Martha Graham Dance Company Announces Second Season Of GRAHAM100
The Company's 2024-25 touring kicks off in July with performances in 18 cities across the US and a five-city tour in Spain.
By: A.A. Cristi Jul. 15, 2024
The world-renowned Martha Graham Dance Company has announced the second season of GRAHAM100, a three-season 100th anniversary celebration of Martha Graham and her Company's legacy. Curated under the theme Dances of the Mind, the 2024-25 season focuses on Graham's psychological works, multifaceted women characters, and longtime artistic partnership with renowned visual artist Isamu Noguchi.
The Company's 2024-25 touring kicks off in July with performances in 18 cities across the US and a five-city tour in Spain. The popular Graham Studio Series returns, offering audiences a behind-the-scenes look at the Company in the intimate setting of the Martha Graham Studio Theater. The studio series features a range of programs from showings of new works-in-progress to GrahamDeconstructed events and open rehearsals, all followed by discussions with the Company and special guests.
“Our GRAHAM100 celebration is ever-expanding as we launch into the second season of our three-year centennial,” said Artistic Director Janet Eilber. “The Company is segueing from Martha's Americana of the 1930s to her groundbreaking psychological works of the 40s and 50s. Using characters such as Emily Brontë, Medea, and Clytemnestra, Martha transformed the patriarchal playbook by illuminating and empowering the women of these stories. Our modernist masterworks will be in conversation with our new works by Jamar Roberts, Hofesh Shechter, and Baye & Asa. Meanwhile, we're thrilled that many GRAHAM100 partners around the world—from schools to professional companies—will be dancing Graham classics and creating new Lamentation Variations in celebration of the lasting influence of our historic legacy.”
Graham masterworks to be presented on tour throughout the season include Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), Immediate Tragedy (1937), Appalachian Spring (1944), Dark Meadow Suite (1946), and Diversion of Angels (1948). These classics will be presented alongside Jamar Roberts's powerful We the People featuring music by Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. Called a “bracingly moving…and electrifying new protest dance” by Fjord, the work premiered as part of the Company's American Legacies season at New York City Center in April 2024. Hofesh Shechter's thrilling and pulsating CAVE, with an electronic score by Shechter and German duo Âme, will also be presented. CAVE premiered as part of the Company's season at City Center in 2022.
The Company's New York season in the spring will feature 10 works across three programs. Highlights include three of the great Graham/Noguchi collaborations: Frontier (1935), Errand into the Maze (1947), and Clytemnestra, Act 2 (1958). Her Deaths and Entrances from 1943, featuring set design by Arch Lauterer and costumes by Oscar de la Renta (created for the work's revival in 2005), will be presented for the first time since 2012.
The season will also feature the premiere of an expanded version of Baye & Asa's Cortege, inspired by Graham's 1967 Cortege of Eagles. Baye & Asa's work focuses on Charon, the ferryman who shepherds souls to the underworld. In Graham's work, Charon is a harbinger of Troy's inevitable fall. In their creation, Baye & Asa reimagine this character through a contemporary lens and ask: Who is the ferryman for the fall of the American Empire? The work is set to a score by Aidan Elias that samples from Eugene Lester's original composition.
Excerpts from Cortege will be presented as part of the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim on September 29, 2024. The event will include a discussion with Baye & Asa and Graham Company Artistic Director Janet Eilber. This event culminates a one-week Works & Process LaunchPAD technical residency for the work at the Catskill Mountain Foundation's Orpheum Center for the Performing Arts, including a local community sharing in Tannersville, NY, on September 28, 2024.
As part of the 100th anniversary celebration several other companies will be performing works by Graham in spring 2025. Miami City Ballet will perform Diversion of Angels in Cutler Bay, FL (February 2025), Texas Ballet Theatre is set to perform Maple Leaf Rag in Dallas and Fort Worth (February/March 2025), and Orlando Ballet will perform Maple Leaf Rag in Orlando (March 2025). In April 2025, dancers from across Los Angeles will join forces for The Soraya's second contribution to GRAHAM100. The program will feature LA Dance Project in Clytemnestra Suite, Lula Washington Dance Theater in Deep Song and Satyric Festival Song, and USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in “Ritual to the Sun” from Acts of Light.
Texas Ballet Theatre, LA Dance Project, and Lula Washington Dance Theater are also among the organizations participating in the Company's worldwide Lamentation Variations project, creating new dances inspired by Graham's iconic solo from 1930.
