Graham’s Footsteps Graced Goodhart’s Stage!

tech bourrees

There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new dance, and gestures are flowing through me.

(Blood Memory)

When I began my research for Mawr Steps I gathered information on Martha Graham, her dancers, her technique, her body of work, the politics that this dance referenced, etc. But I also sought to learn something about the history of dance at Bryn Mawr College. Because it is not just Graham’s legacy that this project is involved with, of course, it is our legacy too.

I was surprised – and incredibly excited – to find that these two great legacies have been intertwined for decades!

Below are pages from the March 1, 1939 edition of Bryn Mawr’s College News.

(Here is a PDF version of the paper in its entirety.)

The review continued on Page 3

The review continued on Page 3

Front page: "Martha Graham Evokes History In New Dance"

Front page: “Martha Graham Evokes History In New Dance”

 

 

 

 

 

 

(via BMC Special Collections Repository)

 

 

The front page headline reads: “Martha Graham Evokes History In New Dance,” reported from Goodhart Auditorium on February 23, 1939. So, 75 years ago Martha Graham herself performed on the same stage that Steps in the Street will be performed on tomorrow and Saturday nights. What’s more – Graham was performing works at Bryn Mawr (in 1939) created during the same period of her career as Steps (1936).

The serendipitous parallels are truly uncanny.

 

Preparing For Powerful History…

Dancing "Steps" on Goodhart's stage during the tech rehearsal today

Dancing “Steps” on Goodhart’s stage during the tech rehearsal today

“We have seen strange things today,” said the big bull to the others of his herd. “The man we trampled to death is again alive… Now…we shall teach you our own dance and song, which you are never to forget.” For these were to be the magical means by which the buffalo killed by the people in the future would be restored to life…

(Myths To Live By)

The dance that is being passed from buffalo to man is one that creates life by recreating death – that is, by performing a once-lived experience. This process of dynamic recreation is multidimensional: it necessitates an engagement with history; a negotiation between then and now.The performance then provides a portal, a brief opportunity for unrestricted travel, to disparate moments in space and time.

An apparently ghostly moment during last night's tech rehearsal

An apparently ghostly moment during tech rehearsal

Graham Technique & Me

In her autobiography, Blood Memory, Martha Graham wrote:

In those early days a favorite of mine, the critic Stark Young, said to a friend, ‘Must I join you at Martha’s dance concert tonight? All that percussive angular movementI am so afraid she’ll give birth to a cube.”

It’s true that the shapes made through Graham’s choreography are not the demurely graceful ones of classical ballet and the quality of movement created by her early technique is not classically feminine – that is, silken and smooth – either.

photo (7)

photo (4)During those first few weekends of rehearsals with Jennifer Conley, she spoke to the dancers about “shaping the space” with their bodies. This would be done through a focus on equal and opposite forces. I now know this to be an integral part of Graham technique, which involves isometric exercises designed to highlight and enhance the strength and power of the physical body.

I had no experience with Graham technique – and very limited experience with modern dance in general – before becoming involved with this project. Though I knew, conceptually, who Martha Graham was and what modern dance looked like, I had zero kinesthetic knowledge of this dance form. Therefore, to inform my documentation of Mawr Steps (and for my own edification and enjoyment!) I took part in the warm ups that Jennifer began each rehearsal with. These consisted of standard Graham technique floor work interspersed with exercises tailored more specifically to the choreography of Steps in the Street. I also took an Advanced Modern class during the first half of the semester, in which Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch was teaching Graham technique.

What did I learn about Graham technique through these experiences? The complexity of simple movement! Made so by those equal and opposite forces I mentioned earlier. Martha Graham developed her technique around the relationship between breath and emotion, which is embodied in her method of contraction and release. Breathing in is a release and breathing out, a contraction.

Carrie emphasizes to Dana Nichols the stillness of the torso in this exercise

Carrie emphasizes to Dana Nichols the stillness of the torso in this exercise

 

 

Articulation is through the torso in this language. The pelvis and the head must be the heaviest body parts – they work in opposition to open space and drive the movement.

The dancers in Carrie's class practice balancing/shifting weight while maintaining still, upright torsos

The dancers in Carrie’s class practice balancing/shifting weight while maintaining still, upright torsos

 

 

 

 

Graham wrote, in Blood Memory, of her first days in New York:

I walked to the Central Park Zoo and sat on a bench across from a lion in its cage…Finally, I learned to walk that way. I learned from the lion the inevitability of return, the shifting of one’s body.

