Video of Graham's performance showed that the dancer in this version, the tall, beautiful Katherine Crockett, was if anything more precise, more abstract, but also somehow less spontaneous than Graham's original.
#Martha graham panorama video series#
In the latter work, premiered in 1930, Graham used a sort of sheath of costume material to make her body into a series of geometric shapes, with stark movements, mostly while seated on a simple bench, evoking the vocabulary of grief. There were only the most superficial similarities from that early work in Graham's breakthrough pieces, Heretic (shown in video) and Lamentation. 1 (complete with the misguided addition of a final cadence to give the music some finality) and a Carmen-esque gypsy-lite Serenata Morisca to music by Mario Tarenghi. Denis's Denishawn company, a sort of faux-Cretan priest of Knossos dancing to Erik Satie's dreamy Gnossienne No. It began with the embarrassingly cheesy exoticism of Graham's early work with Ruth St. Films and images of Graham's early work, supplementing a historical narration, introduced a chronologically arranged series of short dances. The first half of this program was a sort of guided tour of Graham's life and her work in dance.
By contrast, the company founded by one of Graham's early collaborators, Merce Cunningham, is in the midst of closing permanently after Cunningham's death. The experience also demonstrated that although the company carries on its founder's ideals, it is also becoming more and more like a museum. The performance did not disappoint, offering the opportunity to revisit the company's history and some of its most celebrated choreographies. To celebrate the company's 85th anniversary, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance is on tour, and their stop on Friday night at George Mason University's Center for the Arts was on one of my top picks for the dance season.
Ground-breaking dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, who died in 1991, lives on in the company that bears her name. Katherine Crockett in "Move Variation" by Richard Move (photo by Costas, courtesy of Martha Graham Dance Company)
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