The Martha Graham Dance Company comes to Boston for the first time in almost 20 years as part of its 100th anniversary.
Lamentation, the seed of modern dance.
What is the best way to honor an art form that eschews tradition for innovation? This is the question the revolutionary Martha Graham Dance Company asked (marthagraham.org) as they planned their 100th anniversary. “It behooved us as the oldest dance company in the United States to begin to question how we celebrate our new classics,” says Janet Eilber, who has been the company’s artistic director since 2005. Three seasons of shows are planned, as well as a PBS-produced documentary, a coffee table book and an exhibit at the New York Public Library, all of which will incorporate partners and new works to help contextualize the company’s iconic history.
A scene from Rodeo.
The first season, American Legacies, comes to Boston this month for two shows on Nov. 22 and Nov. 23 (cseries.org). A combination of 20th and 21st-century Americana, it will feature the legendary Lamentation from 1930, which was the seed of modernism in American dance, Dark Meadow Suite from 1946 and Rodeo from 1942 by one of Graham’s student mentees and great friends, the choreographer Agnes de Mille. Rodeo’s original score by Aaron Copland is being reorchestrated by the guru of bluegrass, Gabe Witcher. The program will close with a work that just premiered last February called We the People by Jamar Roberts—a former principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater who left in 2021 to pursue choreographing full time. The work features music commissioned from Rhiannon Giddens and orchestrated by Witcher.
A snippet from Dark Meadow Suite.
The Martha Graham Dance Company hasn’t performed here in almost 20 years and Eilber worked closely with Nicole Taney, the artistic director of the Celebrity Series of Boston, to decide on the pieces that would best showcase the company’s range. Each is complex and different, but together they take the audience on a ride from Graham’s essential reaction to American dance, to her love of the rituals of Native Americans she observed as a young woman in the Southwest and Mexico, to the narrative of a young cowgirl misfit, to a statement about the power of people to come together and create change. The three disparate works speak to each other and march together when contextualized by the larger Americana theme. “We found that when we put new work on the program with the Graham classics, there’s a real conversation. The new work brings fresh eyes to the legacy, and the legacy brings the substance of the history of American dance to the new work,” says Eilber.
Photography by: CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN; CARLA LOPEZ; BRIGID PIERCE
