Tag Archives: tyranny

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.

 

Declining Berlin

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The Spanish Civil War began in July of 1936. Martha Graham created Chronicle during that summer.

Some 9 months earlier, in September of 1935, Graham received an invitation from the Third Reich to participate in the 1936 Summer Olympics being held in Berlin.

Graham’s invitation – signed by Reich Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels

And Martha Graham’s response:

"I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible." (Martha Graham, Blood Memory)

“I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible.”
(Martha Graham, Blood Memory)

via Library of Congress