Latest news with #MarthaGraham
Time Out
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Pilobolus
Photograph: Courtesy Grant Halverson | Sweet Purgatory The popular troupe Pilobolus, which melds dance with physical theater and striking stage imagery, presents a pair of programs. Program A includes the NYC premiere of Lamentation Variations —a tribute to Martha Graham's classic solo Lamentation— as well as Awaken Heart , Sweet Purgatory and the Orpheus and Eurydice–themed /span> Tales from the Underworld . Program B features the local debut of Flight , set to music by Paul Sullivan, alongside Particle Zoo , Bloodlines and Rushes . (The family matinee on July 5 is Program B but with Tales from the Underworld instead of Rushes .) Tue, Jul 1, 2025 Wed, Jul 2, 2025 Thu, Jul 3, 2025 Fri, Jul 4, 2025 Sat, Jul 5, 2025 Sat, Jul 5, 2025 Sun, Jul 6, 2025 Tue, Jul 8, 2025 Wed, Jul 9, 2025 Thu, Jul 10, 2025 Show more By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. 🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed! Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! Discover Time Out original video
The Hindu
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
International Yoga Day: Odissi exponent Surupa Sen on how dance and yoga nourish the body and the mind
'Run! Run faster and you will get there quicker!', is all we hear and do in our lives. We are constantly surrounded by the demand to cope no matter how. On the other end of the spectrum, our ancient practices teach us to be still. Yoga and classical dance are both indigenous traditions of India that seek the same goal — to be aware of the breath and let the praana guide every action. To engage both the body and the mind to act at once for a holistic experience. The ancient practices suggest that we pause to engage deeply with life, and compassionately with ourselves. Yoga enables the mind-body balance that help us make better choices for living. Dancers are complex movement artistes. They have to be contortionists, martial artists, poets, story tellers and sculptors all at once. They do not just bring an idea to life when they dance but create life itself in each moment. As a dancer, my body changes every moment to adhere to a complexly shifting mind. From the slightest quiver of a lip and the fleeting angle of the eye to the gentle tremble of a finger, all come together to express a single nuanced emotion. . For a dancer, the body is a living instrument. If my body must go to places that my mind seeks in its imagination, I must train to stretch its potential so that I may inhabit those boundless worlds. Thus when the body, mind and spirit come together, we have reached our goal. Martha Graham, the great contemporary dancer and choreographer said, 'I am a dancer. I believe we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living'. In the pursuit of excellence, for the past 35 years that I have lived the life of a dancer at Nrityagram, yoga and other kinds of cross-training has been integrated into our daily schedule. For years now, we have studied and developed body kinetics that combine different perspectives of training to specifically nourish and inform the Odissi body. In my initial years as a student, I found a lacuna in the application of yoga practice to the lines of alignment within which the Odissi dancer must function. Most practitioners of yoga may not be dancers or necessarily understand the forces acting on a dancer's body. I felt this to be the central reason for the injuries I faced as a dancer. I therefore attempted to understand on my own through research and study ways to heal myself and to ensure that none who trained with me would suffer the same damage. Choosing selectively from different forms of body work, we created a curriculum that would enhance our potential as performers. At Nrityagram, the dancers begin their day with a walk or run, then clean the gurukul spaces, followed by body conditioning exercises. Each day is a different model that must respond to the body's need for that particular day. In order to do that, the dancers must first prepare their mind so that it assimilates the body's needs ensuring the right choice of exercises to better their practice for that day. Each bone and muscle must be oxygenated and lubricated to sufficiently deliver at the highest level. Once this preparation is complete, a further warm-up is done in class before the rigour of complex dance vocabulary is undertaken. After many hours on the dance floor, we allow the body time to de-stress with stretches that are suited for each dancer to recover as quickly as possible. Nrityagram has been at the very forefront of establishing the idea that the longevity of a dance career depends on the adequate protection and respect we must give to and have for our bodies. Both choreographically and as performers, we have pushed our abilities to render new dimensions of skill in the classical dance world. This, in turn, has inspired artistes to explore new and more efficient ways of working both in Odissi and other dance styles. Dance traditions in India have been handed down through generations of artistes. As we gaze at the dancing figures on temple walls, we seek what they have — both yogic stillness and flexible body. Yoga and dance together can help us achieve this. Though AI and bots have entered the human space and threaten to do all that we can, it cannot for now express what the dancer's body can. Until then, let us continue to nourish this extraordinary instrument called the human body through yoga and dance.