The dancers of the Martha Graham Dance Company are So Young An, Ane Arrieta, Laurel Dalley Smith, Zachary Jeppsen, Meagan King, Lloyd Knight, Antonio Leone, Devin Loh, Marzia Memoli, Amanda Moreira, Ethan Palma, Jai Perez, Anne Souder, Richard Villaverde, Leslie Andrea Williams, and Xin Ying.
Martha Graham Dance Company 2024-2025 Schedule
2024
July 23:
Aspen District Theater, Aspen, CO
July 26-27:
Jackson Hole Center for the Arts, Jackson Hole, WY
September 29:
Works & Process at the Guggenheim, New York, NY
October 11-13:
FSU Center for the Performing Arts, Sarasota, FL
November 22-23:
Celebrity Series Boston, Boston, MA
2025
January 3-4:
Society for Classical Studies, Philadelphia, PA
January 18:
Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa, CA
January 22:
White Bird, Portland, OR
January 25:
The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, La Jolla, CA
January 28:
Artown Reno, Reno, NV
January 31-February 25:
Tennessee Performing Arts Center, Nashville, TN
February 8:
The McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, Stillwater, OK
February 28:
The Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, Long Island, NY
March 15:
Marcus Performing Arts Center, Milwaukee, WI
March 19:
Stevie Eller Dance Theatre, Centennial Hall, Tucson, AZ
March 21:
Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Scottsdale, AZ
April 1-13:
New York Season
April 24:
The Lincoln Center, Fort Collins, CO
April 26:
Macky Auditorium Concert Hall, Boulder, CO
May 17-June 1:
Spain tour (Santander, Oviedo, Bilbao, San Sebastian, and Madrid)
More information is available at marthagraham.org/events.
A schedule for the Graham Studio Series will be available in September 2024. Program details and ticketing information for the Company's New York season will be available in November 2024.
About GRAHAM100
GRAHAM100, a three-season 100th anniversary celebration of Martha Graham's work and her Company's legacy, began in September 2023 and will continue throughout 2026. Known as one of the most influential artistic forces of the 20th century, Martha Graham presented her first performance with a supporting group of dancers on April 18, 1926. Since that date, considered to be the launch of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Graham's groundbreaking and uniquely American style of dance has influenced generations of artists and continues to captivate audiences worldwide. To celebrate its Centennial, the Company is organizing an extensive series of programs and events exploring the diversity and depth of Graham's extraordinary artistic legacy. GRAHAM100 will feature performances, new productions, exhibitions, film screenings, publications, discussions, and educational activities that build on the Company's legacy of innovation and its present and future vision based on this incomparable legacy.
About Martha Graham
Martha Graham (1894-1991) is recognized as a primal artistic force of the 20th century, alongside James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Frank Lloyd Wright. TIME magazine named Martha Graham “Dancer of the Century,” and People magazine named her among the female “Icons of the Century.” The diversity and depth of her extraordinary artistic legacy, often compared to Stanislavsky's Art Theatre in Moscow and the Grand Kabuki Theatre of Japan, is perpetuated in performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company and Graham 2, and by the students of the Martha Graham School.
In 1926, Martha Graham founded her dance company and school while living and working out of a tiny Carnegie Hall studio in midtown Manhattan. In developing her technique, Graham experimented endlessly with basic human movement, beginning with the elemental forms of contraction and release. Using those principles as the foundation, she built a movement vocabulary that would “increase the emotional activity of the dancer's body.” With this pioneering technique, which has been compared to ballet in its scope and magnitude, Graham's 181 dances expose the depths of human emotion through movements that are sharp, angular, jagged, and direct.
As complex as she was prolific, Graham's approach not only revolutionized the art form of dance with an innovative physical vocabulary, she expanded the scope of the art form by rooting works in contemporary social, political, psychological, and sexual contexts, deepening their impact and resonance. Graham's ballets were inspired by a wide variety of sources, including modern painting, the American frontier, religious ceremonies of Native Americans, and Greek mythology. Many of her most important roles portray great women of history and mythology: Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Medea, Phaedra, Joan of Arc, and Emily Dickinson.
