NEW@Graham: Celebrating a decade of "Lamentation Variations"

Lament not. Janet Eilber plans to keep dreaming up ways to revivify America's longest-running dance troupe, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Graham's famed solo, Lamentations, continues to show the way.

Last evening, the company celebrated the 10th year of Lamentation Variations, its unusual commissioning project launched in 2007 as artistic director Eilber noticed that the season's opening night would fall on the anniversary of 9/11. Since then, Eilber has invited dancemakers, representing a diversity of aesthetic approaches, to respond to or re-imagine the Graham solo. So, Yes to Judson genius Yvonne Rainer rethinking Lamentation or tap genius Michelle Dorrance remixing it!

The commissioned artists pledge fidelity, more or less, to a set of spartan rules limiting length (no longer than Graham's four minutes), rehearsal time (10 hours tops) and sets (absolutely none allowed). Even given these restrictions, each has managed to re-envision the original in signature ways--for instance, turning the spare, tense, wrenching angularity of Graham's grieving into something eerily luxurious for soloist Katherine Crockett (Richard Move, 2007), bringing the entire company onstage (Larry Keigwin, 2007), turning the solo into an interracial male duet (Kyle Abraham, 2015) or teaching Memphis Jookin to a cluster of nine young Grahamites (Lil Buck, 2017).

"The question became 'How to put new choreography on the stage next to Graham classics," said Eilber as she opened the evening in the company's studio at Westbeth, former home of Merce Cunningham's troupe. "Would I get run out of town?" Ultimately, though, she found that introducing new work helped audiences "appreciate Martha Graham more and remember what a radical she was."

A radical, indeed. Throughout these opening remarks, an early 1940s video of Graham dancing Lamentation played behind and loomed over Eilber, proving her correct. Graham worked that solo. Her concept and vision for it, along with her fierce performance, remain unmatched. Last evening's program featured Variations by Abraham, Keigwin, Gwen Welliver (preparing for a 2018 Tallahassee premiere), Bulareyaung Pagarlava as well as Lil Buck's New York premiere. Each offered elements of interest...and yet...and yet...Graham remains queen.

Lamentation Variations concludes this evening with another informal toast and studio showing at 7pm, featuring Variations by Aszure Barton, Doug Varone, Richard Move, Larry Keigwin and Lil Buck. Click here for information and ticketing.

Martha Graham Studio Theater
Westbeth, 55 Bethune Street (11th Floor), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Graham's surrealism on display at the Morgan

Along with its major exhibition of Surrealist works on paper--Drawing Surrealism (January 25-April 21)--The Morgan Library and Museum will present a performance of works by Martha Graham.

Inner Landscape: Martha Graham and the Surreal
Thursday, February 7, 7pm

The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform three of Graham’s masterworks that touch on surrealism and demonstrate how the choreographer made the workings of the mind visible in dance. Every Soul is a Circus (with Katherine Crockett performing the lead), Satyric Festival Song, and “Moon” from Canticle for Innocent Comedians will be featured with commentary by the Company’s Artistic Director, Janet Eilber. Drawing Surrealism will be open at 6pm especially for program attendees.

Tickets: $20; $15 (members)

The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue (at 36th Street), Manhattan
212-685-0008 x560
(map/directions)

Legends, then and now: Graham and Bausch

What becomes a legend most...when she's gone?

For Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, what becomes her legendary mentor now is a mix of classic repertory works and new commissions designed to take a fresh approach to Graham themes. In seasons past, these themes have explored "Political Dance" and psychological "Inner Landscapes." For its 2013 program at The Joyce Theater (February 20-March 3), the company will offer "Myth & Transformation." This collection will include Phaedra--unseen for a decade--and other Graham works inspired by Greek myths and legends plus the New York premiere of Doug Varone's Lamentation Variation and a restaging of Richard Move's The Show (Achilles Heels), originally created for Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. In addition, along with a new piece by Nacho Duato, the troupe will bring Graham's Rite of Spring to Carolina Performing Arts (Chapel Hill, NC) as part of a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the premiere of the Stravinsky piece.

From the original cast of The Show (Achilles Heels). Rasta Thomas (l) and Miguel Anaya (r)
photo by ©JulietaCervante

Yesterday afternoon, the troupe previewed samples from "Myth & Transformation" in its new home--the former, and legendary, Merce Cunningham studio at Westbeth. Varone's quartet for men--part of the company's commission of interpretations of Graham's iconic solo, Lamentation--evokes a sense of the early HIV/AIDS crisis, of dynamic interconnections, interdependence, loss, readjustment and healing within a community at a time when change is the only constant. The Show (Achilles Heels), with its snappy, game-show setting and androgynously-sexy protagonist (played now by Lloyd Mayor, a breakout talent hailing from the Isle of Man), will give freer play to its young dancers' expressive capabilities and seems pitched to draw younger audiences.

[And look what I found! Here's Lloyd Mayor in a video interview, a year or so ago, talking about life at the Rambert School and mentioning his dream of getting into the Graham company.]

BAM drew a decidedly mature, largely upscale crowd of fans of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch for last night's sold-out US premiere of Bausch's final work of surrealist absurdity and romance. "...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si..." unfolds across a stage floor glowing with cool, white light like a  lightbox or a polar ice sheet, which makes its imagery (and designer Marion Cito's elegant, sensuous gowns) absolutely pop.

With one intermission, the evening runs a giddy 2 hours and 40 minutes--a pretty steep commitment--but the Bausch ensemble rewards attention with alternately gorgeous, tender, clever and amusing scenarios and performances. The begowned women--and Bausch's movement for them as individuals--have always impressed me more than the guys darting around them in their serviceable black shirts and slacks; the luminous female standouts here in "...como el musguito" include Morena Nascimento and Ditta Miranda Jasjfi. But Fernando Suels Mendoza has a wonderful bit as a flirtatious fellow effusively greeting the ladies as they approach and pass. Once you watch him perform this segment, you continue to follow and welcome everything he does.

Mind the cracks, though--those "Antarctic ice" cracks opening up in that glowing white floor. Beneath all of that color and movement and beauty and fun and abandon lie completely ignored hints of disaster in the making.

The company premiered this work just a few weeks before Bausch's cancer diagnosis and shocking, sudden death. With 20/20 hindsight, it appears prescient, a farewell and a gift of mad, extravagant love to her dancers and her audience.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch continues at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House tonight and October 20, 23, 24, 26, 27 at 7:30pm and October 21 at 3pm. Tickets are sold out but, for information, click here.

Graham company's new direction

A New Direction for the Martha Graham Dance Company

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, June 9, 2010

Through thick or thin ice

What real dancers think of figure skating
Insiders reveal what they love and loathe about their balletic cousins on ice 
by Margaret Eby, Salon.com, February 16, 2010