The world-renowned Martha Graham Dance Firm has begun the second season of GRAHAM100, a three-season 100th anniversary celebration of Martha Graham and her Firm’s legacy. Curated beneath the theme Dances of the Thoughts, the 2024-25 season focuses on Graham’s psychological works, multifaceted girls characters, and longtime creative partnership with famend visible artist Isamu Noguchi.
The Firm’s 2024-25 touring kicked off in July with performances in 18 cities throughout the U.S. and a five-city tour in Spain. The favored Graham Studio Collection returns, providing audiences a behind-the-scenes have a look at the Firm within the intimate setting of the Martha Graham Studio Theater. The studio collection includes a vary of applications from showings of latest works-in-progress to GrahamDeconstructed occasions and open rehearsals, all adopted by discussions with the Firm and particular company.
“Our GRAHAM100 celebration is ever-expanding as we launch into the second season of our three-year centennial,” mentioned Inventive Director Janet Eilber. “The Firm is segueing from Martha’s Americana of the Nineteen Thirties to her groundbreaking psychological works of the ’40s and ’50s. Utilizing characters corresponding to Emily Brontë, Medea and Clytemnestra, Martha reworked the patriarchal playbook by illuminating and empowering the ladies of those tales. Our modernist masterworks can be in dialog with our new works by Jamar Roberts, Hofesh Shechter, and Baye & Asa. In the meantime, we’re thrilled that many GRAHAM100 companions world wide — from colleges to skilled firms — can be dancing Graham classics and creating new Lamentation Variations in celebration of the lasting affect of our historic legacy.”
Graham masterworks to be offered on tour all through the season embody Cave of the Coronary heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), Fast Tragedy (1937), Appalachian Spring (1944), Darkish Meadow Suite (1946) and Diversion of Angels (1948). These classics can be offered alongside Jamar Roberts’s highly effective We the Individuals that includes music by Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. Known as a “bracingly transferring…and electrifying new protest dance” by Fjord, the work premiered as a part of the Firm’s American Legacies season at New York Metropolis Heart in April 2024. Hofesh Shechter’s thrilling and pulsating CAVE, with an digital rating by Shechter and German duo Âme, can even be offered. CAVE premiered as a part of the Firm’s season at Metropolis Heart in 2022.
The Firm’s New York season within the spring will function 10 works throughout three applications. Highlights embody three of the nice Graham/Noguchi collaborations: Frontier (1935), Errand into the Maze (1947) and Clytemnestra, Act 2 (1958). Her Deaths and Entrances from 1943, that includes set design by Arch Lauterer and costumes by Oscar de la Renta (created for the work’s revival in 2005), can be offered for the primary time since 2012.
The season can even function the premiere of an expanded model of Baye & Asa’s Cortege, impressed by Graham’s 1967 Cortege of Eagles. Baye & Asa’s work focuses on Charon, the ferryman who shepherds souls to the underworld. In Graham’s work, Charon is a harbinger of Troy’s inevitable fall. Of their creation, Baye & Asa reimagine this character via a recent lens and ask: Who’s the ferryman for the autumn of the American Empire? The work is about to a rating by Aidan Elias that samples from Eugene Lester’s unique composition.
Excerpts from Cortege can be offered as a part of the Works & Course of collection on the Guggenheim on September 29. The occasion will embody a dialogue with Baye & Asa and Graham Firm Inventive Director Janet Eilber. This occasion culminates a one-week Works & Course of LaunchPAD technical residency for the work on the Catskill Mountain Basis’s Orpheum Heart for the Performing Arts, together with a area people sharing in Tannersville, NY, on September 28.
As a part of the 100th anniversary celebration, a number of different firms can be performing works by Graham in spring 2025. Miami Metropolis Ballet will carry out Diversion of Angels in Cutler Bay, FL (February 2025), Texas Ballet Theatre is about to carry out Maple Leaf Rag in Dallas and Fort Price (February/March 2025), and Orlando Ballet will carry out Maple Leaf Rag in Orlando (March 2025). In April 2025, dancers from throughout Los Angeles will be part of forces for The Soraya’s second contribution to GRAHAM100. This system will function L.A. Dance Undertaking in Clytemnestra Suite, Lula Washington Dance Theater in Deep Track and Satyric Competition Track, and USC Glorya Kaufman Faculty of Dance in “Ritual to the Solar” from Acts of Gentle.
Texas Ballet Theatre, L.A. Dance Undertaking and Lula Washington Dance Theater are additionally among the many organizations collaborating within the Firm’s worldwide Lamentation Variations challenge, creating new dances impressed by Graham’s iconic solo from 1930.
The dancers of the Martha Graham Dance Firm are So Younger An, Ane Arrieta, Laurel Dalley Smith, Zachary Jeppsen, Meagan King, Lloyd Knight, Antonio Leone, Devin Loh, Marzia Memoli, Amanda Moreira, Ethan Palma, Jai Perez, Anne Souder, Richard Villaverde, Leslie Andrea Williams and Xin Ying.
For extra info, cities and dates go to marthagraham.org.
