مارثا غراهام
玛莎•葛兰姆
מרתה גרהם
マーサ·グラハム
마사 그레이엄
МАРТА ГРЭМ

Night Journey

source: nytimes

As Martha Graham’s “Night Journey” opens, a solitary woman stands motionless upstage holding up a loop of thin rope. Since her back is diagonally turned to us, we can’t tell whether she is looking at or through this loop, but we see that she is fixated. Are these the threads of time, or memory, she’s holding?

Maybe I react that way because it’s not long since I last saw “Götterdämmerung,” which starts with the Norns passing the rope of time. But certainly she holds them long enough for us to feel the loop is ambiguous. “Night Journey” becomes larger in our minds if we only realize later that it is also the noose with which she will hang herself, and if we feel that it is fraught with her own life’s experience. What follows that opening are the memories that most obsess her and lead most inevitably to her death.

The heroine of “Night Journey” is Jocasta, the queen who finds that she has married her son, Oedipus. Their central duet gives us opposite images: one in which she lies on the floor as he descends upon her sexually, the other in which he falls back into her arms like a baby. On surface level, no two images could be more obvious about the Oedipus-Jocasta relationship: they have sex and she’s his mother. But those aren’t the main meanings that hit us as we watch. What’s striking is that Jocasta is passive in the first, Oedipus passive in the second; that they are both pictorial images that materialize out of a continuous dance, and return, disturbingly; and that they suggest that Jocasta has wanted both sides of this relationship, to have this man as her lover and her son.

Other meanings also accumulate. You can’t miss, I think, the look of a Pietà as she cradles her son. And while Graham is telling the specific story of Oedipus and Jocasta, she is also catching what is generally but not literally Oedipal about many male-female relationships.

“Night Journey,” created in 1947, is a classic of the period in which Graham reinvestigated Greek myth along Jungian lines. The central point of telling the Oedipus story from Jocasta’s point of view is enough to remind us how innovative Graham was, especially since the Oedipus myth remains so familiar. It has its clunky moments now, not least when Tiresias the blind seer bounces back onto the stage on his staff as if it were a pogo stick. But at Tuesday night’s opening performance the work was in fresh enough shape to show us why Graham, 16 years after her death, remains one of the great choreographers.

The difference between strong and dim, or good and bad, performances of the Graham repertory can be startling. When in 1979 I first saw “Errand Into the Maze,” the dance in which the Minotaur-Labyrinth legend is told in terms both female and sexual, it rightly brought an entire opera house cheering to its feet with its overpowering physical excitement. When I saw it in 1988, the same work looked stale. (It will be danced again this season, but, confusingly, the Graham company seems to have scheduled it on some performances of next week’s Program C and not on others.)

Tuesday’s “Night Journey” was the first I had seen since the very first time I saw the Graham company in 1976. Elizabeth Auclair danced Jocasta with a kind of quiet I’ve seldom seen in Graham before, an entirely admirable form of restraint. Tadej Brdnik, built in the epic line of Graham male dancers with powerful musculature, presented Oedipus with telling simplicity, especially in the remarkable final episode when he switches from one last sexual contemplation over Jocasta’s body before blinding himself and briskly feeling his way offstage.

Debate about whether Graham’s choreography was still good began in the 1940s and was well advanced by the late 1950s. Controversy about whether the best works were being well enough performed was already lively in the 1970s. And all these arguments reached larger dimensions after her death. The Graham company today is still rebuilding itself from the civil wars and lawsuits through which it has passed in recent years. For those of us who have an incomplete knowledge of the Graham repertory, these are hard times in which to judge several of these dances. There are great Graham dances that I have not yet seen in the theater (“Primitive Mysteries,” “Letter to the World,” “Deaths and Entrances”), and others I believe to be great without having seen any adequate performance (“Dark Meadow”).

What am I to make of “Embattled Garden,” Graham’s quartet study of Adam, Eve, Lilith and the Stranger, as it looked on Tuesday night? Is this the kind of mythological Graham that must always have looked as overwrought as it does to me now? Might it have seemed wholly absorbing as danced by its original cast in 1958? Could another cast today lead me back into its drama? Individual steps and phrases here certainly have astonishing force; I can imagine that in other circumstances some or all of its situations might be compellingly ambiguous. At present, there is a distractingly fashionable prettiness about parts of it that I don’t associate with Graham, but also an unspontaneous style of performance that has bedeviled many Graham performances for decades. It doesn’t help that the Graham company, like so many others, now must perform to taped music.

