The movements and changes in modern dance from the 20^th to the 21^st centuries have remarkable similarities to the changes in technologies in this relatively short period.  When Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham were setting the groundwork for a very new form, it was at a time when the technological age was just starting to make its first steps.  It’s an amazing evolution, then, from a time when Ford was just beginning to enter into the landscape in the United States, to the present, when a ford online repair manual is common to how people live their lives.  At the same time, the unique and distinctive vocabulary of modern dance has entered into the everyday realms, where most people with an eye for art and culture have had some exposure to the form.

It began as a response to the constrictive nature of ballet.  Visionary artists like Isadora Duncan were at the front lines in contemporary dance.  She argued for an alternative to the extreme discipline of ballet, one based on the dancer’s natural form, where she could move according to her own constraints.  This is not to say that modern dance is not without its own extreme discipline, but it does so in a way that makes natural movement more precise, rather than forcing contortion for the sake of classical tastes.

Today’s modern dance has developed into its own codified rules and regimens, however.  New generations of artists are working toward creating new forms, and new evolutions, that continue where modern dance left off.  For a newly mechanized world, natural movement was welcome as an antidote to the constraints of an industrial society.  But for a contemporary world, where information technologies are a driving force, choreographers and dance companies are blending natural movement with digital effects.

Just as the idea of auto mechanics used to be contained in the minds of experts but can now be accessed through sites such as haynes.com, physical dance theatre combines information technologies with the visceral power of the body.  Companies like DV8 are able to break genuinely new ground by combining movement with technology, and moving both forward in unique and engaging ways.  The roots in modern dance are there, certainly, but in much the same way that modern dance, at one time, took a revered form, and made it into something entirely new.  This is a general pattern in artistic vanguards of all disciplines, where the old ways are not forgotten at all, but integrated into a present to make art that looks forward into the future.