 

 

In Jennifer’s words: “The goal of the contraction is expansion.” I found this prompt to be most important to the articulation of emotion and most challenging to physically accomplish.

There is more information about Martha Graham’s technique and the history of modern dance on the resources page of this blog as well as on the Graham Company website. Briefly, however, my experience of the Graham contraction after my first several days warming up with Jennifer and the dancers:

When the dancers begin moving across the floor I gracefully remove myself from the herd to watch in awe and surreptitiously practice my contracting and releasing while taking notes. Dancers, if you’ve noticed my observer’s look turn into one of consternation it is only because I am attempting to: engage new-found pelvic muscles, “scoop out” my abdomen AND effectively contract my sternum (what? yes.) without bringing my shoulders up to my ears. All of which I’m doing on an exhale, trying 1 – not to hold my breath and 2 – to actively expand my torso, opening up space between my vertebrae.

 

Riegger’s “New Dance” and the Patterned Whole

As I reflect further on last week’s rehearsal – the first we’ve had in the auditorium of Goodhart Hall – I realize that the beauty of the “wholeness” I appreciated in watching Steps in the Street performed on the stage was derived in part from my experience of the rhythms and patterns of the work in this new, elevated (both literally and figuratively) context.

Over the course of the day the dancers rehearsed the piece in its entirety with the music many times, becoming more closely acquainted with the mixed meters of Wallingford Riegger’s modernist composition. Because the form of the musical score makes counting each measure more complicated the dancers have learned to rely at times on the sound of each other’s steps to cue transitions in movement (as opposed to the beat of the music), so an entrance may fluidly follow the preceding exit. The way the dancers have made adjustments together, as an ensemble, to negotiate this dissonance – between the rhythmic patterns of the sound and those of the movement – highlights, once again, the themes of interdependence and relatedness that exist within this piece. The dancers’ reliance on one another exposes the way in which each entrance relies on an exit in order to continue the dance.

Without having my attention drawn to these structural details, I wouldn’t have seen the delicate balance that exists through Steps in the Street – the elegant way its unique parts together create a cohesive whole.

Listen to Riegger’s musical score and then imagine keeping time to this music while contracting all of your muscles and spinning backwards on tiptoe!

 

The End of The Beginning

This past Saturday marked both the first opportunity the dancers had to rehearse on the stage of the McPherson Auditorium in Goodhart Hall, where the performances will be held, as well as the last day they will spend rehearsing with Jennifer Conley before she returns for the performances at the end of April. My greatest take-away from this “end of the beginning” was an experience of wholeness – I guess it could be considered the spirit of the mass more completely accessed right before my eyes. By this I mean I felt a strengthened bond between the dancers of the ensemble that was evident in their movements. I also found a new appreciation for the dance itself as a complete entity, instead of a series of deconstructed parts – and this was, I’m sure, influenced by both the unity of the dancers and the way my view was framed by the stage.

After the warm-up Jennifer had the dancers focus on some of the more challenging entrances – moments that are difficult due to a combination of exacting form, limited time and complex staging. So, they lined up and moved across the stage, row by row, back and forth.

Here they come - Sofia, Alexandra Adams, Joie, Michelle - rehearsing spiral lunges. The next row is prepared to follow, with arms in place and hands cupped.

Here they come – Sofia, Alexandra Adams, Joie, Michelle – rehearsing spiral lunges. The next row is prepared to follow, with arms in place and hands cupped.

 

The dancers rehearse the "zombie walk" while Jennifer [far right] uses Joie to demonstrate the sensation of opposing forces this movement should conjure. Here, the dancers are pushing forward through air thick with remembered sorrows.

The dancers rehearse the “zombie walk” while Jennifer [far right] uses Joie to demonstrate the sensation of opposing forces this movement should conjure. Here, the dancers are pushing forward through air thick with remembered sorrows.

Below, the beautiful bourrées (for which I provided a portion of the staging map here), which require the dancers to twirl backwards in an interweaving pattern across the stage, covering a significant amount of space very quickly.

Preparation (anticipation!)

Preparation (anticipation!)

And then but a blur.

Then but a blur.

And quickly following:

Prepare...

Prepare…

 

And go!

And go!