Opening night began with “Lamentation Variations,” taking Graham’s celebrated 1930 solo “Lamentation” (seen here in a silent 1932 film) and developing it into three new dances by Aszure Barton, Richard Move and Larry Keigwin. The intention is to commemorate the 9/11 anniversary and to honor New York City, home to the Graham company for 80 years. Each of the three dances was in a completely separate style, each started out interestingly, and each lasted just a bit too long. All three, however, demonstrated that “Lamentation” remains inspiring. Still, it would inspire more if we were not shown facial close-ups. “Lamentation” is greatest and strangest when the dancer is seen amid a vast space, alone and continually changing shape in grief.
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source: facebook

Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer whose influence on dance has been compared with the influence Picasso had on the modern visual arts. Stravinsky had on music, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture.

She danced and choreographed for over seventy years. Graham was the first dancer ever to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the USA: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan’s Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said, in the 1994 documentary “The Dancer Revealed”, “I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.”

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Graham was born in Allegheny City, which today is part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1894. Her father George Graham was what in the Victorian era was known as an “alienist”, a practitioner of an early form of psychiatry. The Grahams were strict Presbyterians. Dr. Graham was a third generation American of Irish descent. Her mother Jane Beers was a second generation American of Irish and Scots-Irish descent and was also a sixth generation descendant of Puritan Miles Standish.

In the mid-1910s, she began her studies at the newly created Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, at which she would stay until 1923. In 1922 Graham performed one of Shawn’s Egyptian dances with Lillian Powell in short silent film by Hugo Riesenfeld that attempted to synchronize a dance routine on film with a live orchestra and onscreen conductor.

In 1925, Graham was employed at the Eastman School of Music where Rouben Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama. Among other performances, together they produced a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly thereafter and Graham chose to leave also, even though she was asked to stay on.

In 1926, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance was established. On April 18 of the same year, at the 48th Street Theatre, Graham debuted with her first independent concert, consisting of eighteen short solos and trios that she had choreographed. She would later say of the concert: “Everything I did was influenced by Denishawn.” On November 28, 1926 Martha Graham and others in her company gave a dance recital at the Klaw Theatre in New York City.

One of Graham’s students was heiress Bethsabée de Rothschild with whom she became close friends. When Rothschild moved to Israel and established the Batsheva Dance Company in 1965, Graham became the company’s first director.

In 1936, Graham made her defining work, “Chronicle”, which signaled the beginning of a new era in modern dance.[citation needed] The dance brought serious issues to the stage for the general public in a dramatic manner. Influenced by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Depression that followed, and the Spanish Civil War, it focused on depression and isolation, reflected in the dark nature of both the set and costumes.

In 1938 Erick Hawkins was the first man to dance with her company. The following year, he officially joined her troupe, dancing male lead in a number of Graham’s works. They were married in 1948. He left her troupe in 1951 and they divorced in 1954.

Her largest-scale work, the evening-length Clytemnestra, was created in 1958, with a score by Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh. She also collaborated with composers including Aaron Copland on Appalachian Spring, Louis Horst, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Carlos Surinach, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti.[8] Graham’s mother died in Santa Barbara in 1958. Her oldest friend and musical collaborator Louis Horst died in 1964. She said of Horst, “His sympathy and understanding, but primarily his faith, gave me a landscape to move in. Without it, I should certainly have been lost.”

There were a few notable exceptions to her dances being taped. For example, she worked on a limited basis with still photographers Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s, and Barbara Morgan in the 1940s. Graham considered Philippe Halsman’s photographs of “Dark Meadows” the most complete photographic record of any of her dances. Halsman also photographed in the 1940s: “Letter to the World”, “Cave of the Heart”, “Night Journey” and “Every Soul is a Circus”. In later years her thinking on the matter evolved and others convinced her to let them recreate some of what was lost.

In her biography Martha Agnes de Mille cites Graham’s last performance as the evening of May 25, 1968, in a “Time of Snow”. But in A Dancer’s Life biographer Russell Freedman lists the year of Graham’s final performance as 1969. In her 1991 autobiography, Blood Memory, Graham herself lists her final performance as her 1970 appearance in “Cortege of Eagles” when she was 76 years old.

In the years that followed her departure from the stage Graham sank into a deep depression fueled by views from the wings of young dancers performing many of the dances she had choreographed for herself and her former husband. Graham’s health declined precipitously as she abused alcohol to numb her pain. In Blood Memory she wrote,

“It wasn’t until years after I had relinquished a ballet that I could bear to watch someone else dance it. I believe in never looking back, never indulging in nostalgia, or reminiscing. Yet how can you avoid it when you look on stage and see a dancer made up to look as you did thirty years ago, dancing a ballet you created with someone you were then deeply in love with, your husband? I think that is a circle of hell Dante omitted.

