Tag Archives: wallingford riegger

Riegger’s “New Dance” and the Patterned Whole

Posted on by

As I reflect further on last week’s rehearsal – the first we’ve had in the auditorium of Goodhart Hall – I realize that the beauty of the “wholeness” I appreciated in watching Steps in the Street performed on the stage was derived in part from my experience of the rhythms and patterns of the work in this new, elevated (both literally and figuratively) context.

Over the course of the day the dancers rehearsed the piece in its entirety with the music many times, becoming more closely acquainted with the mixed meters of Wallingford Riegger’s modernist composition. Because the form of the musical score makes counting each measure more complicated the dancers have learned to rely at times on the sound of each other’s steps to cue transitions in movement (as opposed to the beat of the music), so an entrance may fluidly follow the preceding exit. The way the dancers have made adjustments together, as an ensemble, to negotiate this dissonance – between the rhythmic patterns of the sound and those of the movement – highlights, once again, the themes of interdependence and relatedness that exist within this piece. The dancers’ reliance on one another exposes the way in which each entrance relies on an exit in order to continue the dance.

Without having my attention drawn to these structural details, I wouldn’t have seen the delicate balance that exists through Steps in the Street – the elegant way its unique parts together create a cohesive whole.

Listen to Riegger’s musical score and then imagine keeping time to this music while contracting all of your muscles and spinning backwards on tiptoe!

 

Finding Lost Steps

Posted on by

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.