of the body are so beautiful in young dancers that there is no need to make up all sorts of nonsense, and one can simply memorize the technique of performing movements. But Duncan did not give up, insisting that lines are also not beautiful in themselves, but when they are directed toward a goal.

In short, views on ballet diverged, and the girl had to leave school and develop her own direction independently. Surprisingly, the contemporary dance direction was revived only thirty years after Isadora Duncan's death. Her followers became Marie Rambert and Merce Cunningham.

In Russia, the contemporary direction penetrated a little earlier, but the decree banning plastic studios did not allow it to spread and develop properly. Later, through the efforts of foreign cultural centers, it was possible to revive the dance sphere, and this gave a full impetus to the development of contemporary dance.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Russian choreographers Olga Pona, Alexander Lyubashin, Tatyana Baganova, and some others sparked interest in dance abroad and opened several dance schools in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A couple of years later, they were invited to perform at European festivals.

Outside Russia, performances by self-taught choreographers caused surprise because they performed quite professionally despite a complete lack of information.

A little later, self-formed groups of dancers began to spread in Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Chelyabinsk, and Novosibirsk. They created their own repertoires and performed them in theaters.

In 2010, contemporary dance was officially recognized as an existing style and was included in federal state educational standards.

In music schools, the direction 'modern types of dance' appeared; in higher education institutions, 'teacher of modern directions'; and in colleges, specializations 'artist of ballroom dance ensemble' and 'artist of modern dance ensemble' were added.

Contemporary dance is not just an art of performing correct movement technique; it is a complete immersion into a state of harmony with one's body. This harmony is achieved by dancing barefoot, because that is how a dancer can achieve mental balance.