There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new dance, and gestures are flowing through me.
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
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.