As an artist, Martha Graham conceived each new work in its entirety—dance, costumes, and music. During her 70 years of creating dances, she collaborated with such artists as sculptor Isamu Noguchi; actor and director John Houseman; fashion designers Halston, Donna Karan, and Calvin Klein; and renowned composers including Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Norman Dello Joio, Louis Horst (her mentor), Gian Carlo Menotti, William Schuman, and Carlos Surinach.
Always a fertile ground for experimentation, Martha Graham and her Company have been an unparalleled resource in nurturing many leading choreographers and dancers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Jacqulyn Buglisi, Merce Cunningham, Sir Robert Cohan, Erick Hawkins, Pearl Lang, Donald McKayle, Elisa Monte, Anna Sokolow, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp. She created roles for classical ballet stars such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, and Rudolf Nureyev, welcoming them as guests into her Company. In charge of movement and dance at The Neighborhood Playhouse, she taught actors such as Bette Davis, Kirk Douglas, Anne Jackson, Madonna, Liza Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Tony Randall, and Joanne Woodward how to use the body as an expressive instrument.
Martha Graham's uniquely American vision and creative genius earned her numerous honors and awards, such as The Laurel Leaf of the American Composers Alliance in 1959 for her service to music. Her colleagues in theater, the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local One, voted her the recipient of the 1986 Local One Centennial Award for Dance, not to be awarded for another 100 years. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford bestowed upon Martha Graham the United States' highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and declared her a “national treasure,” making her the first dancer and choreographer to receive this recognition. Graham received another presidential honor when President Ronald Reagan named her among the first recipients of the United States National Medal of Arts in 1985.
About the Martha Graham Dance Company
The Martha Graham Dance Company has been a leader in the evolving art form of modern dance since its founding in 1926. It is both the oldest dance company in the United States and the oldest integrated dance company.
Today, the Company is embracing a new programming vision that showcases masterpieces by Graham alongside newly commissioned works by contemporary artists. With programs that unite the work of choreographers across time within a rich historical and thematic narrative, the Company is actively working to create new platforms for contemporary dance and multiple points of access for audiences.
Since its inception, the Martha Graham Dance Company has received international acclaim from audiences in more than 50 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The Company has performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House, Covent Garden, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as at the base of the Great Pyramids in Egypt and in the ancient Odeon of Herodes Atticus theater on the Acropolis in Athens. In addition, the Company has also produced several award-winning films broadcast on PBS and around the world.
Though Martha Graham herself is the best-known alumna of her company, the Company has provided a training ground for some of modern dance's most celebrated performers and choreographers. Former members of the Company include Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Paul Taylor, John Butler, and Glen Tetley. Celebrities who have joined the Company in performance include Mikhail Baryshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, Tiler Peck, Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo, and Aurelie Dupont.
In recent years, the Company has challenged expectations and experimented with a wide range of offerings beyond its main stage performances. It has created a series of intimate in-studio events, forged unusual creative partnerships with the likes of SITI Company, Performa, the New Museum, Barney's New York, and the Greek Theater Festival in Siracusa, Italy (to name a few); created substantial digital offerings with Google Arts and Culture, YouTube, and Cennarium; and created a model for reaching new audiences through social media. The astonishing list of artists who have created works for the Graham dancers in the last decade reads like a catalog of must-see choreographers: Kyle Abraham, Aszure Barton, Baye & Asa, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Lucinda Childs, Marie Chouinard, Michelle Dorrance, Nacho Duato, Mats Ek, Andonis Foniadakis, Liz Gerring, Larry Keigwin, Michael Kliën, Pontus Lidberg, Lil Buck, Lar Lubovitch, Josie Moseley, Richard Move, Bulareyaung Pagarlava, Annie-B Parson, Yvonne Rainer, Jamar Roberts, Hofesh Shechter, Sonya Tayeh, Doug Varone, Luca Vegetti, Gwen Welliver, and Robert Wilson.
The current Company dancers hail from around the world and, while always grounded in their Graham core training, can also slip into the style of contemporary choreographers like a second skin, bringing technical brilliance and artistic nuance to all they do—from brand-new works to Graham classics and pieces from early pioneers such as Isadora Duncan, Jane Dudley, Anna Sokolow, and Mary Wigman. “Some of the most skilled and powerful dancers you can ever hope to see,” according to The Washington Post. “One of the great companies of the world,” says The New York Times, while the Los Angeles Times notes, “They seem able to do anything, and to make it look easy as well as poetic.”
For more information about the Company, visit www.marthagraham.org.
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