Katherine Dunham validated African Americans as performers and brought their cultural heritage to the concert and Broadway stage; along the way she sought to break down racial barriers off stage as well, in addition to codifying her own dance technique.
Demi Character Dance is generally found in addition to classical ballet sections at dance eisteddfods and competitions. They allow the ballet dancer to showcase their technique whilst portraying a character.
Creative Movement refers to a dance practice where the students are responsible for generating movement, in response to a prompt of some kind. Students explore concepts of Body, Effort, Space, Time, and Relationship while developing a personal vocabulary of locomotor and non-locomotor movements.
Contemporary Dance or Contemporary Ballet requires the skills, technique, and flexibility of a ballet dancer. It uses these skills to create movement and choreography that deviates and distorts traditional ballet.
Competitive dance is an umbrella term that encompasses many styles of dance, including but not limited to ballet, jazz, lyrical, tap, contemporary, hip hop, and acro dance. You will normally not see a dance class labeled as simply “Competitive Dance”; rather, the class may be called something like “Competition Team Jazz Class”, which simply indicates that the dancers participating are a part of the studio’s competition team. To best understand competitive dance, you must understand what kind of dance competitions there are.
Commercial dance pulls moves from jazz, hip hop, breakdance, popping, krumping, and street dance, but for entertainment purposes might also include ballet or even musical theatre.
Clogging, or clog dance, originated in the foothills of Appalachia around the mid-1700s, and was adapted from a combination of the folk dances of the early American settlers of the area, who came from England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany. Each of these cultures had their own rich history of folk dancing and folk music, which all included some form of percussive footwork, personal expression, and upbeat music.
Burlesque dance is a sensual, sometimes bawdy and comedic dance style reserved for adults. Historically, burlesque dance was a part of variety shows as early as the late 1800s that featured lewd comedy, suggestive dancing, pantomime, and later, the striptease. One famous example of early 20th century burlesque can be seen in the movie “Gypsy” starring Natalie Wood as Gypsy Rose Lee, a real burlesque dancer, whose gimmick was to strip down to nearly nothing but never reveal anything more than an arm or a leg.
Broadway jazz, or theater jazz originated in the 1920’s. It was the first time dance was an important part of a play’s plot, and viewers fell in love. It is a unique blend of ballet, modern, and jazz and is distinguished by its emphasis on exaggerated movements, high energy, and story-telling. It is almost always performed by a troupe of dancers, with few solos.
The BrainDance is not a dance style, but a “flexible framework” that was developed by Anne Green Gilbert and heavily informed by Bartenieff Fundamentals. It is a somatic exercise that can be performed in a myriad of ways.