Martha Graham Dance Company to Present NY Season at The Joyce Theater

The world-renowned Martha Graham Dance Company will return to The Joyce Theater for its 99th season featuring 11 works across three programs titled Dances of the Mind, April 1-13, 2025. The Company will also present a special opening night gala performance on April 1, a family matinee, and its biennial University Partners Showcase featuring university and high school dancers from around the country.

Two programs will feature Martha Graham’s remarkable psychological classics alongside works from some of today’s must-see choreographers, including Baye & Asa and Hofesh Shechter. Graham’s rare Americana solos will be paired with Agnes De Mille’s joyous Rodeo and Jamar Roberts’s powerful We the People. Graham’s Greek-themed Clytemnestra Act II and Errand Into the Maze, both with modernist sets by Isamu Noguchi, will be presented alongside Deaths and Entrances, inspired by the Brontë sisters. The season also includes exciting new works from choreographer and leading Graham dancer Xin Ying and choreographer and Graham 2 director Virginie Mécène.

Two masterworks delve into the complex minds of Graham’s female protagonists: Errand Into the Maze (1947), a dance that draws on the myth of Theseus in which a heroine, in Graham’s work, enters the labyrinth and battles the Minotaur, with a score by Gian Carlo Menotti; and the second act of Graham’s full-evening work Clytemnestra (1958). This dance drama is a retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, seen from the perspective of Clytemnestra. The original score is by Halim El-Dabh.

Graham’s 1943 work Deaths and Entrances will be presented for the first time since 2012. Inspired by the lives of the Brontë sisters, the work looks at the struggle of women to follow their deepest impulses in the face of convention and tradition. Described by The New York Times as “gripping and emotionally moving,” Deaths and Entrances is set to a score by Hunter Johnson and features costumes by Oscar de la Renta, which he created for the work’s revival in 2005.

This season the Company continues to expand its diverse repertory with powerful works from several contemporary choreographers.

Cortege, a world premiere by the choreographic duo Baye & Asa, draws inspiration from Graham’s 1967 Greek-themed Cortege of Eagles. In Baye & Asa work they focus on Charon, the ferryman who shepherds souls to the underworld. In Graham’s work, the Trojan Empire is crumbling, and Charon is the conductor of its inevitable fall. Baye & Asa’s Cortege removes this central figure of mythological predestination, and instead places the burden of fate on the ensemble. Together, they generate the cyclical momentum of war. The work is set to a score by Jack Grabow that samples from Eugene Lester’s original composition for Graham.

Graham’s solo Frontier, from 1935, with music by Louis Horst and set by Isamu Noguchi, will be presented alongside Revolt and Immigrant, two lost Graham solos from the late 1920s that have been reimagined and choreographed by Graham 2 director Virginie Mécène. Mécène researched Graham’s early career to get inspiration for her solos through a fellowship from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2023-24.

Letter to Nobody, conceived and created by choreographer and Graham dancer Xin Ying and artist and designer Mimi Yin, is a love letter to Martha Graham, whose influence reaches beyond her physical existence. It is also a love letter to the artists who will never be known by Graham herself but who carry her legacy into the future. It uses generative media approaches, including emerging AI technologies, to extract data from archival footage and bring Martha Graham back to the stage to perform a duet with Xin Ying. Based on the Graham masterwork from 1940 Letter to the World, the new duet takes its inspiration from a poem by Emily Dickinson: “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too? / Then there’s a pair of us!” The manipulated footage of a 1940s performance featuring Graham alongside notable company members including Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham, provides a potent partner for Xin’s solo.
Jamar Roberts’s acclaimed We the People, featuring music by Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens, will also be presented. Described by Roberts “as equal parts protest and lament,” the work serves as a reminder that the power for collective change belongs to the people. We the People premiered as part of the Company’s New York City Center season in April 2024. An audience favorite, Hofesh Shechter’s cathartic CAVE (2022), with an electronic score by Shechter and German duo Âme, also returns this season.

Rounding out the Joyce season is Agnes De Mille’s 1942 classic Rodeo with Aaron Copland’s iconic score reorchestrated for a six-piece bluegrass ensemble by multi-instrumentalist and composer/arranger Gabe Witcher. All of the elements of the Company’s new production of Rodeo are designed to broaden the conversation about this iconic work of Americana while remaining true to de Mille’s classic. The work was set by de Mille repetiteur Diana Gonzalez, and features new costumes by Oana Botez, projected visual design by Beowulf Boritt, and lighting design by Yi-Chung Chen.

There will be a Gala performance celebrating the Company’s 99th season on Tuesday, April 1, at 7pm.

The Company’s biennial University Partners Showcase will be presented on Saturday, April 5, and on Saturday, April 12, the Company will present a special family matinee with programming for ages 8 and up.