 

Tapping into the Spirit

This past weekend was the first and longest of the three weekends that Jennifer Conley will spend with us at Bryn Mawr, teaching choreography and setting staging. She will return for dress and technical rehearsals just before the April performances.

After the three hours spent in the studio on Friday evening – the goal of which, post-introductions, was to stage the first and second sections of the piece – the dancers returned at 10 am on Saturday morning and rehearsed for six hours on both Saturday and Sunday.

Steps in the Street is only about six minutes long, but every moment of this dance is an athletic feat requiring great amounts of strength and control. There are these jumps, for instance, that reoccur throughout the piece that I have tried to practice myself. I cannot make one decent looking jump. In Steps these jumps are done in rapid, rhythmic succession, sometimes for many counts at a time. I had to leave during rehearsal, in Pembroke Studio, on Saturday and as I walked outside, underneath Pembroke Arch, I could still hear the pounding of twenty-two feet landing over and over and over again.

Heather McGinley, Sevin Ceviker, Mariya Dashkina Maddux, Jacqueline Bulnes, and Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch of the Graham Company in Martha Graham's "Sketches from 'Chronicle'" (Photo by Costas / Copyright Costas)

Heather McGinley, Sevin Ceviker, Mariya Dashkina Maddux, Jacqueline Bulnes, and Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch of the Graham Company in Martha Graham’s “Sketches from ‘Chronicle'”
(Photo by Costas / Copyright Costas)

 

In her autobiography, Blood Memory, Martha Graham wrote:

Before I began to dance I trained myself to do four hundred jumps in five minutes by the clock.

 

 

 

The six minutes of Steps are made up of a series of entrances and exits, so Jennifer is for the most part teaching the choreography and setting the staging simultaneously. Though the dance requires great physical strength this is not immediately apparent to the viewer – there are no show-off-y tricks – rather the power of this work is derived from sustained rhythms  and repetition within the choreography and the complex patterns created by the entrances and exits of the dancers en masse.

Jennifer's color-coded map shows part of the staging of one particularly complex entrance

Jennifer’s color-coded map shows part of the staging for one particularly complex entrance

By the end of the day on Sunday everyone was, understandably, wiped out. Knee pads were being worn on a number of different joints and I noticed some winces and limps I hadn’t before. I had left in the middle of the day and returned for the final hour of rehearsal. The dancers were preparing to do a full run-through of all but the final section of the dance with the music.

Jennifer had been encouraging the dancers to “tap into the spirit” of the dance – like the act of “intermingling” I referenced here – this means sharing something with those who have danced these steps before you while at the same time bringing your own spirit to the work in order to keep it alive. I’m not exaggerating when I say this is what I felt happen during that run-through on Sunday afternoon. It was as though the psychic space Jennifer had been preparing the dancers for since Friday had just been conjured. The air in the studio seemed to vibrate with some greater shared energy – like something had just clicked into place – a unity and a new found familiarity between the dancers, the history and the work. It was a little spooky and very beautiful.

 

Getting Started: Martha Graham Tool Kit

 

Bryn Mawr's Modern Ensemble gets steppin' (Photo by Tiannan Zhan, BMC '14)

Bryn Mawr’s Modern Ensemble gets steppin’
(Photo by Tiannan Zhan, BMC ’14)

Everyone involved in this early stage of the Mawr Steps reconstruction process came together for an inaugural 3 hours this past Friday evening. Though I have studied dance and performed original (or derivative) works, this is my first time working with a reconstruction. I am now struck by the imbalance in my dance education between the study of history (non-existent) and technique. I don’t think this is unique to my early pedagogical experience (my formal dance training essentially ended when I turned 16) but understanding this discrepancy does lend new significance to the concept of stepping into dance history for me.

A “Martha Graham Tool Kit” has been provided by the Graham Company as part of the artistic support they will be lending to Bryn Mawr’s licensed reconstruction of Steps in the Street. This kit includes, in addition to rehearsal videos and audio, what I have termed the reconstruction bible (I mean, binder…) This binder, which the Dance Program may hold onto until the April performances, has in it:

  • historic background of Steps in the Street
  • press clippings referencing Steps
  • Martha Graham quotes and biographical info.
  • template for the programs distributed at a student production
  • technical instructions – for staging, lighting & costume design
  • archival images of Steps being performed by Graham Company dancers

Jennifer Conley introduced Bryn Mawr’s student dancers (and us documentarians) to the work they would be reconstructing by encouraging active engagement with these materials. We flipped through pictures together, analyzing Graham Company images at Jennifer’s prompting – identifying formal elements and thinking about their emotional or intellectual implications. And through this exercise we came to understand the history, content and choreography of the work as well.

