Lyrical, Modern, & Contemporary Dance... what's the difference?

What's the difference between Lyrical, Modern, & Contemporary? I'm here to try and explain the intricacies of these three styles of dance. Hope you enjoy!

tags
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[alwaysdancing]

Amazing video! I couldn't understand the difference between lyrical, modern and contemporary before so it helped a lot.

[starrbling]

Okay, so this is what I've gathered.

Lyrical - inspired by ballet, looks similar to ballet but with different techniques

Modern - someone said "fuck all these rules" and basically did the opposite of ballet. Everything is grounded, but it still has some similarities (i.e pointed toes) also, modern refers to an entire era of dance from the 1900s

Contemporary - someone looked at basically every new style derived from modern and ballet and said "okay, mix them all up". from hip hop, jazz, latin and afro themes, modern and ballet

[trinityslade]

this is such a well done, lovely video! thank you!! ive been dancing 20 years, but was never clear on the distinction between modern and contemporary, but this cleared it up for me 100%! thanks for putting the time into this :)

[lovaeriksson]

thank you so much for this! i finally understand the difference between 3 styles i would have called the same a few months ago. this was very helpful:)

[thegirl]

Thank you for the detailed information. I fell in love with the contemporary dance like crazy but they seem to have only modern in the school here :(
Im heartbroken 💔

[barefacedquestions]

Thank you so much for this. I was wondering why I've suddenly taken to lyrical dance recently. Now I understand the reason is due to my renewed interest in ballet, and lyrical dance has plenty of it.

[Whoville]

I liked the way you explained these, I would have never understood the history behind them. I only knew them for the visual physical dances I saw when I looked up videos of different dances. Can you also do a video for Jazz? I am considering taking an adults beginners Jazz class and trying to decide between contemporary ballet or Jazz and which one I'd like but also feel comfortable doing with my body. I'm very shy and im worried if I do Jazz I might be uncomfortable doing it in front of other people but I think it might be what I naturally dance like at home on my own XD

[SuperDarvit]

Thanks for the thorough descriptions, very helpful! Just wondering why you didn't use a few clips to visualize your remarks, that could enhance the video loads (I think)

[holisticallyholly]

modern = the hippie child of ballet, sold! now im learning modern, after being a competitive dancer as a teen. lol i need to reconnect with my inner child through dance!

[zionnoel]

I want to get into dance, and so I was so joyous to watch this video and learn a little bit of simple, useful differentiation. :) Thank you!😊

[stannct]

Thank you so much, I need to give a presentation about modern dance and your explanation really helped me out a lot!! Just for future reference for myself, modern dance starts at @3:00

[haydaydaily]

Great insight! I personally feel like contemporary is just the total opposite of lyrical, for lyrical you have like pointed toes etc(like you mentioned) but contemporary has like flexed foot and distorted body

[SP-rxtb]

Graham states she never took ballet and rebelled against it - was Ruth st Dennis and denis Shawn that took their inspiration from petroglyphs and art of Egypt her influence later was Japanese artist

[mph]

Ballet can be done to a song. Graham is a contemporary technique along with Cunningham etc. A contemporary dancer trained in many techniques and normally they have a base in something like Cunningham, Graham, Horton, Limon etc. and I would say the boundaries of dance are pushed through the choreography. Contemporary choreography can look like and be anything. You may see a contemporary piece and feel like you're watching jazz or ballet, theatre or something so weird you don't know what you're watching. I feel the description of lyrical was pretty much what I would say, but the description of contemporary is a little lacking unitards, pushing and pulling angst Lol. Though me being a contemporary dancer I have always found it so difficult to describe contemporary and I feel it's even harder now the choreography is being influenced by techniques like hip hop etc. I feel this is even leaking into the training of the traditional techniques like Graham as teachers who teach are getting further and further away from the original source and start incorporating the dance styles of today that they train in, though I guess in some way this has probably always happened. I noticed that no release techniques were mentioned in this video and release techniques have been a base for many contemporary dancers in recent years. One thing I hate when looking for contemporary dance on YouTube is that the results that come up are pretty much 95% lyrical. Lol. Babble over. Lol.

[erinkrizay]

This video was so helpful thank you!!! Here I was doing dancey stuff not even knowing how to refer to what style I was doing 💃🏼🤷🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

[phantompower]

Thanks for your infomation solved my long term question of my mind.❤

[oinkoink]

thank you very much for this explaination!

[alfredofloyd]

My opinion is that Contact Improvisation, martial arts, somatic floor work (Bartenieff, Feldenkrais) has a huge influence on Contemporary, maybe more than modern and ballet.

[yasminmacneil]

This helped so much! I'd like to take up dance but had no idea what class to sign up to, thanks for your informative video!

[disciplesvoice]

Please do a video on beginner improv dance