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Jennifer Conley: Form and History

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I’ve been reading people remark upon how her dances from the ‘30s, her earlier dances, don’t have the sleekness of her later dances, which were informed by more balletic shapes and gestures. These early works were really about the power of the mass, the unified group of women—and her company was all women at that time—so, when you reconstruct at other schools is it always an all- female cast?      I always have a female cast for these early works. I’m not opposed to having men in the piece—I mean at the Graham Company the men always wanted to do Chronicle, which is the bigger piece that this is a section of— they wanted to do a male version of it—but, not yet…

…Well there’s a certain authenticity, I guess—the costuming would change, the male body has a different presence—Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman were working alongside Martha, in another part of New York but at the same time, and they were doing the male-female-equal thing—the no struggle for dominance of one over the other but trying to exist harmoniously, cooperatively, and creating this sort of Utopian society of men and women, and Doris choreographed for the women and Charles choreographed for the men—so there’s an egalitarian sort of feeling that was in the air—it affected them and it affected Martha too.

A lot of Martha’s dancers actually were involved in something called the New Dance Group, which was a radical dance collective that really thought that dance could incite social change, their slogan was, “Dance is a weapon to incite social justice,” and they were really into dancing on the picket lines, and helping with the unionization movement that hadn’t quite formed yet—Martha wasn’t that closely tied with it, but she knows the headlines, she knows what’s going on, she knows who her dancers are and where they’re coming from—from Russia, from Germany, from all these different places, a high Jewish percentage of women in her company, who grew up in the tenement housing on the Lower East Side, working class families—so she’s aware, consciously, of what’s going on.

So when these fears are swelling, among the people on the east coast, with regards to what’s happening abroad, it’s real for this generation of artists—they didn’t see themselves as separate from this, they saw themselves as part of it—and so how is my art going to reflect that? And there’s such humanity in the work of the 1930s.

They call them “The Greatest Generation”—it’s a different spirit, it’s a different sense of mankind and our relationship to one another, than we have today. I don’t think there was any apathy—things did not come as easily, in terms of information, or even food for that matter, or jobs (though we are having a downturn in our economy right now in terms of jobs – )…but, yeah, it was such a different time and it wore on the people differently. So the way they moved was different.

Yeah. I was just thinking, the way they moved in terms of the way their bodies were informed by their surroundings—and by their own thoughts and personal and political motivations—but also thinking about the food that they’re eating and the clothing that they’re wearing, whatever is available—                                          Double knit wool!

[Laugh] Right. I guess they refer to this as her “long woolens period”—           That’s right.

…thinking about your material goods and how that is affecting your performance—and your body and the way that you’re living—yeah, dancing in wool…                     It’s before lycra, it’s before nylon—and it’s also a time too for women—America is still waking up from the Victorian protocols, expectations on women, and there’s this quickening of city life, because these artists were all living in New York City. The skyscrapers were going up and you’re seeing these bold geometric lines, like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building, which went up around the same time these dances were happening.

There’s a similar “economy of means” they like to say when they are analyzing these buildings, in that there’s some simplicity there.  And we’re not looking at the ornamental nature of, say, Grand Central Station, which is one of my favorite buildings in New York City, with the Baroque curlicues…  We’ve completely gone into something very stark and very minimal.

The stark and minimal strike pose seen repeatedly throughout "Steps"

The stark and minimal strike pose seen repeatedly throughout “Steps”

Yes—the strong defined lines of this dance, the geometry of it, is something—just now watching it appear on stage for the first time—that I was able to appreciate in a whole new way.  It’s that same aesthetic you’re talking about.  And this also brings to mind something else you mentioned during our first weekend of rehearsals: how this dance is about unity but not conformity.                                       A balance of the individual and the community.

So, as both a dancer and a teacher, can you say anything about what that physical experience is like for you—of tapping into that spirit of the legacy?                    There is something ancestral about the experience when I am doing it.  I have a consciousness of those that have come before me and done this piece.

Is it like a conceptual consciousness? Or is it manifested in your body in any way? I know that’s a difficult thing to put into words—                                                                I think the consciousness translates physically.  I think the physicality affects the consciousness.  It goes both ways.  I don’t think it’s imposed.  I feel like it emerges in the experience and, without getting too metaphysical, you can feel the presence.  It’s like traveling through time somehow. …and it can be kind of transcendent in that way.

I think any dance experience can achieve that.                                                             It’s like a prayer.  It’s like an honoring, an offering.

You can understand why for centuries, across cultures, movement has been used in religious rituals and rites …the “trance state”…                                                   Right. And you think of maybe a fertility rite or puberty ritual and you dance this and twenty years later your daughter is doing it, or you see your granddaughter doing it and you remember.  You can remember and recall that experience but now you are seeing it from a different sphere of perception.

And do you feel that way when you watch the students you taught dancing it?           I do. Yeah, because I’ve been in this environment too, in college learning this dance.

 

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.

 

Finding Lost Steps

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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: navigating deceptions of time and space

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

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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

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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.