Forbes
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Noguchi At Night' Draws Together Groundbreaking Sculpture, Dance, And Culinary Excellence With Pop-Up Performances By Martha Graham Dance Company
Leslie Andrea Williams, principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, performs Lamentation ... More (1930). Noguchi at Night, May 9, 2025, The Noguchi Museum, New York. Enveloped in a plum-colored tube-like garment from which only her head, hands, and feet peek out, Leslie Andrea Williams is framed by a black granite circular sculpture evoking the passage of day and night, light and darkness, symbolizing the origin of life. Williams, principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, gently shifts her head from left to right. She tilts and twists her upper body, swaying rhythmically. The angular motions of her torso, head, and arms simultaneously juxtapose with and align with Isamu Noguchi's Sun at Midnight (1973). As Williams' movements intensify, the plum costume transforms into geometric shapes such as squares, triangles, and rhomboids, while she maintains a solemn gaze. She grasps the upper edge of her costume with a hoisted fist, flexing it over her head. Williams lowers her head as she sits in a meditative pose. Her fluid movements and expressions convey profound sorrow of catharsis. Williams' ethereal performance last Friday of Lamentation (1930), a modern dance solo choreographed by legendary American modern dancer, teacher and choreographer Martha Graham (1894-1991) to Piano Piece, Op. 3, No. 2 by Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, music pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), ignited the The Noguchi Museum. 'What an honor to perform Lamentation here 🥲 I've dreamt of performing here since I first came to visit during my first year in the company 10 years ago,' Williams, who describes herself as a 'creative storyteller' across artistic genres, wrote on her Instagram. 'It was so special to be amongst the set pieces made for Martha while also becoming a 'sculpture come to life.'✨ Thank you to the Noguchi Museum team for a wonderful evening.' FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Leslie Andrea Williams, principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, performs Lamentation ... More (1930). Noguchi at Night, May 9, 2025, The Noguchi Museum, New York. Williams' nearly-four-minute performance in AREA 3 on the first floor of the expansive museum in Queens, New York, was among four pop-up solos throughout the museum by Martha Graham Dance Company, with choreography and costumes by Graham, Artistic Director Janet Eilber, and Executive Director LaRue Allen. New York-based Martha Graham Dance Company is the nation's oldest professional school of dance, and the only one primarily focused on the Martha Graham Technique. Leslie Andrea Williams, principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, performs Lamentation ... More (1930). Noguchi at Night, May 9, 2025, The Noguchi Museum, New York Guests wandered through the massive space, a creative, contemplative oasis tucked into the mixed industrial and residential area in Astoria, Queens, watching the dancers interact with the sculpture, as they enjoyed a selection of exquisite Japanese dishes by chef, restaurateur, and creative director Kiyo Shinoki, along with specialty cocktails provided by Suntory. Chef Kiyo Shinoki. Noguchi at Night, May 9, 2025, The Noguchi Museum, New York. Noguchi at Night, a one-night dance and culinary experience, also included pop-up performances of Ekstasis (1933), Satyric Festival Song (1932), and Spectre-1914 (1936), amplifying the collaborative legacy of Graham and Noguchi. Proceeds from Noguchi at Night benefitted The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Much like the divorce of sciences and arts, there is too much under-utilized fungible space between the visual arts and the performing arts. Masters of their own art forms, Graham and Noguchi recognized that they were stronger together and that drawing together dance and sculpture magnifies the appreciation and human connection that nourishes humanity. Groundbreaking at every turn, Noguchi (1904-1988) founded The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (now The Noguchi Museum) in 1985, as the first museum in the United States to be established, designed, and installed by a living artist to show their own work. His ethos and spirit pulsates throughout the idyllic interior and garden galleries, whisking New Yorkers and visitors away from the frenzy of daily routine, reminding us that art is essential, not extraneous, to our existence and fortitude. The breadth and scope of Noguchi's oeuvre is as stupendous as the space he created to make it accessible to future generations. An easy 18-minute walk from the N/W trains, the museum presents an inimitable transmuting and regenerative immersive experience. My son Michael Alexander and I were grateful for the tip to stop by the impeccably curated Noguchi Museum Shop to purchase traditional incense from Kungyokudo, Japan's oldest incense house. Riemon Ouno opened Kungyokudo in 1594, across from the Hongwanji Temple in Kyoto to provide incense and medicine to the monks of the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha Buddhist school. Kungyokudo is now owned and operated by Ouno's 22nd-generation descendant, Kazuo Ouno, and his wife, Chihaya Ouno.
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The audience chucked food at us!' Emilyn Claid on angry shows, her ballet shame and gardening for Martha Graham
Maybe it's inevitable by the age of 75 that you've lived a number of lives. For Emilyn Claid, that's meant the leap from ballet dancer in Toronto to the squats of grungy 1969 New York (via Martha Graham's garden), to pioneering the New Dance scene in 1970s London, to artistic director, academic and psychotherapist (not to mention mother, grandmother), and then in her eighth decade, full circle to being a performer again. It was after realising 'I was leaving three-quarters of myself out' that Claid made 2022's comeback solo show Untitled, appearing strong, sensual, funny and provocative, dressed in leather vest and a fur cloak. She put the work in to get back on stage at 72 ('A lot of press-ups and sit-ups') but at the same time, she says, it was absolutely natural, like coming home. 'Not being at home like a comfortable sofa,' she clarifies. 'The excitement of knowing a whole world that's familiar to me and yet is always constantly changing.' The dance world has changed plenty in the six decades that Claid has been working. When she stopped performing in the late 90s, 'it was hard as a woman, as a lesbian, to make lesbian work'. Now Claid is being embraced by a new generation of queer artists. I visit an east London studio to find her rehearsing a 'young and feisty' group of performers (Azara Meghie, Eve Stainton, Adrienne Ming, Orrow Bell and co-director Martin O'Brien) for her new 'live art ballet' The Trembling Forest. Claid is rangy and stylish, with cropped grey hair under a black cap. The group collaboratively work out a scene, veering from giggles to solemnity and back again. Later in the week, they'll be joined by a bigger cast who are all going to be on stage covered in clay. We'll come back to that. It's a long journey from Claid's suburban childhood in Wimbledon. She wasn't very good at ballet, she insists, yet she was good enough to be accepted into the National Ballet of Canada after joining their Toronto school at 16. But she was too tall, always in the background, never going to get further. 'It's a tricky one, ballet, because you get so addicted and so stuck into this [quest for] perfection and getting it right,' she says. 'When you fail at it – when I failed at it – the shame is terrible. It takes years to get over that. But then when you get over you think, Oh thank God! It's incredibly stifling. And for women's bodies, unless you're born that way, I think it's very difficult.' She left for New York in 1969 with the aim of going to the Martha Graham school, turned up with no cash and her English accent, and offered to look after Graham's garden in exchange for classes. 'They thought, she's English, she's bound to know about gardens.' The planting of daffodils aside, this was scuzzy New York. 'It was sex, drugs, dance, risky, wonderful,' says Claid. It was an introduction to many different worlds, discovering the gay scene and basement clubs with 'naked men all dancing on LSD or whatever'. She was squatting in the East Village, or living in the apartment of any artist friend who was away. The kind of apartments with a bathtub in the kitchen and you'd put a table on top to eat dinner. 'Tiny rooms with beaded curtains and cockroaches everywhere.' She was still a teenager. 'But I always felt safe there.' Claid worked with dancers from the Graham company. Nobody had any money but they all seemed to get by. 'There were a lot of patrons, I did a lot of modelling for artists.' She got into some dangerous situations, she admits – 'I guess it's a sort of fancy kind of prostitution really, isn't it?' – but says, 'I was tough.' At one point her parents sent someone over to New York to find her. They did, living in a squat behind a house in the East Village. 'Not a great situation,' she admits. 'My parents must have been freaked out, but there was nothing they could do. I'd left home at 16, I was totally independent.' By the time she came back to London a couple of years later, 'I was pretty wrecked', and suffering from osteoarthritis in her big toe joint. She'd been in pain since she was 11, but kept it hidden. She gave up dance and briefly became a secretary, but the call was too strong. Then Claid met Jacky Lansley, Fergus Early and Maedée Duprès, who together founded the X6 Collective and the New Dance movement. There was a real sense of change, of undoing hierarchies, ripping up the rules, smashing ballet's stranglehold, putting politics at the forefront (their 1977 work Bleeding Fairies blasted the image of the ethereal ballerina and other tropes). They found a home at Butler's Wharf on the South Bank of the Thames, part of a wider experimental arts scene including Derek Jarman, sculptor Andrew Logan (who founded Alternative Miss World) and the London Musicians Collective. They'd put on performances and festivals, all very DIY, no toilet in the building ('you had to go down to the river'), big warehouse doors open on the sixth floor with a sheer drop on the other side. People came and it was buzzing, but again there wasn't any money. Most people were squatting and on the dole – that's what was funding young artists then. What did Claid's work look like? 'I was so angry!' Her whole face breaks into a brilliantly appealing grin and silent laughter stops her talking for a moment. 'Big, clumsy feminists doing angry work! It was very autobiographical. I had eating disorders, there's all sorts of things we were dealing with.' She would speak to the audience, she would dance, 'image making' is the term she uses, which could equally describe the work she's making now. Some of the group went to perform in Lyon, 'And I can remember the audience chucking food at us, telling us to get off. Lots of the work was radically, collaboratively devised. Collage rather than narrative. And of course that was not popular with audiences at the time.' As artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre from 1981 to 1990 she pushed radical work, but always tried to be entertaining, too. (Unlike, she says, the very abstract London Contemporary Dance Theatre who 'put audiences off totally'.) Abandoning clear meaning and narrative is still fairly radical, I say. 'I don't ever want to give up on narrative,' she responds. 'I just don't want there to be only one narrative.' As a queer artist, Claid says she particularly embraces the idea of meaning not being fixed, singular or binary. Queerness, she says 'is much more now about a movement rather than an identity; a constant process of unfixing normativity'. She's calling The Trembling Forest a 'live art ballet' because like live art 'the body's creating the material in the moment of the performance' based on tasks or a score she gives the collaborators. But 'ballet' because there is a frame and structure, six scenes. The clay-covered bodies will be the forest (Claid might be one of these, she hasn't decided yet), and they're in what she calls 'long time,' death, essentially, so-named because 'we're going to be dead for a lot longer than we're alive'. And into the forest come the living, a 'motley crew of messy, scribbly, scrabbly bodies'. They know they're heading towards 'long time' and these are their last rituals. 'There's the meta-narrative of hope and desolation, living and dying,' says Claid. Will the audience be able to read that? 'I don't mind if they do or they don't. It's great if people see different things.' In recent years Claid trained as a Gestalt psychotherapist and that's influenced her choreography. The philosophy behind Gestalt is relational, we exist only in relation to each other. Claid talks about the narcissism of being a performer. 'It's all about, 'How wonderful can I be for the audience?'' Now she's more interested in 'What am I going to share with the audience? What can we make together?' When she watches her dancers improvise, instead of thinking, 'Which bits do I like?' She asks them: 'Where did you feel most energised?' The result for us, the audience, she says, is that we see 'something that is alive'. In 2021, Claid combined her work in dance and psychotherapy in the book Falling Through Dance and Life, on surrendering to gravity, and in a more existential sense, accepting the void we're all on our way to. She does physical work with her therapy clients, and sees unequivocally the changes in their lives and relationships as a result. 'What we do with our bodies impacts on our minds.' Career-wise, she's faced the (metaphorical) fear of falling flat on her face. 'I take it right back to ballet, the shame of failing', Claid says, 'and then recognising how that is actually a creative source rather than a dead-end.' She couldn't – and wouldn't want to – define what success means any more. In whose eyes? She quotes from a memorable decades-old review: 'Emilyn Claid gets Dance Umbrella [festival] off to a bad start!' and breaks into another grinning laugh. Audiences weren't ready for her then. Will they be ready now? The Trembling Forest is at Copeland Gallery, London, as part of Ceremony festival, 23-24 April, and at Tramway, Glasgow, 10 May, as part of Dance International Glasgow
Los Angeles Times
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Opinion: Pioneering artists: The life and legacy of Martha Graham
Over the course of the course of the 20th century, perhaps no artist of modern dance was as surprising — and boundary-defying — as Martha Graham. Producing work for upwards of 70 years, Graham is credited for establishing a characteristically different movement technique, rooted largely in the physical actions of contraction and release. One hundred eighty works later, the Graham style has become synonymous with effervescence, vitality, and dynamism, thanks in large part to the broad diffusion of its repertory across top dance companies domestically and internationally. Graham's early childhood dance experiences were, naturally, the chief influences on the choreography she later developed. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1894, Graham relocated to California at an early age. She spent her formative years under the tutelage of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denies at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles, and later performed professionally with its company. Graham thereafter brought her talents to New York City, starring in John Murray Anderson's 'The Greenwich Village Follies' in a Broadway debut. Despite these successes, however, Graham had an intrinsic creative impulse, and she eventually distanced herself from established dance institutions. In the early 1920s, Graham directed her first independent show, which featured three dancers. The number of such 'muses,' as she often understood them to be, quickly proliferated, with 16 female dancers comprising her ensemble by the decade's end. Like audiences and critics nationwide, these dancers had been attracted to the eccentric and bold style that defined the Graham technique. By the 1930s, she was producing an expansive array of works, including 'Lamentation' (1930), 'Panorama' (1935), 'Chronicle' (1936), and 'American Document' (1938). Although each work was remarkably distinctive, they were all united by their powerful commentary on the social values of the time, pulling from storied experiences to illustrate a normative set of expectations dictated by an altogether new understanding of modern American dance. It is unsurprising, then, that the 1930s also provided the groundwork for growing discovery and appreciation of Graham's work. During that time, Bennington College, a liberal arts institution in Vermont, offered Graham a position as a professor of dance, which she held for four years. There, she met Erick Hawkins, her future husband and the first man to perform in what had been Graham's female company of dancers. Their synergy inspired an unprecedented creative output, kindling works such as 'Every Soul is a Circus' (1939), 'Letter to the World' (1940), and 'Dark Meadow' (1946). It was also during these years, in the late 1930s and spanning the 1940s, that a collection of notable dancers elected to work with Graham, including Merce Cunningham, Anna Sokolow, and Sophie Maslow. In the 1950s, and throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the U.S. Department of State facilitated national tours featuring her company's works. Eventually, further financial support from outside entities enabled the Graham Company to perform internationally as well as domestically. By this time, Graham no longer starred in the works she produced, though her choreographic output remained consistently high. The school affiliated with her company, which was founded in 1926, remained similarly successful. Graham's final works, produced in the last 20 years of her life, featured perhaps the most remarkable assemblage of dancers yet, including prominent modern artists like Takako Asakawa and Peter Sparling and notable ballet dancers, such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Dame Margot Fonteyn. Energized by what she considered abundant young talent, Graham continued to choreograph until her death in April of 1991. Graham's death, however, did not mark the end of her long and rewarding career. Her choreography fundamentally transformed modern dance, compelling up-and-coming artists to test the boundaries of movement-based expression. As New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff asserts, 'Martha Graham's name remains a virtual synonym for modern dance,' and such will likely be the case for decades more to come.