[When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded. My face was ruined, and people say I looked odd, which I agreed with. Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma.”

After a failed suicide attempt she was hospitalized. Graham not only survived her hospital stay but she rallied. In 1972 she quit drinking, returned to her studio, reorganized her company and went on to choreograph ten new ballets and many revivals. Her last completed ballet was 1990’s Maple Leaf Rag.

Graham choreographed until her death in New York City from pneumonia in 1991, aged 96. She was cremated, and her ashes were spread over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico.

Graham has been sometimes termed the “Picasso of Dance,” in that her importance and influence to modern dance can be considered equivalent to what Pablo Picasso was to modern visual arts. Her impact has been also compared with the influence Stravinsky had on music, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture.

To celebrate what would have been her 117th birthday on May 11, 2011, Google’s logo for one day was turned into one dedicated to Graham’s life and legacy.

Martha Graham has been said to be the one that brought dance into the twentieth century. Due to the work of her assistants, Ron Protas and Linda Hodes, much of Graham’s work and technique have been preserved. They taped interviews of Graham describing her entire technique, and videos of her performances. As Glen Tetley told Agnes de Mille, “The wonderful thing about Martha in her good days was her generosity. So many people stole Martha’s unique personal vocabulary, consciously or unconsciously, and performed it in concerts. I have never once heard Martha say, ‘So-and-so has used my choreography.'” An entire movement was created by her that revolutionized the dance world and created what is known today as modern dance. Now, dancers all over the world study and perform modern dance. Choreographers and professional dancers look to her for inspiration.
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source: sempretops

Ela marcou a dança mundial e é considerada uma das melhores figuras da dança, Martha Graham nasceu em um subúrbio de Pittsburgh, Pensilvânia, em 11 de maio de 1894.
Martha Graham foi dançarina, coreógrafa e professora, é considerada uma das grandes figuras da dança moderna sendo chamada inclusive de mãe da dança moderna.

Sua inspiração para se tornar a dançarina tão marcante que foi, veio de seu pai que era médico e que tratava de distúrbios mentais dizer um dia na sua adolescência que dava o diagnóstico baseado no modo que seus pacientes se moviam.

Graham tornou-se interessada em estudar a dança depois que ela viu Ruth St. Denis em 1914. Seus pais não aprovaram ela se tornar uma dançarina, então ela se matriculou na Escola de Cumnock.

Somente após a morte de seu pai em 1914, que ela se sentiu livre para perseguir seu sonho. Após graduar-se em Cumnock, ela se matriculou na Denishawn Studio, uma escola de dança operada por Ruth St. Denis e Ted Shawn.

Martha Graham nunca tinha tido uma aula de dança até esse ponto, mas a menina pequena, calma, tímida, porém trabalhadora impressionou Shawn que a levou para excursionar com seu grupo em uma produção de Xochitl, baseado em uma lenda indígena. Em 1923, Graham deixou essa empresa para fazer dois anos de dança solo para o Greenwich Village Follies.

Biografia de Martha Graham Em 1925, Martha Graham tornou-se instrutora de dança na Eastman School of Music em Nova York. Ela começou a experimentar formas de dança moderna. “Eu queria começar”, disse ela, “não com personagens ou idéias, mas com o movimento.”

Ela rejeitou os passos tradicionais do balé clássico, queria que o corpo fosse relacionado ao movimento natural e à música. Ela experimentou o que o corpo poderia fazer com base na sua própria estrutura, desenvolvendo o que era conhecido como “movimentos de percussão.”

Depois disso fundou sua própria escola que formou grandes bailarinos e criou o seu próprio estilo de dança que possuía relação entre movimento, respiração e muito contato com o chão.

Foram 50 anos de uma linda carreira com 200 coreografias explorando temas diversos e diferentes.
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source: dicasdedanca

