biography
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1894–1991)
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| biography:
| Dancer and choreographer, born in Allegheny (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, USA. Prevented by her strict father from attending dance school when a girl, after he died she enrolled in the Denishawn School of Dancing in Los Angeles (1916). She then toured with their company, making her professional debut in 1920, appeared with the Greenwich Village Follies (1923–5), a dance group in New York City, and taught at the Eastman School of the Theatre in Rochester, NY. For some years she had been working out her own ideas about choreography, and she gave her first solo recital in 1926 in New York City. From then on, working at first with pick-up groups, and by the 1930s with a fairly regular company, she began to develop a radically new approach to dance: spare and angular in certain movements yet using exotic costumes far removed from classical ballet; improvised through tapping inner feelings and psychology, yet controlled down to the last facial expression and finger movement. The music for many of the early pieces was composed by Louis Horst, her long-time collaborator (1926–48), and later she commissioned new works from major composers such as Aaron Copland and William Schuman, and also commissioned sets from artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder. In the 1930s she choreographed several works drawing on Mexican Indian themes, such as Primitive Canticles, and then turned to works inspired by the lives of historical women, such as Joan of Arc (Seraphic Dialogue) and Emily Dickinson (Letter to the World). From 1946 she produced a number of works derived from Greek mythology, most powerfully the evening-long Clytemnestra (1958). By the 1950s she was internationally recognized as the leading American choreographer of interpretive dancing, yet she always considered herself a dancer first, and usually cast herself as the central figure in her works until her final performance in 1969. She continued as a teacher and choreographer almost to her death. Demanding and autocratic, she nevertheless inspired a devoted following, among both her students and public, and received continual financial grants and personal honours. Many of the most prominent dancers and choreographers of the 20th-c began in her company, including her one time husband, Erick Hawkins. |
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