Cast

• Sharni Vinson as Natalie
• Rick Malambri as Luke
• Alberto Zuniga as Junior Zuniga
• Alyson Stoner as Camille Gage
• Adam Sevani as Moose
• Harry Shum, Jr as Cable
• Ally Maki as Jenny Kido, Kido joins the MSA Crew in order to express herself. In Step Up 2: The Streets Kido was portrayed by Mari Koda.
• Harriet Maclennan as Lil' Rogue
• Bailey Hanks as New York tour guide
• Lil' Demon
• Anna-Jane Johnston
• Brooke Mildenhall
• Earlier So You Think You Can Dance finalists, including:

* Ivan Koumaev
* Katee Shean
* Joshua Allen
* Stephen "Twitch" Boss
* Amar Muminović "Smell me" as Bighead

Briana Evigan (Step Up 2: The Streets) will not be in Step Up 3D as rumored. She confirmed it via Twitter.

Step Up 3-D (2010)

Watch Step Up 3-D Online

Step Up 3D is the upcoming third installment in the Step Up film series. The film was directed by Jon Chu, who also worked on the previous film Step Up 2: The Streets. Step Up 3D is scheduled to be released in conventional 2-D, Real D 3D and Disney Digital 3-D formats on August 31st.

Overview


Director: Jon Chu

Writers (WGA): Amy Andelson,Emily Meyer

Release Date: 6 August 2010 (USA)

Genre: Drama | Music | Romance

Tagline: Take the biggest step of all in 3D

Plot: A tight-knit group of New York City street dancers, including Luke (Malambri) and Natalie (Vinson), team up with NYU freshman Moose (Sevani), and find themselves pitted against the world's best hip hop dancers in a high-stakes showdown that will change their lives forever. Written by Walt Disney Pictures.

Katherine Dunham (born 1910)

Boris Chaliapin (1904-1979)
Sanguine and charcoal on illustration board, 1962, T/NPG.89.75
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Gift of Mrs. Boris Chaliapin and Irina Chaliapin Murphy, 1989

Katherine Dunham pioneered the use of folk and ethnic dance as a basis for modern theatrical compositions. She built her distinguished career as both a dancer and choreographer, and on her academic research into the role of dance in African, Caribbean, and African American societies. Dunham pursued her interest in the origins of black dance at the University of Chicago where she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology. In 1935 she received her first grant to study ethnic dance in Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, and Haiti. She especially loved Haiti and returned there many times. Participation in the depression-era Federal Theatre Project in Chicago offered Dunham an invaluable opportunity to experiment with her own folk ballets, such as L'Ag'Ya (1938), a dramatized version of a fighting dance from Martinique. Her company's New York debut in 1940 was an unqualified success, and her compositions were recognized as the first uniquely African American concert dance. Thereafter, Dunham enjoyed a long and varied career, choreographing and starring in numerous concert, theater, and film works. In 1965-66 she served as the technical cultural adviser for the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal. Upon her return, she settled in East St. Louis, where she founded a combined cultural center, anthropological museum, and dance studio. The center offered local residents a curriculum of dance, psychology, anthropology, and languages. Dunham's legacy, however, is greater than any one neighborhood or culture. In her own words, "I would feel I'd failed miserably if I were doing dance confined to race, color, or creed. I don't think that would be art, which has to do with universal truths."

José Limón (1908-1972)

Philip Grausman (born 1935)
Bronze, 1969, NPG.75.31
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Gift of an anonymous donor

By World War II, American dance had evolved in several directions. However, the spirit of the early modern dance pioneers lived on in the work of José Limón, whom many consider the greatest performer in the history of modern dance. Limón was born in Mexico, in the state of Sinaloa. His family, displaced by the Mexican Revolution, moved to the United States when he was seven years old. As a young man, Limón enrolled in art school in New York but later dropped out, complaining that he was not free to develop his own style. After going to a dance concert with some friends, Limón felt that he had finally found his calling, and he immediately began to study dance with Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey. From 1930 to 1940, Limón danced with their company in concert works and Broadway shows, beginning with Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer in 1932. During those years he also began to choreograph his own works. Many of Limón's dances, such as Danzas Mexicanas (1939), had Mexican or Spanish themes. After serving in World War II, Limón formed his own company and enjoyed great success both in the United States and abroad. Today he is remembered for his commanding stage presence and for the seemingly effortless use of his body to communicate subtle ideas and emotions.