Martha Graham mudou a dança para sempre. Ela Trouxe ao mundo da dança uma era do movimento moderno e realismo. Martha é considerada uma das principais pioneiras da dança moderna. Graham preparou um caminho para o mundo da dança como nenhum outro. Ela dançou e coreografou para toda sua vida e recebeu vários prêmios como a chave da cidade de Paris e o Imperial Ordem da Coroa Preciosa no Japão. Ela foi a primeira bailarina a se tornar uma embaixadora cultural, a realizar na Casa Branca e ao ser atribuídas a Medalha da Liberdade, o maior prêmio civis.
Martha Graham nasceu dia 11 de maio de 1894 em Allegheny, Pensilvânia em uma família Presbiteriana. Martha era a mais velha dos seus irmãos, seu pai trabalhava no campo da psiquiatria e sua mãe sempre cuidando da família. Quando Martha completou 14 anos, sua família decidiu mudar para a Califórnia para a cidade de Santa Barbara em busca de uma cura para suas crises respiratórias.
Dois anos mais tarde, com 16 anos, Martha encontrou por interesse próprio a dança. Ela viu um cartaz de uma Cia de Dança em Los Angeles por Ruth St. Denis e ela foi assistir. A performance foi uma revelação para ela, ela decidiu naquele momento que queria dedicar sua vida a dança. Sua família não ficou feliz com a notícia, que esperavam que sua filha exercesse uma maior ocupação, como um médico, advogado ou cientista. Ela não teve escolha, porém, ela teve que dançar.
Neste momento, o alto perfil da dança no mundo consistia principalmente de balé e burlesco / vaudeville e folclore. Mas Marta não estava interessada nessas disciplinas, ela só lembrava de Ruth St. Denis, uma dança que foi pioneira começa a redefinir o conceito de dança americana. Denis na dança tinha um fluxo natural, e ela dançava com pés descalços. Como Isadora Duncan foram construindo as bases do que viria a adaptar Graham. No entanto as suas influências foram importantes para o desenvolvimento da Martha; os seus progressos na dança foram pequenos em comparação com o que viria a criar Martha.

marthagraham1
Com 20 anos, Martha se matriculou na própria Denishawn Dance School, e começou a estudar com Ruth St. Denis e Ted Shawn. Quando ela entrou na escola, escutou que estava velha para começar. Martha não se deixou desanimar com dedicação em sua arte e sua paixão, a levou para um trabalho extremamente difícil, e ela foi capaz de formar o seu corpo com grande precisão.
Graham foi uma das melhores dançarinas e foi aceita na sociedade. Eles visitaram, durante anos, e ela decidiu então, a certa altura, que era para ir para Nova York para mais oportunidades. Ela se tornou uma dançarina da Broadway com Greenwich Village Follies. Na idade de 30 anos ela tomou uma posição de instrutora na Eastman School of Music, onde se tornou um diretor de sua marca a nova dança. Ela teve prazer em ensinar, mas teve problemas com a burocracia da escola.
Ela decidiu então coreografar algumas danças e criou uma cia de dança. Em 1926 estreou seu primeiro show. Como ela continuou a coreografar, suas danças começaram a ficar cada vez mais revolucionárias. Sua descoberta foi em 1929 com “Heretic” e em 1930 em “Lamentation”.
O trabalho inicial de Graham não foi bem recebido pelo público. Eles desejavam ir para a Broadway ou o balé para animá-los, para se divertir, não para pensar e sentir. Marta não estava fornecendo o tipo de dança que divertia o público. Ela estava usando a dança mais como uma terapia ou uma cobaia em seu mundo de caos emocional e paixão. O estilo de Martha foi infundido com fortes, precisos e circulação da energia cobrada contrações abdominais, bem como controlados caindo e subindo. Ela realmente desprezou o termo “dança moderna”, que preferia que ela preferiu o termo “dança contemporânea”. Sua idéia era que o conceito de “moderno” era constantemente em evolução e, portanto, não era correto como uma definição.

martha-graham3

Martha, em seguida, dirigiu o departamento de dança na Universidade de Nova York e mais tarde se tornou uma das fundadoras da Julliard, agora uma proeminente Universidade das Artes.
Graham casou em 1948, com Erick Hawkins Então a mãe dela faleceu em Santa Barbara, em 1958.
Durante a maior parte da sua vida Graham não permitia a filmagem ou fotografia das suas danças. Raramente ela autorizava e é por isso que somos capazes de ver suas obras hoje.
Martha continuou dançando bem até os seus 60 anos, mas ela ficou deprimida com o seu corpo e se afundou em álcool, em desespero.
Graham era tão apaixonada pela dança que ela não deixou o palco embora os críticos disseram que ela já estava ultrapassada. Quando a voz dos críticos cresceu, Graham se aposentou dos palcos. Seu desempenho final foi quando ela tinha 76 anos.
Matha Graham faleceu no dia 1 de abril de 1991.
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source: marthagraham

Martha Graham’s revolutionary vision and artistic mastery has had a deep and lasting impact on American art and culture. Her bold use of socially infused subjects and emotionally charged performances single-handedly defined contemporary dance as a uniquely American art form, which the nation has in turn shared with the world.

