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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Horton

https://www.biography.com/people/martha-graham-9317723

https://skinnerreleasingnetwork.org/welcome-to-srn/about-joan-skinner/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Taylor-choreographer

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25/09/18 This is a picture of my contraction from the graham contraction exercise

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25/09/18 This is an initial picture of my right leg splits. I hope you get more flexible and lower to the ground.

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25/09/18 This is an initial picture of my left leg splits. As you can see I am very far off the floor. I hope to get lower and eventually touch the floor, which I can do by stretching in my free time.

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25/09/18 This is a initial picture of my centre splits, I am very high off the ground and I hope to get lower and eventually touch the ground.

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25/09/18 This is a picture of my flat back. As you can see my lower back is not straight and my arms are not in line with my body.

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25/09/18 This is an initial picture on my lateral T on my left sided. I am not in a T position and my leg is bent. I also need to turn my foot out so that I can balance over my hip.

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25/09/18 This is a picture of my lateral T on my right side. I need to turn out my foot more, straighten my leg and pull up through my supporting leg. I also need to make sure my arms are beside my ears.

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25/09/18 This is a video of me stretching at home to improve my flexibility. If I do this every night before bed or in my free time, my flexibility will rapidly improve. https://youtu.be/pJlKqFpVnEo

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25/09/18 This is a video of me practicing some balances, in order to improve my balance for lateral T’s and other exercises. https://youtu.be/OP0u2wRLVSk

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27/09/18 This is a video of me practicing my coccyx balances. By practicing these at home, they will improve and become easier. https://youtu.be/IT9n6Fcmk80

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27/09/18 This is a picture of one of the positions in the coccyx balances. I need to ensure that I do not hunch over in this position and I need to balance on the coccyx, not leaning into one hip.

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27/09/18 This is one of the positions that I hit in the coccyx balances. To improve this I need to make sure that I have a flat back, that my legs are straight and that my arms are in like with my ears.

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Here is a video of my slide descends. I still have a lot of work to do to be able to get to the jazz split position and to get off the floor cleanly. https://youtu.be/38H52l2iR18

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This is a video of the stretches that I do nearly every night. These stretches seem to have improved my flexibility slightly, if I countinue this way I will be more flexible soon. https://youtu.be/3-JQ1WoM9DI

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01/11/18 This is a video of my skinner release swings that I practiced in my free time. I believe that they are improving but I still need to release my body more. https://youtu.be/onxhyfJFiHw

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01/11/18 This is a video of my lateral T exercise that I practiced in my free time. From practicing these and really concentrating in lessons, I haverealised  a dramatic improvement as I am now able to balance better and I am closer to a T position. https://youtu.be/0jYBXCS6QBU

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04/11/18 This is a video from lesson of skinner release swings. I made sure to improve this exercise I released my body more and swung my arms. https://youtu.be/45OGSF3vnjY

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04/11/18 This is a video of the Graham bounces. These are difficult as they are at a fast tempo but with practice I know that they will improve. https://youtu.be/FfdT4Xjls-o

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04/11/18 This is a video of my preparation for release swings. In this exercise, I need to drop my weight more and release my body when we swing down. https://youtu.be/f6pc-AVc0pM

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06/11/18 This is a video of the Paul Taylor release swings with the rounding of the back. https://youtu.be/V0-GuUaq17w

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14/11/18 This is a video of the lateral combination. https://youtu.be/Rhh2U-teHRI

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14/12/18 This is a picture of my high release. We have only recently started to practice this and so I hope to get better at it and get my sternum further up to the sky.

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14/11/18 This is a video of the skinner release swings. https://youtu.be/akMEVmUzQ7o

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14/11/18 This is a video of the lateral T study with a promenade. I need to practice staying in the correct position whilst also turning and shifting my heel. https://youtu.be/pLEQ1JX0T8k

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20/11/18 This is a video of the Graham seated spirals which focuses on the shift of the hips and high release. https://youtu.be/0zaNWlADlMI

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20/11/18 This is a video of the Graham bounces. After practice, I have managed to get lower on the bounces and now I can nearly touch my feet with my head. https://youtu.be/0qjj8eWqRwI

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20/11/18 This is a video of the lateral T study with promenade which I practiced in my free time. In this exercise, my balance, positioning and also my promenade has improved. https://youtu.be/Of6FZTwQ4AE

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20/11/18 This is a video of the skinner release swings that I practiced in my free time. The release of my body has improved but is still not up to the right standard. I have also learnt to let my head go with my arms. https://youtu.be/bFPjTAAmCPY

