Dancestry Upcoming Performances

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Loïe Fuller (1862), born Mary Louise Fuller, began her professional career as an actress in Chicago in the 1880’s. She traveled to New York City and performed in a number of forgotten plays before being inspired to become a solo dance performer.  She traveled to Europe, promoting her new style of skirt dancing, and landed in at the Folies Bergere, in Paris. Her skirts became longer, bigger and slowly the waists disappeared and rods were added to extend their length. Fuller hung the stage in black velvet, turned out the house lights, placed colored gels in front of the lights, used gobos to fracture or change the shape of the light, and she placed these new theatrical inventions around the performing space like a halo. In 1896, Fuller created some of her most well known solos: Night, Fire Dance, and Lily of the Nile. In 1908, Fuller formed a dance company and school based on natural dancing. She began choreographing large group works, like La Mer, for her muses, who perform all over the world. Fuller continued to present her famous solos and group works until her death on New Years Day, 1928.

Famed for her bare feet, silk tunics, and free spirit, Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) revolutionized turn-of-the-twentieth century concert dance. A San Francisco native often hailed as the “Mother of Modern Dance,” Duncan began teaching and performing at a young age. She traveled east, dancing in Chicago and New York, where she worked as a member of Augustine Daly’s theatre company. Duncan’s early solo concerts were in the context of high society salons, and she danced to both musical accompaniment and poetic recitations. By 1900, Duncan sought an audience for her art in Europe. In London, she began to create choreographies to Frederic Chopin’s piano compositions, and in Paris she served a brief apprenticeship with Loie Fuller. In fact, Fuller organized a concert for Duncan that led to her first major contract with a theatre in Budapest, Hungary. Over the course of her nearly three-decades long career, Duncan toured extensively throughout Europe, Russia, the United States, and South America. Her work evolved during that time, with early choreographies expressing youthful joy and exuberance, symphonic works evoking Greek mythological stories and archetypes, and powerful dances featuring monumental and heroic themes in response to the First World War.

Duncan’s influence was not limited to revolutionizing dance as an art form, she was an outspoken advocate for women’s freedoms, including dress reform and education, founding her first school in Germany in 1904. Six of her original students, dubbed the “Isadorables” by a critic, performed with her and later passed on her technique and a repertory of nearly one hundred choreographies. Influenced by her observations of movement in nature, her studies of the work of Francois Delsarte, and her meditations on Greek and Renaissance art, Duncan identified the solar plexus as the initiatory center of all emotive and expressive movements and created a dance technique that develops the relationship between breath and gesture. This movement technique is expressive, integrating, and powerful, and as direct-lineage Duncan dancers, Meg Brooker, Valerie Durham, and Jennifer Sprowl are actively working to preserve, pass on, and develop the Duncan dance legacy.

Regarded as the Poet of Modern Dance, Erick Hawkins (1909-1994) was hailed as a true dance radical. Hawkins completed a degree in Greek classics at Harvard and began his study of dance with Harald Kreutzberg. In 1934, he became the first American student to enroll in George Balanchine's School of American Ballet where he also danced and choreographed for Ballet Caravan, which later became the New York City Ballet. He became the first male dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1938 and created unique male roles in many of her dances, generating a compelling physicality of style and a new image of masculinity in American Modern Dance. In 1951, Hawkins opened his own school where he began exploring the new field of kinesiology. His technique emphasizes movement that is organic, ergonomic and free of superfluous gesture and effort. This technique is the source of the unparalleled grace and fluid beauty one sees in a Hawkins trained dancer. Erick is often quoted for his poetic acknowledgement that “The body is a clear place.” Erick Hawkins led his company with enormous spirit and vitality. At the core of his style is his unprecedented collaboration with contemporary composers, artists, sculptors, and designers. He worked with artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Isamu Noguchi, Stanley Boxer, Ralph Lee, and Ralph Dorazio. Some of the many composers he commissioned were Virgil Thomson, Alan Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, Michio Mamiya, Ge Gan-ru, and Lucia Dlugoszewski. Hawkins was awarded the President’s Medal for the Arts at the White House in October of 1994. In the President’s words: “for his boldness and talent Hawkins commands a legendary place in American Modern Dance heritage…truly a pioneer.” Hawkins has been honored with a Mellon Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dance Magazine Award, Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Western Michigan University, The Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement, International Society for the Performing Arts Distinguished Artist Award, and The Master Teacher/Mentors Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.