Tag Archives: mady cantor

Jennifer Conley: Technique

Posted on by
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.

 

Kicking Off with Antifascist Pro-Democratic Mass Dance

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.