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20/11/18 This is a video of the lateral combination. My levels have improved in this exercise as I have learnt to Plié lower. https://youtu.be/duK_wJB-pmY

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20/11/18 This is a video of the release swings preparation. I release my body more now and my arms are in line with my ears. https://youtu.be/_Eu4kKpr4fw

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20/11/18 This is a video of the Paul Taylor release swings with the rounding of the back. https://youtu.be/7EmAAdboovk

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20/11/18 This is a video of my coccyx balances. https://youtu.be/8SstRbKhfV0

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20/11/18 This is a video of fortification 1. I have improved in this exercise as I have learnt to continue moving and to never stop. I also keep my legs straight and control all of the movements. https://youtu.be/ZznX7-wWFFk

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20/11/18 This is a video of my slide descends from lesson. I have improved in this exercise as I now turn my torso more and am able to control my movement down to the ground. https://youtu.be/VkTHVYpw-p8

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04/12/18 This is a video of the Graham bounces. I can now touch my feet with my head and am able to get my body closer to me legs. https://youtu.be/hmxb3HBj26s

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04/12/18 This is a video of my graham contractions. https://youtu.be/K0JRabyQEbY

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04/12/18 This is a video of contractions after corrections from Nahum. This video was taken in lesson. I completed the end of the exercise correctly and I kept my head up on the first contraction. https://youtu.be/0t6AX8-snTk

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04/12/18 This is a video of the Graham seated spirals with the right foot in front. https://youtu.be/7iPRxWx2CRc

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04/12/18 This is a video of the Graham seated spirals with the left foot in front. https://youtu.be/Aymkg3Qk0Pk

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04/11/18 This is a video of the roll downs. https://youtu.be/f3n6wyJ_c7o

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04/12/18 This is a video of the flat back exercise. https://youtu.be/WaercGYbYaY

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04/12/18 This is a video of the lateral exercise. https://youtu.be/NFuHL6jchyc

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04/12/18 This is a video of the skinner release swings. https://youtu.be/wsT45NKQ31c

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04/12/18 This is a video of the release swings with pencil turns. https://youtu.be/z82fwAF4Ucc

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10/12/18 This is a video of the Martha Graham bounces that I practiced in my free time. The more that I practice the better that I feel they look and the better that I execute them. https://youtu.be/hfwu-4HdTd4

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11/12/18 This is a video of the Graham bounces. https://youtu.be/JQ4WPfwLLu0

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11/12/18 This is a video of Martha Graham contractions. In this exercise, i used my breathing to properly execute the exercise. This video was filmed in class. https://youtu.be/2QRg8lXppG4

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11/12/18 This is a video of the Martha Graham seated spirals. I used my breathing this time to enhance my contractions and stretches. https://youtu.be/NiBTLscenuI

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11/12/18 This is a video of the roll downs and flat back exercise. https://youtu.be/k_61ZeI42jI

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11/12/18 This is a video of the lateral exercise. https://youtu.be/wL_0k2YGX1I

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11/12/18 This is a video of the preparation for release swings, with lateral and a full rotation. https://youtu.be/tPShwhHTBgo

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11/12/18 This is a video of the Paul Taylor release swings with the rounded back. https://youtu.be/1DKpOWTiFgw

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11/12/18 This is the position that I need to hit for my pencil turns

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11/12-/18 This is a progress picture of my centre splits

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11/12/18 This is a progress picture of my left leg splits

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11/12/18 This is a progress picture of my right leg splits

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11/12/18 This is a video of the latera T study. Over the semester, I have dramatically improved in this exercise

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10/12/18 This is a picture of my lateral T to the right side

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10/12/18 This is a picture of my lateral T position to my left side

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10/12/18 This is a progress picture of my high release, I lean back to ensure that I can ouch my sternum to the sky as much as possible.

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10/12/18 This is a progress picture of my flat back. As you can see it has improved as my head is in line and the bottom to the top of my back is straight

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10/12/18 This is a progress picture of my contraction, as you can see it has improved for when I first started as my back is in more of a C shape and my lower back is also rounded.

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Martha Graham is considered by many to be the 20th century's most important dancer and the mother of modern dance.

