Clytemnestra and the Dance Dramas of Martha Graham: Revising the Classics
The Gallatin School,
New York University
Tuesday, September 16, 6-8 pm
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts, 715 Broadway (entrance at 1 Washington Place)
Washington Place) Choreographer Martha Graham, considered one of the great artistic innovators of the 20th century, helped pioneer the look, style, and technique of modern dance. The creator of 181 dances, she was acclaimed for her masterful collaborations with well-known composers, musicians, and visual artists. This panel will explore a particularly rich body of Graham’s work dating from the mid 1940s through the 1950s drawing on Greek mythology, ancient legends, and female archetypes, with a focus on her epic 1958 dance work Clytemnestra. Hailed then as “a timeless ritual” by New York Times dance critic John Martin, Clytemnestra featured a highly-charged score by composer Halim El-Dabh and scenic designs by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Live excerpts will be performed.
Panelists will discuss Graham’s work from aesthetic, choreographic, and cultural perspectives examining how themes from myth and antiquity served her artistic vision and marked a transition from the austerity of many of her earlier works into a new type of dance-theatre. They will present contemporary critical views on her distinctive use of narrative and Asian-inspired movement techniques; her theatrical reframing of classical Greek heroines; Graham’s role as a modernist artist in the Cold-War era of the 1950s; and her longtime artistic partnership with Noguchi. Live excerpts will be performed.
Please note that this panel occurs as part of the weeklong residency, from Sept. 15-19th, of The Martha Graham Dance Company, which will be in rehearsal for a new production of Clytemnestra at NYU’s Skirball Theatre.
Panelists:
Bruce Altshuler, Director of the Program in Museum Studies at the Graduate School of Arts & Science at NYU. From 1992 to 1998 he was Director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City. He has lectured widely on the history of exhibitions, museums, and contemporary art, and is author of Isamu Noguchi and The Avant-Garde in Exhibition, editor of Collecting the New, and co-editor of Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations. The first of his two-volume sourcebook on exhibition history, Salon to Biennial, will be published this fall.
Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Center and formerly a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. She danced many of Graham’s greatest roles, had many roles created for her by Graham, and has since taught, lectured, and directed Graham ballets internationally. Eilber has also performed in films, on television, and on Broadway and has received four Lester Horton Awards for her reconstruction and performance of seminal American modern dance.
Deborah Jowitt, principal dance critic for The Village Voice since 1967. She has published two collections: Dance Beat (1977) and The Dance in Mind (1985), and her Time and the Dancing Image won the de la Torre Bueno Prize in 1989. Graham has also contributed to many publications and is a sought after lecturer and teacher. She is on the faculty of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her latest book, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance was published in 2004.
Gay Morris, a leading dance and art critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Art in America, ARTnews, and Body and Society. She is the author of A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960 – winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize in 2007 – and editor of the anthology Moving Words, Rewriting Dance (1996).
Moderator:
Julie Malnig, a professor of theatre and dance studies at the Gallatin School and a former editor of Dance Research Journal. She is the author of Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (1995) and editor of the forthcoming Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (2008). One of her recent essays is “All Is Not Right in the House of Atreus: Feminist Theatrical Renderings of the Oresteia,” forthcoming in Feminist Revisions of Classic Works (2008).
Respondent:
Sharon Friedman, a professor of drama and literature at the Gallatin School and editor of the forthcoming Feminist Revisions of Classic Works: Critical Essays (2008).