Martha Graham (1894-1991)

Paul Meltsner (1905-1966)
Oil on canvas, circa 1940, T/NPG.73.41
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Martha Graham was one of the leading dancers and choreographers of the American modern dance movement. In 1916 she began her training at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles, under the tutelage of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. There, Graham learned to discard the strict forms and gestures that had traditionally governed choreography. By the time of her New York debut in 1926, she had developed a style that was both revolutionary and controversial. Graham intended her dances to provide insight into the human condition, as in Letter to the World (1940), inspired by Emily Dickinson's life and poetry, or Appalachian Spring (1944), a celebration of America's pioneer spirit. While early modern dance did not use characters or tell stories, Graham had a theatrical bent that surfaced increasingly in her later works. Her modern-dance ballets, beginning with Clytemnestra in 1958, used the free-form techniques of modern dance to present classical literary works. Included in Graham's legacy are several monumental dance scores written for her by composers such as Samuel Barber, Paul Hindemith, and Aaron Copland.

Some Modern Dance

Traditionally, European and American theatrical dance centered on ballet. However, in the early twentieth century, it became fashionable in dance circles to rebel against the strictures of tradition. The first two well-known American dancers to break away from classical ballet were Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. Although their styles differed, Duncan and St. Denis's unconventional approaches opened the door to a new era in dance history: the American modern dance movement of the 1920s. Leaders of this movement, some of whom are listed below, based their works on personal experience, using their bodies as instruments to express such emotions as passion, fear, joy, or grief. Rather than adhering to a set form and a limited range of gestures, as in ballet, the dancer created form as an outgrowth of his or her own communicative impulses.

Over time, modern dance has reconciled itself to other traditional dance forms. Perhaps nothing has helped to integrate various styles of dance more than American musical comedy, which draws on ballet, modern, tap, and ethnic folk dancing. In addition, with the advent of television and improved transportation after World War II, audiences and dancers alike have benefited from a greater exposure to dance styles from all over the world. Dancers today use a broader range of techniques, styles, and source materials than ever before.

Legacy Of Modern Dance

The legacy of Modern dance can be seen in lineage of 20th century concert dance forms. Although often producing divergent dance forms, many seminal dance artists share a common heritage that can be traced back to free dance.


Postmodern And Contemporary Dance

Both Postmodern dance and Contemporary dance are built upon the foundations laid by Modern dance and form part of the greater category of 20th century concert dance. Where as Postmodern dance was a direct and opposite response to Modern dance, Contemporary dance draws on both modern and postmodern dance as a source of inspiration.

The social and artistic upheavals of the late 1960s and 70s provoked even more radical forms of modern dance. Modern dance today is much more sophisticated in technique and technology than when modern dance was founded. The founders composed their dances entirely of spirit, soul, heart and mind as opposed to today's modern which has more technical aspects.

The concern with social problems and the condition of human spirit is still expressed, but the issues that are presented would have appalled many early modern dancers. The essence of modern dance is to look forward, not back. Ballet and modern sometimes fuse together and enrich both forms, but neither is likely to lose its identity in the process. It is impossible to predict what directions modern dance will take in the future. Each style could go in so many different directions and are usually very radical. If this trend keeps up, future audiences can look forward to an interesting forum of dance.

African American Modern Dance

The development of Modern dance embraced the contributions of African American dance artists regardless of whether they made pure modern dance works or blended modern dance with African and Caribbean influences.

• Katherine Dunham - An African American dancer, and anthropologist. Originally a ballet dancer, she founded her first company Ballet Negre in 1936 and later the Katherine Dunham Dance Company based in Chicago, Illinois. Dunham opened a school in New York (1945) where she taught Katherine Dunham Technique, a blend of African and Caribbean movement (flexible torso and spine, articulated pelvis and isolation of the limbs and polyrhythmic movement) integrated with techniques of ballet and modern dance.

• Pearl Primus - A dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist, Primus drew on African and Caribbean dances to create strong dramatic works characterized by large leaps in the air. Primus often based her dances on the work of black writers and on racial and African-American issues. Primus created works based on Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1944), and Lewis Allan's Strange Fruit (1945). Her dance company developed into the Pearl Primus Dance Language Institute which teaches her method of blending African-American, Caribbean, and African influences with modern dance and ballet techniques.

• Alvin Ailey- A student of Lester Horton, Bella Lewitzky, and later Martha Graham, Ailey spent several years working in both concert and theater dance. In 1958, Ailey and a group of young African-American dancers performed as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York. Ailey drew upon his blood memories of Texas, the blues, spirituals and gospel as inspiration. His most popular and critically acclaimed work is Revelations (1960).

Development Of Modern Dance

Whilst the founders of modern dance continued to make works based on ancient myths and legends following a narrative structure, their students, the radical dancers, saw dance as a potential agent of change. Disturbed by the Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism in Europe, they tried to raise consciousness by dramatizing the economic, social, ethnic and political crises of their time.

