Graham’s Footsteps Graced Goodhart’s Stage!

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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

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…

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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

Costumes

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Anni Turkel

Itchy wool, the smell of wet wool, trying to reshape a stretched out sweater – or worse, trying to stretch a shrunken one… When I think of dancing in a near floor-length dress made of wool these are the thoughts running through my mind.

In 1936 Martha Graham and her dancers were wearing costumes made of double knit wool. Thankfully, in 2014 Bryn Mawr and Haverford dancers will be wearing cotton jersey. Though it is still a somewhat heavy fabric to dance in (compared to the super-technology we now have in athletic gear) it is undoubtedly lighter than its 1930s counterpart – more of a second skin, less of a pelt.

Synthetics notwithstanding, these costumes are true to Graham’s 1930’s stipulations and to the nature of Steps in the Street – they are both determinedly solemn as well as deceptively complex. I would describe the costumes, at first glance, as: long black dresses – they are intended to just brush the top of the foot. The bodice is fitted, with cap sleeves and a square neckline – and with two princess seams running down its length, from where the neckline meets the sleeve (almost under the arm), over the bust, to a low dropped waist. Attached to this is a full skirt with overlapping material that forms a slit, which is not visible without movement.

These costumes are on loan as part of the reconstruction arrangement Bryn Mawr has with the Martha Graham Dance Company. The Graham Company suffered the great misfortune of losing many of their costumes, and sets and props, in a storage facility that was ruined during Hurricane Sandy. The costumes we are using this Spring are therefore reconstruction costumes that had to be reconstructed themselves post-Sandy and Bryn Mawr’s cast will only be the second to wear them.

A few weeks ago the dancers had their first rehearsal in costume. At that rehearsal I had an opportunity to speak briefly with Heidi Barr, who has done costuming for Bryn Mawr College’s Dance Concerts for a number of years. Heidi will be fitting and altering the costumes for our production of Steps in the Street.

Through our conversation Heidi brought into focus aspects of the costume that I, with my untrained eye, would not have immediately considered. Below, some examples are illustrated by photos of the dancers rehearsing in costume!

Continue reading →

“…a newcomer, the Modern Dance.”

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Anni Turkel

Below is a page from the Bryn Mawr College Yearbook, Class of 1939, remarking upon the success of Bryn Mawr’s first Modern Dance classes:

via Bryn Mawr College, Special Collections

After a few weeks of laughter at the contortions and resulting aches of its devotees, the college began to be interested. …the Modern Dance is now given for credit, is self-supporting, and has an hour and place all its own. Without doubt there is something fascinating about controlled but strenuous rhythmic movement.

(Special Collections Repository)

And from the same year, 1938-39: a film of Bonnie Bird, an early Graham Group dancer, demonstrating the beginnings of what would become Martha Graham’s codified technique.

The End of The Beginning

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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.

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!)

Then but a blur.

And quickly following:

Prepare…

And go!

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.

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.

WELCOME to Mawr Steps

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Anni Turkel

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.

Bryn Mawr Steps Into Dance History

The Process of Reconstructing Martha Graham's "Steps in the Street"

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