Tag Archives: mass dance

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.

 

“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)