• Hanya Holm - A student of Mary Wigman and instructor at the Wigman School in Dresden, Holm founded the New York Wigman School of Dance in 1931 (which became the Hanya Holm Studio in 1936) introducing Wigman technique, Laban's theories of spatial dynamics, and later her own dance techniques to American modern dance. An accomplished choreographer, she was a founding artist of the first American Dance Festival in Bennington (1934). Holm's dance work Metropolitan Daily was the first modern dance composition to be televised on NBC and her labanotation score for Kiss Me, Kate (1948) was the first choreography to be copyrighted in the United States. Holm choreographed extensively in the fields of concert dance and musical theater.

• Anna Sokolow - A student of Martha Graham and Louis Horst, Sokolow created her own dance company (circa 1930). Presenting dramatic contemporary imagery, Sokolow's compositions were generally abstract, often revealing the full spectrum of human experience reflecting the tension and alienation of the time and the truth of human movement.

• José Limón - In 1946, after studying and performing with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, Limón established his own company with Humphrey as Artistic Director. It was under her mentorship that Limón created his signature dance The Moor’s Pavane (1949). Limón’s choreographic works and technique remain a strong influence on contemporary dance practice.

• Merce Cunningham - A former ballet student and performer with Martha Graham, he presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in 1944. Influenced by Cage and embracing modernist ideology using postmodern processes, Cunningham introduced chance procedures and pure movement to choreography and Cunningham technique to the cannon of 20th century dance techniques. Cunningham set the seeds for postmodern dance with his non-linear, non-climactic, non-psychological abstract work. In these works each element is in and of itself expressive, and the observer (in large part) determines what it communicates.

• Erick Hawkins - A student of George Balanchine, Hawkins became a soloist and the first male dancer in Martha Graham's dance company. In 1951, Hawkins, interested in the new field of kinesiology, opened his own school and developed his own technique (Hawkins technique) a forerunner of most somatic dance techniques.

• Paul Taylor - A student of the Juilliard School of Music and the Connecticut College School of Dance. In 1952 his performance at the American Dance Festival attracted the attention of several major choreographers. Performing in the companies of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine (in that order), he founded the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954. The use of everyday gestures and modernist ideology is characteristic of his choreography. Former members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company included Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean, Dan Wagoner, and Senta Driver.

• Alwin Nikolais - A student of Hanya Holm. Nikolais's use of multimedia in works such as Masks, Props, and Mobiles (1953), Totem (1960), and Count Down (1979) was unmatched by other choreographers. Often presenting his dancers in constrictive spaces and costumes with complicated sound and sets, he focused their attention on the physical tasks of overcoming obstacles he placed in their way. Nikolais viewed the dancer not as an artist of self-expression, but as a talent who could investigate the properties of physical space and movement.

Popularization of American Modern Dance

In 1927 newspapers regularly began assigning dance critics, such as Walter Terry, and Edwin Denby, who approached performances from the viewpoint of a movement specialist rather than as a reviewer of music or drama. Educators accepted modern dance into college and university curricula, first as a part of physical education, then as performing art. Many college teachers were trained at the Bennington Summer School of the Dance, which was established at Bennington College in 1934.

Of the Bennington program, Agnes de Mille wrote, "...there was a fine commingling of all kinds of artists, musicians, and designers, and secondly, because all those responsible for booking the college concert series across the continent were assembled there. ... free from the limiting strictures of the three big monopolistic managements, who pressed for preference of their European clients. As a consequence, for the first time American dancers were hired to tour America nationwide, and this marked the beginning of their solvency." (de Mille, 1991, p. 205)

Modern Dancers Today

Modern dancers use dancing to express their innermost emotions, often to get closer to their inner-selves. Before attempting to choreograph a routine, the modern dancer decides which emotions to try to convey to the audience. Many modern dancers choose a subject near and dear to their hearts, such as a lost love or a personal failure. The dancer will choose music that relates to the story they wish to tell, or choose to use no music at all, and then choose a costume to reflect their chosen emotions.

If you are interested in learning modern dance, check the yellow pages or your local newspaper for possible classes.

Martha Graham

Martha Graham is considered one of the foremost pioneers of American modern dance. In order to express the passion, rage and ecstasy of humans, she developed her very own language of movement. She created a new dance technique similar to classical ballet, but with several differences. She focused heavily on basic human movement, concentrating on the movements of contraction and release. Instead of striving for long, fluid movements, Graham's movements were sharp and jagged. Her dancing aimed to expose basic human emotions through movement. Graham's brave vision for modern dance earned her several awards and honors.

Characteristics of Modern Dance

Modern dance encourages dancers to use their emotions and moods to design their own steps and routines. It is not unusual for modern dancers to invent new steps for their routines, instead of following a structured code of technique, as in ballet.

Another characteristic of modern dance in opposition to ballet is the deliberate use of gravity. Whereas classical ballet dancers strive to be light and airy on their feet, modern dancers often use their body weight to enhance movement. A modern dancer rejects the classical ballet stance of an upright, erect body, often opting instead for deliberate falls to the floor.

What Is Modern Dance

Born in the early 20th century, modern dance is a dance style that centers on a dancer's own interpretations instead of structured steps, as in traditional ballet dancing. During the 1900's, European dancers began rebelling against the rigid rules of classical ballet. Turning against the structured techniques, costumes and shoes of ballet, these dancers favaored a more relaxed, free style of dancing. Modern dance pioneers often danced in bare feet and revealing costumes. In the United States, several dance pioneers paved the way for American modern dance, including the legendary Martha Graham.

Early modern dance

In 1915, Ruth Dorthy St. Denis founded the Denishawn school and dance company with her husband Ted Shawn. Whilst St. Denis was responsible for most of the creative work, Shawn was responsible for teaching technique and composition. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman were all pupils at the school and members of the dance company.

• 1923 Graham leaves Denishawn to work as a solo artist in the Greenwich Village Follies.

• 1928 Humphrey and Weidman leave Denishawn to set up their own school and company (Humphrey-Weidman).

• 1933 Shawn founds his all male dance group Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers based at his Jacob's Pillow farm in Lee, Massachusetts.

After shedding the techniques and compositional methods of their teachers the early modern dancers developed their own methods and ideologies and dance techniques that became the foundation for modern dance practice.

• Martha Graham (and Louis Horst)

• Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman and Martha Graham

• Helen Tamiris - originally trained in free movement (Irene Lewisohn) and ballet (Michel Fokine) Tamiris studied briefly with Isadora Duncan but disliked her emphasis on personal expression and lyrical movement. Tamiris believed that each dance must create its own expressive means and as such did not develop an individual style or technique. As a choreographer Tamiris made works based on American themes working in both concert dance and musical theatre.

• Lester Horton - choosing to work in California (three thousand miles away from the center of modern dance - New York), Horton developed his own approach that incorporated diverse elements including Native American dances and modern Jazz. Horton's dance technique (Lester Horton Technique) emphasises a whole body approach including; flexibility, strength, coordination, and body awareness to allow freedom of expression.

• Ted Shawn

History

Free dance:

• 1891 - Loie Fuller (a burlesque skirt dancer) began experimenting with the effect that gas lighting had on her silk costumes. Fuller developed a form of natural movement and improvisation techniques that were used in conjunction with her revolutionary lighting equipment and translucent silk costumes. She patented her apparatus and methods of stage lighting that included the use of coloured gels and burning chemicals for luminescence, and also patented her voluminous silk stage costumes.
  

• 1903 - Isadora Duncan developed a dance technique influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche [citation needed] and a belief that dance of the ancient Greeks[citation needed] (natural and free) was the dance of the future. Duncan developed a philosophy of dance based on natural and spiritual concepts and advocated for that acceptance of pure dance as a high art.

• 1905 - Ruth St. Denis, influenced by the actor Sarah Bernhardt and Japanese dancer Sada Yacco, developed her translations of Indian culture and mythology. Her performances quickly became popular and she toured extensively whilst researching Oriental culture and arts.

Fuller, Duncan and St. Denis all toured Europe seeking a wider and more accepting audience for their work. Ruth St. Denis returned to the United States to continue her work. Isadora Duncan returned to the United States at various points in her life but her work was not very well received there. She returned to Europe and died in Paris in 1927. Fuller's work also received little support outside Europe.

In Europe

In Europe, Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, and Rudolf von Laban developed theories of human movement and expression, and methods of instruction that led to the development of European modern and Expressionist dance. Their theories and techniques spread well beyond Europe to influence the development of modern dance and theater via their students and disciples, and subsequent generations of teachers and performers carried these theories and methods to Russia, the United States and Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

In the United States

In the United States of America people such as Alvin Ailey, Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis, Doris Humphrey, Katherine Dunham, and also Martha Graham developed, styled and also laid down the foundations of American modern dance. Modern dance has been around for a long time and still today is danced.

Origins

In the early 1900s the American dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and the German dancer Mary Wigman started to rebel against the rigid constraints of Classical Ballet. Shedding the authoritarian controls surrounding classical ballet technique, costume, and shoes, these early modern dance pioneers focused on creative self-expression rather than on technical virtuosity. Modern dance is a more relaxed, free style of dance in which choreographers use emotions and moods to design their own steps, in contrast to ballet's structured code of steps. It has a deliberate use of gravity, whereas ballet strives to be light and airy.

Introduction

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Modern dance is a dance form developed in the early 20th century. Although the term Modern dance has also been applied to a category of 20th Century ballroom dances, Modern dance as a term usually refers to 20th century concert dance.

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