What is Contemporary Dance?

March 20, 2018

Contemporary dance is a highly individual and creative dance form that balances the essential elements of technique with the understanding of rhythm, form, flexibility and a wonderful sense of free release in movement. Students learn to broaden and trust their awareness of spatial relationships, shape and fluid form as they explore their own artistic sensibilities and expressions through free gesture, motion and improvisation in open space.

This unlimited kind of expression actually incorporates many different elements of more structured dance, while combining these elements is an enlightening and delightful, unstructured fashion. The kinetics of this expansive dance form need not be repeated to any exacting measurement or pattern, and this is why it is so free, releasing and enticing to perform and observe.

What is the Style and Essence of Contemporary Dance?

The basic expansive style and essence of contemporary dance involves many essential aspects of other dance forms, such as the following:

• Technique. - Contemporary dance can include aspects of technique from many other forms of dance, from classical ballet positions to the syncopated beats of tap dance and the rhythmic, vibrant movements of jazz and Latin style dancing. For example, many Latin techniques used in Zumba instruction and performance are often present in students' contemporary dance expressions.
• Free Sense of Release. - The exploration in contemporary dance encourages a free, boundless sense of release into creative space, time and energy. Students can express themselves as they grow artistically without feeling the need to conform to given dance steps, patterns or sequences. Time elements can be partially defined or left totally free and unpredictable to the dancer and the observer, which is a large part of the beauty and self-growth nurtured by this modern dance form.
• Improvising with Shape, Space and Form. - As students improvise in movement with the shapes, space and form they perceive around them, they begin to take on the essence of external realities that are kinetic, living, breathing and forever changing and evolving, just as they are in their creative explorations. When dancing together freely in groups, the negative space between dancers and their movements becomes positive at times, intermingling with the dancers as they merge with these open-air, atmospheric forms surrounding and embracing them in the unlimited joys of newly emerging dance.

In the many valuable lessons offered at Southcoast Dance School located in Rye and Tootgarook, students learn to expand their knowledge, understanding, skills and free form expression with the excellent guidance of their experienced, professional dance teachers. By studying Contemporary Dance as well as all the other styles and forms of dance taught by these fine dance artists, students become aware of the fascinating space, form and time around them, creating their own vibrant dance expressions in newbourne, unique artistic forms.

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