Assemble

Assemble

Twelve years ago U. S. concertgoers and gallery gawpers were already used to the dissonances of modernist music and the distortions of modernist painting. But U. S. dance audiences were familiar only with romantic ballet and the rose-garlanded capers of "interpretive dancers." Shocked by this backwardness of the U. S. dance, a group of younger U. S. dancers decided that something ought to be done to bring it up to date. To these reformer-minded dancers, sex appeal, pretty costumes, toe technique were not enough. They wanted to express and depict serious things, to comment on present-day problems.

First of them to break away was the mask-faced zealot, Martha Graham, who left a lucrative job with the then-popular Ruth St. Denis company to brood and prance alone in a Manhattan studio. Results of this brooding, Graham's Manhattan concerts in 1926-29, were the first doses of modernist dance Manhattanites had ever taken. Soon, however, two other former Denishawn dancers, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, joined the procession. When famed German Modernist Dancer Mary Wigman visited the U. S. in 1930-31, the U. S. home-grown modernist dance had already taken root. But Wigman's U. S. tours added a trail of disciples to "the modernist ranks. Chief among these was blonde, muscular Hanya Holm.

Today, modern dance, like modern music and modern painting, is no longer modern. But last week its devotees from 34 States converged on Bennington, Vt., where Bennington College opened its fifth annual Festival of the Modern Dance. In the sprawling white farm buildings which house Vermont's youngest and most experimental college, some 150 acolytes, many of them heads of dance departments in other colleges, leaped and squatted with ardor, preparing for big stage events with which the Festival wall close next month. Present besides High Priestesses Graham, Humphrey and Holm, High Priest Weidman, were portly, dachshund-toting Louis Horst, patriarch of the movement, prim N. Y. Times Dance Critic John Martin, its principal evangelist. While London's ballet world was rent in a grand ecart, Bennington's modern dancers heaved together in a lusty assemble.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.