Tag Archives: 1930’s

Jennifer Conley: Technique

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Jennifer and Hannah in a high release

Jennifer & Hannah Klein in a high release

…Continuing with the idea of legacy you also, when you were first introducing the dance, mentioned the concept of “tapping into the spirit” of the dance. I really felt that happen—I mean I saw it happen, that first full weekend—                                     They’re great! They’re really just open and willing, they’re not resisting at all. They’re just eating it right up.

Well that brings up a question I was going to ask later but this is a perfect segue. Can you say a little about your experience here at Bryn Mawr? Anything unique?     Well it’s a little different—in the process what’s a little different is that Mady [Cantor] has set it up so they’re going to get technique during the week, with Carrie [Ellmore-Tallitsch]—

I thought that was part of the “reconstruction package”—                                            No, no she wanted them to have the technique as well, in addition—and have it be available to people who aren’t in the cast as well, who want to just have some Graham classes—so there’s like a Graham residency going on—And I think that’s important, especially in this age, how far removed we are from Martha, that you get multiple voices on the technique.

…Are there only certain dances from her repertoire that are available for reconstruction?                                                                                                                The [Martha Graham] Center has a pretty clear idea of what translates well outside of the [Martha Graham Dance] Company—because the company is so well-versed in this very specific dance form—they are trained in it so that they can roll right into all of the aspects of the repertory.  Not everything translates onto bodies that aren’t trained with that same force.

These dances in the ‘30s are so accessible for people who aren’t trained in Graham because the dancers themselves, of the 1930s, they weren’t going to conservatories and training all day. They were working women. And Martha didn’t have years and years of a codified technique.  They were creating it together, so each of those dancers was contributing aspects to the technique and aspects to the pieces.  That’s the communal part of it.

 

Jennifer Conley: Spreading the Legacy

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Jennifer guiding dancers through swirls of movement and history

Jennifer guiding dancers through the blur of movement and history

On Jennifer Conley’s last day of rehearsing with the dancers at Bryn Mawr I had the opportunity to sit down with her to talk about the process of “Mawr Steps” from her perspective — including her experience as a reconstructor and her own relationship with Steps in the Street as both a teacher as well as a dancer.

I plan to post our transcribed conversation as a series of (loosely themed) excerpts. The following is the first of these!

 

…So, I’m thinking about the process of reconstructing a Graham work and you as a ‘certified reconstructor’—how are you trained to do that?                                            That’s a good question. There’s no training.

Really?                                                                                                                                No, to be a regisseur with the Martha Graham Center is sort of an honor that’s bestowed on you—where there’s some kind of recognition that you’re capable of being articulate about the work, and capable of re-staging the work, because you’ve done the work. And you’ve done the work well. …Just because you’re a fantastic dancer doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be really good with the learning exchange that has to happen in the studio. It just so happens that I’ve always really been interested in that learning exchange, I’ve felt at home in that place, and the more I did as a performer, the more I felt I had to offer in the studio.

And the work—when you’re learning the technique and teaching at the school, the technique is so codified …with these titles like “exercise on six twos” or “the deep stretches in fours” …But that’s kind of ironic because Martha herself never set out to create a technique. The technique was there to serve the movement she was creating, to serve her choreographic vision. And so when she first started they were doing a lot of walking, and a lot of falling and a lot of skipping.

And you have been instructed by the people who had that experience firsthand—so you are only ‘once removed’ from Martha herself?                                                       Absolutely.

The first day that we met you used the word “torchbearer”— I was wondering how you feel in terms of the privilege and the responsibility of carrying Graham’s legacy forward, and also how you’ve experienced this from your own teachers.                  There is a great responsibility, and it is a privilege and I am honored to be able to stage the work. To know that Mady [Cantor] contacts the Martha Graham Center and then the Martha Graham Center contacts me—that my name gets offered…

I don’t think of myself as a torchbearer. Pearl Lang, she danced in the company for 15 years, she danced a huge breadth of roles, she taught at the school for ages—I mean, when I engaged with her she was already in her 80’s, so there’s a certain—I reserve a certain level or stature in experience, in life experience, to be a torchbearer, so I may be a torchbearer in training—[laughing] I carry a very sturdy candle—

Because there is some unique role that you are playing, spreading the legacy— Yeah, absolutely, and there’s—I like the torch metaphor because you’re talking about igniting something in the minds and hearts of others. So that they can carry it on, illuminate something in their own lives in some way.

So from Day 1 I like to let people know that this work exists because of the chain of people who have continued to be interested in it. Otherwise it would have died with Martha when she passed away. It would have died with her when she stopped dancing if she could have had her way.

Right! Can you say a little more about that?                                                                 She wasn’t interested in these old dances. This was the past to her and like most visionary artists they’re focused on the now and what’s next. So the effort to do these reconstructions of the dances from the 1930s really came about by those who were closest to her in the 1980s…

And [they were able to] bring in some of those [original Graham Group] dancers – like Anna Sokolow, Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley – to sit there and say, “Well I remember doing it this way!” …”Well no it was never like this, it was like that!” …with body memories that are coming up from the 1930s, [dancers] who are remembering what it was like to dance this dance… 50 years earlier.

And that’s that historical lineage and fabric that we are now a part of—I’m a part of it, and now I’m working with you and now you’re a part of it too.

 

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

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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)