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Paul Taylor (choreographer)
Paul Belville Taylor Jr. (July 29, 1930 – August 29, 2018) was an American dancer and choreographer. He was one of the last living members of the third generation of America's modern dance artists.The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed Retrieved 28 February 2016. He founded the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954 in New York City. Early life and education Taylor was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, to Paul Belville Taylor Sr., a physicist, and to the former Elizabeth Rust Pendleton. He grew up in and around Washington, DC. By his teens, he had grown to more than six feet in height. He was a student of painting and swam and competed on the swim team, for which he was the recipient of a swimming scholarship, at Syracuse University in the late 1940s. Upon discovering dance through books at the school library, Taylor created his first piece of choreography on Syracuse University Dance department students, which was entitled ''Hobo Ballet''. Taylor then transferred to Juill ...
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George Balanchine
George Balanchine (; Various sources: * * * * born Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze; ka, გიორგი მელიტონის ძე ბალანჩივაძე; January 22, 1904 (O. S. January 9) – April 30, 1983) was an ethnic Georgian American ballet choreographer who was one of the most influential 20th-century choreographers. Styled as the father of American ballet, he co-founded the New York City Ballet and remained its artistic director for more than 35 years.Joseph Horowitz (2008)''Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th-century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts.''HarperCollins. His choreography is characterized by plotless ballets with minimal costume and décor, performed to classical and neoclassical music. Born in St. Petersburg, Balanchine took the standards and technique from his time at the Imperial Ballet School and fused it with other schools of movement that he had adopted during his tenure on Broadway and in ...
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Royal Danish Ballet
The Royal Danish Ballet is an internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Royal Danish Theatre in Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen, Denmark. It is one of the oldest ballet companies in the world and originates from 1748, when the Royal Danish Theatre was founded. It was finally organized in 1771 in response to the great popularity of French and Italian styles of dance. The company was founded with the opening of the Royal Danish Theatre, which has served as its home since that time. The Royal Danish Ballet school was founded in 1771 under the French ballet teacher Pierre Laurent (1730–1807), Then Vincenzo Galeotti developed it and August Bournonville founded his methodology for the school. History From the outset, the Royal Danish Ballet employed some of the leading French and Italian dancers and choreographers. Within a few years of its founding, in 1771, the Royal Theater Ballet School or Royal Danish Ballet school was established to provide native dancers, o ...
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Nijinsky
Vaslav (or Vatslav) Nijinsky (; rus, Вацлав Фомич Нижинский, Vatslav Fomich Nizhinsky, p=ˈvatsləf fɐˈmʲitɕ nʲɪˈʐɨnskʲɪj; pl, Wacław Niżyński, ; 12 March 1889/18908 April 1950) was a ballet dancer and choreographer cited as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century. Born in Kiev to Polish parents, Nijinsky grew up in Imperial Russia but considered himself to be Polish. He was celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could dance ''en pointe'', a rare skill among male dancers at the time, and was admired for his seemingly gravity-defying leaps. Nijinsky was introduced to dance by his parents, who were senior dancers with the travelling Setov opera company, and his early childhood was spent touring with the company. His elder brother Stanislav and younger sister Bronislava "Bronia" Nijinska also became dancers; Bronia also became a choreographer, working closely with him for much of his ...
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Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century classical music, composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernism (music), modernist music. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: ''The Firebird'' (1910), ''Petrushka (ballet), Petrushka'' (1911), and ''The Rite of Spring'' (1913). The last transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as ''Renard (Stravinsky), Renar ...
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The Rite Of Spring
''The Rite of Spring''. Full name: ''The Rite of Spring: Pictures from Pagan Russia in Two Parts'' (french: Le Sacre du printemps: tableaux de la Russie païenne en deux parties) (french: Le Sacre du printemps, link=no) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response, caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved ...
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American Dance Festival
The American Dance Festival (ADF) under the direction of Executive Director Jodee Nimerichter hosts its main summer dance courses including Summer Dance Intensive, Pre-Professional Dance Intensive, and the Dance Professional Workshops. It also hosts a six-week summer festival of modern dance performances, currently held at Duke University and the Durham Performing Arts Center in Durham, North Carolina. Several site-specific performances have also taken place outdoors at Duke Gardens and the NC Art Museum in Raleigh, NC. History In 1934 the Bennington Festival was established as a summer program at Bennington College where modern dance pioneers Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman came together to teach dance technique and perform new works. For one year, in 1939, Bennington moved the program to Mills College in Oakland, California, but it was back in Vermont by 1940. It ceased to exist after the summer of 1942. In 1948, a program based on the Bennington ...
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Portrait Of Paul Taylor, In Episodes, New York City Ballet LCCN2004663618
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer. History Prehistorical portraiture Plastered human skulls were reconstructed human skulls that were made in the ancient Levant between 9000 and 6000 BC in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period. They represent some of the oldest forms of art in the Middle East and demonstrate that the prehistoric population took great care in burying their ancestors below their homes. The skulls denote some of the earliest sculptural examples of portraiture in the history of art. Historical portraitur ...
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Martha Graham
Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide. Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said, in the 1994 documentary ''The Dancer Revealed'': "I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable." Founded in 1926 (the same year as Graham's professional dance company), the Martha Graham School is the oldest school of dance in the United States. First located in a ...
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Louis Horst
Louis Horst (born January 12, 1884, Kansas City, Missouri – died January 23, 1964, New York City) was a composer, and pianist. He helped to define the principles of modern dance choreographic technique, most notably the matching of choreography to pre-existing musical structure and the use of contemporary music for dance scores. Biography and work Horst was the musical director for the Denishawn company (1916-25) before working as musical director and dance composition teacher for Martha Graham's school and dance company (1926-48). One memorable piece of advice that Horst gave dancers in his lessons in the 1930s, at times delivered in a sarcastic tone: "when in doubt, turn." This is a variant of Ted Shawn's famous line "When in doubt, twirl." The Grateful Dead Almanac adopted it as their motto.Grateful Dead Almanac
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4′33″
''4′33″'' (pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds" or just "four thirty-three") is a three- movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs performers not to play their instruments during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. The piece consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, although it is commonly misperceived as "four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence". The title of the piece refers to the total length in minutes and seconds of a given performance, ''4′33″'' being the total length of the first public performance. Conceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working on ''Sonatas and Interludes'', ''4′33″'' became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any auditory experience may constitute music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, whic ...
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John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition ''4′33″'', which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge t ...
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