Martha Graham was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on May 11, 1894.
As a child, she was influenced by her father, a doctor who used physical movement to remedy nervous disorders. Throughout her teens, Graham studied dance in Los Angeles at Denishawn.
In 1926, she established her own dance company in New York City and developed an innovative, non-traditional technique that spoke to more taboo forms of movement and emotional expression. She danced well into her 70s and choreographed until her death in 1991, leaving the dance world forever changed.

Early Years and Inspiration

Born in a suburb of Allegheny (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, on May 11, 1894, Martha Graham was influenced early on by her father, George Graham, a doctor who specialized in nervous disorders. Dr. Graham believed that the body could express its inner senses, an idea that intrigued his young daughter.

In the 1910s, the Graham family moved to California, and when Martha was 17, she saw Ruth St. Denis perform at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. After the show, she implored her parents to allow her to study dance, but being strong Presbyterians, they wouldn't permit it.

Still inspired, Graham enrolled in an arts-oriented junior college, and, after her father died, at the newly opened Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded by St. Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn. Graham spent more than eight years at Denishawn, as both a student and an instructor.

How she became a Choreographer

Working primarily with Shawn, Graham improved her technique and began dancing professionally. Shawn choreographed the dance production "Xochitl" specifically for Graham, who performed the role of an attacked Aztec maiden.The wildly emotional performance garnered her critical acclaim.

Graham left Denishawn in 1923 to take a job with the Greenwich Village Follies. Two years later, she left the Follies to broaden her career. She took teaching positions at the Eastman School of Music and Theater in Rochester, New York, and the John Murray Anderson School in New York City to support herself.

In 1926, she established the Martha Graham Dance Company. Its incipient programs were stylistically similar to those of her teachers, but she quickly found her artistic voice and began conducting elaborate experiments in dance.

Her style

Ever more bold, and illustrating her visions through jarring, violent, spastic and trembling movements, Graham believed these physical expressions gave outlet to spiritual and emotional undercurrents that were entirely ignored in other Western dance forms. The musician Louis Horst came on as the company’s musical director and stayed with Graham for nearly her entire career. Some of Graham’s most impressive and famous works include “Frontier,” “Appalachian Spring,” “Seraphic Dialogue” and “Lamentation.” All of these works utilized the Delsartean principle of tension and relaxation—what Graham termed “contraction and release.”

Despite the fact that many early critics described her dances as “ugly,” Graham’s genius caught on and became increasingly respected over time, and her advances in dance are considered by many to be an important achievement in America’s cultural history. The Graham technique is a highly regarded form of movement taught by dance institutions across the globe.

Graham continued to dance into her mid-70s and choreographed until her death on April 1, 1991 at the age of 96, leaving behind a legacy of inspiration not only for dancers but for artists of all kinds. Her company continues to perform internationally with a varied repertory.

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Joan Skinner has a lifetime of achievement in the worlds of dance performance and pedagogical innovation.

Early influences included studying dance from the age of six with Cora Belle Hunter, formerly a graduate student of Mabel Ellsworth Todd, author of the groundbreaking “The Thinking Body” in 1937.

Shortly after graduating from Bennington College, Vermont, in 1946, Martha Graham personally invited Joan to join her company, having noticed her in several student performances.  Soon Joan was performing major works alongside Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and others, and teaching at the Graham school.  During this time she was also studying ballet at the School of American Ballet and was particularly impressed with the teaching of Anatole Oboufhoff, a former partner of Pavlova.

In 1951, having left the Graham company, Joan began working with Merce Cunningham at his studio.  She performed in the revolutionary “Sixteen Dances” and “Suite by Chance”, and was one of the Cunningham soloists for the American Dance festival on Broadway in April 1953.

In the following four years, her performing career flourished, including through lengthy and gruelling cross-country tours. During one of them, she sustained a ruptured disc, a serious injury threatening her future in dance. It led her to Alexander Technique teacher Judith Liebowitz in New York in 1955. The principles she learned there would prove very influential in her later exploration of movement technique. After a period of study, Joan was able to resume a rigorous, challenging dancing career without further injury.

Following 1957, Joan increasingly focused on teaching, primarily at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois, where she received her Master’s in dance in 1964; as well as at the Walker Art Center and the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She also taught experimental classes, in which she began to evolve her own distinctive approach to movement training.

As a dance faculty member at the University of Illinois in the early 1960’s, Joan was encouraged by her friend and mentor Margaret Erlanger to experiment with graduate students in refining her own approach to technique.  It was these students who coined the term “releasing”, to describe their feeling-state throughout Joan’s experimental classes. Among these students were Mary Fulkerson and a handful of other notables who continued practising, developing and communicating these principles following graduation.

