Tag Archives: sophie maslow

Expressing Feeling Through Form

Posted on by

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Posted on by

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)