Martha Graham Dance Company in Martha Graham's "Sketches from 'Chronicle'" (Photo by Costas / Copyright Costas)

Martha Graham Dance Company in Martha Graham’s “Sketches from ‘Chronicle'”
(Photo by Costas / Copyright Costas)

In this image, “the strike,” for instance: the women’s angular, sharp elbows and firmly planted feet indicate strength; the arms crossed over their heads express both resistance and empowerment; the mass structure demonstrates unity but not conformity – an opposition both psychic and corporeal.

Even though I will not be stepping through time on stage in April, the way I began to relate to history during Friday’s rehearsal awakened in me an anticipatory reverence for, and an embodied awareness of, what great value lies in sharing this movement legacy.

 

Kicking Off with Antifascist Pro-Democratic Mass Dance

By shedding an artificial division of labor according to which the legs locomote, the arms imitate, the head rules, etc., the ‘massive’ body asserts a different aesthetic of weight, angle, and balance. …Graham grafted her modernist aesthetic of the massive body onto the social mass which is the group, thereby deftly folding a modernist aesthetic into socially activist choreography. ‘Mass’ can point to the importance of weight and space in Graham’s dance, but ‘mass’ also betokens the precedence of choreography for the group over that for the soloist. …The notion of mass drama begs a question by suggesting a plural, submerged or unindividuated subject.

(Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics)

 

As I mentioned last week Martha Graham used the choreographic form of mass dance, and the heightened emotional output this form generated, to create Chronicle‘s powerful social commentary.

Though Mady Cantor has been working with the licensing division of the Martha Graham Dance Company for nearly a year to make this project possible, this coming weekend marks the physical start of our reconstruction process. Friday evening will begin the first of three consecutive weekends of rehearsals with Jennifer Conley, former Graham Company dancer and official reconstructor of Bryn Mawr’s production of Steps in the Street.

It’s hard to imagine right now all of these disparate parts – 11 individuals who know nothing of the physical experience of the dance yet and some of whom have limited experience with Graham technique – coming together with the force and purpose necessary to follow in the steps of Graham’s fierce revolutionaries.

In considering this I feel nothing but excitement (and some vicarious empowerment). I interpret the plural, submerged individual of this mass dance not as one who has shrunken and lost herself in the mass but rather one who has expanded beyond any preconceived limits of herself. The feminism of the mass ethos is undeniable, with strong women symbiotically gaining and sharing strength and balance as they embody unified power against tyranny and injustice.

I can think of no one more prepared than a mass of Bi-Co women warriors to take this dance of resistance to the street.

 

WELCOME to Mawr Steps

I’m Anni Turkel, a senior History of Art major at Bryn Mawr. Though I grew up dancing – ballet, tap and jazz – movement slowly began to play an ever smaller role in my life as I progressed through adolescence into early adulthood. A couple of years ago I was babysitting for a family whose neighbors had a giant trampoline in their backyard that we (or really just the kids) were invited to use whenever we liked.   As summer became fall I found myself practically coercing my two charges, ages 4 and 7, to rush through snacks and homework, or postpone dinners and baths, in order to play on the trampoline with me. Blood pumping, joints coiling and springing, limbs flying – the physicality that children take for granted in their daily play – I was experiencing this forgotten exhilaration of movement! Most sensational was not just my body flying through the air but the buoyancy of spirit I felt too.

So, two years post-airborne revelation, I am now writing my History of Art thesis on a choreographer and multi-media artist through the critical lens of feminist psychoanalysis, and I’m in my second semester of beginner dance classes in Bryn Mawr’s Dance Program.

In response to a journal entry I wrote for my Beginning Modern Technique course last semester, Mady Cantor, Associate Director of the Dance Program, approached me at the beginning of this semester to ask if I might be interested in helping to document the reconstruction of a Martha Graham piece that the Modern Ensemble would be doing. I, of course, said yes!

And that’s what this blog will do: 1) record this process of reconstruction from my own perspective, as observer, as well as from the inside perspective of some of the student dancers; and 2) explore what we gain, as individuals and as an institution, as our “steps” in 2014 are placed within the legacy of those first made in 1936.