A Study Of Modern Dance Teaching Of Henry Yu

Henry Yu is one of twenty six students of Martha Graham and is the only Chinese dancer belonging to that category. Moreover, he is the only Chinese who has ever performed with Graham at the same stage. As early as in 1974, Yu commenced his teaching practice in modern dance. Therefore, he has accumulated very much experience during the last forty years and made a great contribution to the development of modern-dance industry.The thesis is divided into four parts. At the very first part, the scientific nature of ‘decomposition-training’ and ‘symbolic terms’ has been proved by numerous experiments. The part also deals with the comparison of Yu’s drum improvisational accompaniment and the traditional piano improvisational accompaniment and after that, the thesis provides its own attitude. The second part is about the ‘inheritance of Martha’s techniques’. The part mainly focuses on the core techniques developed by Graham and meanwhile, it points out some incorrespondence between the genuine Martha technique and such skills in modern theoretical researches, which is induced by the lack of experiencing Martha’s core techniques in person for most of the researchers. Hence, this part can be utilized as a reference for future theoretical studies in this aspect. Furthermore, the paper concludes the characteristics of Yu’s own teaching style. The third part is about ‘the revolution of Martha’s techniques’, which pays a large attention to the enrichment of Martha’s techniques by Yu. After that, Yu’s special warm-up training is introduced from four aspects: the background and the purpose of building such a set of warm-up system, the theoretical foundation of the ‘warm-up floorwork’, the various types of the floorwork and the value of the training. It is also founded that the religious thoughts, Jung’s psychological theories and Michelangelo’s aesthetic ideas have exerted a great impact on Yu’s creation of the ‘warm-up floorwork’. In addition, Yu’s warm-up training is proved to be both scientific and effective. Yet, only quite few have learned his training methods. The thesis thus provides a very specific analysis of all the skills involved in the warm-up, which might give some solid materials to the researchers who are very interested but inexperienced in this field, and should be very helpful in popularizing the ‘warm-up floorwork’.