Expressing Feeling Through Form

Posted on February 26, 2014 by Anni Turkel

Sophie Maslow, a dancer with Martha Graham’s company during its early years, on her initial experiences working with Martha:

She made you do more than your best in class. You would find yourself doing things you didn’t even know you could do, and you wouldn’t dare do any less than your best. If she told you to take three leaps and jump out of the window, you would’ve done that too. She did ask us to do impossible things at certain times in class. She was very busy beginning to find her way, finding a new way of moving. That way was to make the human body an instrument that would be capable of expressing all things in human experience, not just pretty things. Sometimes they were ugly things.

(the journal Choreography & Dance)

It is this expression of emotion through the rigors of technique that became the focus of Bryn Mawr’s dancers’ second weekend of rehearsals with Jennifer Conley. Having set the majority of the choreography and staging last weekend, now was the time for fine-tuning the details that would really lend the dance its emotive strength.

This involved a focus on form to strengthen the shapes of the dance. That is, the articulation of the body in particular positions as well as the timing and spacing of the dance as a whole. Jennifer broke down the choreography to examine specifics like where the gaze should be directed and what muscle groups are being engaged at different points in the movement. Through this process she created wonderfully evocative images (some of which are in the captions below) to help the dancers connect to the deconstructed Steps both physically and emotionally.

Camila Aguais, spiral lunging
Imagine: the spiral wrapping around the spine, creating space between each vertebrae. The hips remain on the same plane, like geologic strata or the grain of wood. There is no release, no waves or undulations, rather the body arrives as one monolithic whole.

Julia Reeves, in preparation for an entrance
Imagine: what you love the most, be it person, object or idea. Eyes remain veiled and cupped hands echo contracted torso. Send performance energy into your back.

Sofia Ranalli & Alexandra Kirsch, a slow and silent entrance
Imagine: with every step you take you are remembering and asking how to move forward after trauma. The movement is generated from a pull at the backs of the thighs. You are sculpting the space around you as you move.

Tapping into the Spirit

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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)

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.

Finding Lost Steps

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Anni Turkel

On Friday we analyzed an image of Graham Company dancers in a strike pose, noting how it illustrated the opposing forces at work in both the form and content of Steps in the Street. Here, the conflict of the mass is of the individual’s experience being experienced communally – and it seems like this friction is inherent in the act of reconstructing itself.

Throughout the first rehearsal Jennifer Conley has emphasized an “intermingling” that should occur – between the steps and the students. Because this piece is alive with history there must be a negotiation between the “then” and the “now” in the dynamic process of its recreation.

Mawr Ephemeral: dancing through the deceptions of time and space

The tragedy of Miss Graham’s art is that like all dancing it is bound up with time and space, that is, ephemeral unless it can in some way be fixed. (Re-Radicalizing Graham)

This statement, made by composer Wallingford Riegger, indicates how important reconstructions are to dance history. This was not recognized by Martha Graham herself, however, for nearly three quarters of her career – she rarely kept her early pieces, notoriously destroying films and photos of them. It was not until she stopped performing in 1969 (at the age of 75!) that this changed, and her first sanctioned revivals of early works did not make it to the public until the late 1980’s.

It is seemingly by a stroke of luck that Steps survived! While other sections from Chronicle have been revived some are only fragments of what they had been – re-staged largely from dancers’ memories – and the larger work in its entirety is considered irretrievable.

In the mid-1980’s partially destroyed and silent footage of the original 1936 production of Chronicle, filmed by the ethnographer Julien Bryan, was found in the depths of a vault. It was by weaving together sections from Bryan’s footage with some recreated choreography that Yuriko (associate artistic director of the Company at this time), supervised by Martha Graham, revived Steps in the Street nearly 50 years after it had been lost.

Though the musical score of 1936 could not be found a different work by its original composer – Riegger’s New Dance – accompanies Yuriko’s reconstruction. This revival of Steps in the Street premiered in October of 1989 during the Martha Graham Dance Company’s Fall Season at New York’s City Center.

Getting Started: Martha Graham Tool Kit

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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)

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

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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.

“Steps in the Street” and the Politics of the 1930’s

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Anni Turkel

Martha Graham’s career spanned a period of 80 years. Of the 181 pieces she created during her prolific career Chronicle (1936), the larger work of which Steps in the Street is a part, is one of a very few to be considered explicitly political in nature. This work is considered Graham’s response to the rise of fascism in Europe and, more specifically, her reaction to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

During the 1930’s there was a strong Leftist presence in New York City’s cultural scene and some of this political activity in the arts emanated from the Lower East Side, defined then by its immigrant communities. From these communities came dancers Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow, both of whom danced with Graham in the original production of Steps in the Street and became prominent choreographers in their own right. Sokolow and Maslow, like many dancers from the downtown arts enclaves, were involved simultaneously with new dance movements which sought to use dance as a political tool capable of inciting social change.

While Martha Graham did not employ the same techniques of political activism as her creative contemporaries, she conveys powerful social commentary in Chronicle through the piece’s group structure and articulation of raw emotion through movement.

Chronicle is a group piece in three sections:

Spectre – 1914 (Drums – Red Shroud – Lament)
Steps in the Street (Devastation – Homelessness – Exile)
Prelude to Action (Unity – Pledge to the Future)

Declining Berlin

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Anni Turkel

The Spanish Civil War began in July of 1936. Martha Graham created Chronicle during that summer.

Some 9 months earlier, in September of 1935, Graham received an invitation from the Third Reich to participate in the 1936 Summer Olympics being held in Berlin.

Graham’s invitation – signed by Reich Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels

And Martha Graham’s response:

“I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible.”
(Martha Graham, Blood Memory)

via Library of Congress

Premiere of Martha Graham’s “Chronicle”

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Anni Turkel

The program from the original 1936 production of Chronicle by “Martha Graham and Dance Group”: