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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.