Graham’s creativity crossed artistic boundaries and embraced every artistic genre. She collaborated with and commissioned work from the leading visual artists, musicians, and designers of her day, including sculptor Isamu Noguchi and fashion designers Halston, Donna Karan, and Calvin Klein, as well as composers Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti.

Influencing generations of choreographers and dancers including Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp, Graham forever altered the scope of dance. Classical ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Mikhail Baryshnikov sought her out to broaden their artistry, and artists of all genres were eager to study and work with Graham—she taught actors including Bette Davis, Kirk Douglas, Madonna, Liza Minelli, Gregory Peck, Tony Randall, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, and Joanne Woodward to utilize their bodies as expressive instruments.

Graham’s groundbreaking style grew from her experimentation with the elemental movements of contraction and release. By focusing on the basic activities of the human form, she enlivened the body with raw, electric emotion. The sharp, angular, and direct movements of her technique were a dramatic departure from the predominant style of the time.

With an artistic practice deeply ingrained in the rhythm of American life and the struggles of the individual, Graham brought a distinctly American sensibility to every theme she explored. “A dance reveals the spirit of the country in which it takes root. No sooner does it fail to do this than it loses its integrity and significance,” she wrote in the 1937 essay A Platform for the American Dance.

Consistently infused with social, political, psychological, and sexual themes, Graham’s choreography is timeless, connecting with audiences past and present. Works such as Revolt (1927), Immigrant: Steerage, Strike (1928), and Chronicle (1936)—created the same year she turned down Hitler’s invitation to perform at the International Arts Festival organized in conjunction with the Olympic Games in Berlin—personify Graham’s commitment to addressing challenging contemporary issues and distinguish her as a conscientious and politically powerful artist.

Martha Graham remained a strong advocate of the individual throughout her career, creating works such as Deaths and Entrances (1943), Appalachian Spring (1944), Dark Meadow (1946), and Errand into the Maze (1947) to explore human and societal complexities. The innovative choreography and visual imagery of American Document (1938) exemplified Graham’s genius. The dramatic narrative, which included the Company’s first male dancer, explored the concept of what it means to be American. Through the representation of important American cultural groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans, and Puritans and the integration of text from historical American documents, Graham was able to capture the soul of the American people.

During her long and illustrious career, Graham created 181 masterpiece dance compositions, which continue to challenge and inspire generations of performers and audiences. In 1986, she was given the Local One Centennial Award for dance by her theater colleagues, awarded only once every 100 years, and during the Bicentennial she was granted the United States’ highest civilian honor, The Medal of Freedom. In 1998, TIME Magazine named her the “Dancer of the Century.” The first dancer to perform at the White House and to act as a cultural ambassador abroad, she captured the spirit of a nation and expanded the boundaries of contemporary dance. “I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer,” she said. “It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable.”

The Martha Graham Dance Company has been a leader in the development of contemporary dance since its founding in 1926. Informed by the expansive vision of pioneering choreographer Martha Graham, the Company brings to life a timeless and uniquely American style of dance that has influenced generations of artists and continues to captivate audiences. Graham and her Company have expanded contemporary dance’s vocabulary of movement and forever altered the scope of the art form by rooting works in contemporary social, political, psychological, and sexual contexts, deepening their impact and resonance.

Always a fertile ground for experimentation, Martha Graham Dance Company has been an unparalleled resource in nurturing many of the leading choreographers and dancers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Pearl Lang, Pascal Rioult, and Paul Taylor. Graham’s repertoire of 181 works has also engaged noted performers such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Claire Bloom, Margot Fonteyn, Liza Minnelli, Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, and Kathleen Turner. Her groundbreaking techniques and unmistakable style have earned the Company acclaim from audiences in more than 50 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Today, the Company continues to foster Graham’s spirit of ingenuity. It is embracing a new programming vision that showcases masterpieces by Graham, her contemporaries, and their successors alongside newly commissioned works by contemporary artists inspired by Graham’s legacy. With programs that unite the work of choreographers across time within a rich historical and thematic narrative, the Company is actively working to create new platforms for contemporary dance and multiple points of access for audiences.

Martha Graham Dance Company’s repertory includes Graham masterpieces Appalachian Spring, Lamentation, Cave of the Heart, Deaths and Entrances, and Chronicle, among other works. The Company continues to expand its mission to present the work of its founder and her contemporaries, and remains a leader by catalyzing new works with commissions that bring fresh perspectives to dance classics, such as American Document (2010) and Lamentation Variations (2009). Multimedia programs like Dance is a Weapon (2010), a montage of several works connected through text and media, redefine the boundaries of contemporary dance composition.