Angela Isadora Duncan (May 26, 1877, or May 27, 1878 – September 14, 1927) was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance and performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the United States. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the U.S., and Soviet Russia from the age of 22. She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France.
Doris Batcheller Humphrey (October 17, 1895 – December 29, 1958) was an American dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As many of her works were annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed.
Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which includes dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was considered to have been developed as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and also a way to express social concerns like socioeconomic and cultural factors.
In the late 19th century, modern dance artists such as Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Loie Fuller were pioneering new forms and practices in what is now called improvisational or free dance. These dancers disregarded ballet's strict movement vocabulary (the particular, limited set of movements that were considered proper to ballet) and stopped wearing corsets and pointe shoes in the search for greater freedom of movement.
Free dance is a 20th-century dance form that preceded modern dance. Rebelling against the rigid constraints of classical ballet, Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis (with her work in theater) developed their own styles of free dance and laid the foundations of American modern dance with their choreography and teaching. In Europe, Rudolf Laban, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and François Delsarte developed their own theories of human movement and methods of instruction that led to the development of European modern and Expressionist dance.
Free dance was prolific in Central and Eastern Europe, where national schools were created, such as the School of Musical Movement (Heptachor), in Russia, and the Orkesztika School, in Hungary.
Boni & Liveright (pronounced "BONE-eye" and "LIV-right") is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.
It was the first American publisher of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays. In his biography of Horace Liveright, Firebrand, author Tom Dardis noted B&L was "the most magnificent yet messy publishing firm this century has seen." In 1974 Liveright's remaining backlist was bought by W. W. Norton & Company. Norton revived the name as an imprint in 2012 as Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Expressive dance from German Ausdruckstanz, is a form of artistic dance in which the individual and artistic presentation (and sometimes also processing) of feelings is an essential part. It emerged as a counter-movement to classical ballet at the beginning of the 20th century in Europe. Traditional ballet was perceived as austere, mechanical and tightly held in fixed and conventional forms. Other designations are modern dance and (especially in the historical context) free dance, expressionist dance or new artistic dance, in Anglo-American countries German dance. In 2014, modern dance with the stylistic forms and mediation forms of rhythmic and expressive dance movements was included in the German List of intangible Cultural Heritage as defined by the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. German Expressionist dance is related to Tanztheater.
Evelina "Eva" Palmer (Greek: Εύα Πάλμερ-Σικελιανού; January 9, 1874 – June 4, 1952) was an American woman notable for her study and promotion of Classical Greek culture, weaving, theater, choral dance and music. Palmer's life and artistic endeavors intersected with numerous noteworthy artists throughout her life. She was both inspired by or inspired the likes of dancers Isadora Duncan and Ted Shawn, the French literary great Colette, the poet and author Natalie Barney and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. She would go on to marry Angelos Sikelianos, a Greek poet and playwright. Together they organized a revival of the Delphic Festival in Delphi, Greece. Embodied in these festivals of art, music and theater she hoped to promote a balanced sense of enlightenment that would further the goals of peace and harmony in Greece and beyond.