Joan eventually became head of the modern dance program at the University of Washington in 1967, where her experimentation continued. What we now know as Skinner Releasing Technique took shape from the early 1970s, as she refined and codified the material and approaches she was developing.  A formal teacher training programme first appeared in the mid-1980’s.  Since that time over 120 teachers have been trained to pass on Joan’s gentle, rigorous and poetic approach to movement, which remains as distinctive and radical as ever.

Now retired, Joan Skinner lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, jazz composer Jim Knapp.

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Paul Taylor, born July 29, 1930, Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania U.S.—died August 29, 2018, New York, American modern dancer and choreographer noted for the inventive, frequently humorous, and sardonic dances that he choreographed for his company.

Entering Syracuse University in 1947 on swimming and painting scholarships, Taylor began dance training in 1951. He subsequently studied modern dancewith Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and José Limón and ballet with Antony Tudor and Margaret Craske. He began his professional career in 1953 with Martha Graham’s company, creating such important roles as Aegisthus in Clytemnestra (1958), Hercules in Alcestis (1960), and Theseus in Phaedra(1962). He also performed in works by other modern choreographers, including those of Charles Weidmanand Merce Cunningham. He danced a solo created for him by George Balanchine in Episodes (1959), a work choreographed by Balanchine and Graham to music by Anton Webern.

As a choreographer Taylor utilized a wide variety of movement styles, some of which he described as “flat” (two-dimensional in appearance), “dance scribbling” (emphasis on action rather than on shape or line), and “lyric” (“long arms”). His avant-garde works ranged from Duet (1957), in which he and his partner remained motionless for four minutes, to Orbs (1966), an hour-long composition to Beethoven’s last string quartets. Other well-known dances included Three Epitaphs (1956), Aureole (1962), Scudorama (1963), The Book of Beasts (1971), Esplanade and Runes (1975), Cloven Kingdom (1976), Aphrodisiamania (1977), Airs (1978), Nightshade (1979), and Le Sacre du Printemps (1980). His Aureole entered the repertoires of such major ballet troupes as the Paris opera ballet and the Royal danish ballet.

Taylor’s company, established in 1954 and usually numbering 13 dancers, first performed in Europe in 1960, toured South America in 1965 under the International Cultural Exchange Program of the U.S. State Department, and in 1978 toured the U.S.S.R. and appeared on the U.S. public-television network. Taylor also choreographed for the Spoleto (Italy) Festival of Two Worlds and won several prestigious awards. He withdrew from performing in the 1970s.

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Lester Horton was an American Dancer, choreographer and teacher who was born 23rd January 1906 in Indiana, United States and died 2nd November 1953 in Los Angeles, United States.

Horton was credited with launching the modern dance movement in Los Angeles and for establishing the country’s first racially integrated dance company. In his short career he developed a dance training technique that continued to be used by instructors into the 21st century.

Horton’s initial interest in movement was inspired by Native American dance (he had been fascinated by Native American culture since childhood). In Los Angeles, he learnt to integrate props into his choreography and present dance as dramatic theatre. His style was inventive and dynamic, often requiring his students to move in unusual, exaggerated and unballetic ways.

In the mid-1930s Horton choreographed protest pieces such as Dictator (1935) and Prelude to Militancy (1937). A major highlight in Horton’s career was his choreography of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1937, many in the audience were shocked by the barefooted dancers contorting themselves into angular and rigid movements.

In 1942, Horton began choreographing for lots of Hollywood films including Moonlight in Havana (1942), White Savage (1943), Phantom of the Opera (1944), and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1945). He went on to choreograph 19 films over the following 11 years.

When Horton died suddenly of a heart attack, Alvin Ailey took over as director of the company for two years before moving to New York City, where he became one of the most successful American modern dance choreographers and always cited Horton as one of his primary influences, he really made Horton’s unique style well known and popular.

Classes influenced by Horton often consisted of 7 warm up exercises including:

•Roll downs – to warm up the spine
•Flat backs – strengthen and stretch lower back, stomach, and hamstrings
•Parallel bounces with Primitive Squats – of the Achilles tendons)
•Lateral stretches – strengthen, elongate the torso, hamstrings, lower back, upper back
•Release swings
•Parallel leg swings
•Deep lunges

There are 17 fortifications. These studies would include exercises to stretch, strength, fortify, change levels through ascents and descents, rhythm, falls, turns, twists, elevations dynamics etc.