Tag Archives: steps in the street

Graham’s Footsteps Graced Goodhart’s Stage!

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tech bourrees

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

The review continued on Page 3

Front page: "Martha Graham Evokes History In New Dance"

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.

 

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.

 

WELCOME to Mawr Steps

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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.