GRAHAM100, a Three-Year Celebration of the Martha Graham Centenary, Premieres at The Soraya

The Soraya opens its 2023-24 season with a history-making performance featuring the nation’s oldest dance company.  The Martha Graham Dance Company turns 100 and launches its three-year centennial celebration at The Soraya on Saturday, September 30, a celebration that will subsequently travel to theaters around the nation and be celebrated worldwide. 

GRAHAM100 will stretch over three years, and the first year’s theme is American Legacies.  To inaugurate that celebration, The Soraya presents a program that spans more than 100 years—from an early work performed by Graham in 1915 Los Angeles, to a new rendering of Agnes De Mille’s groundbreaking Rodeo. 

Continuing The Soraya’s tradition of pairing live music with the Graham performances, musical ensemble Wild Up, with Artistic Director and Conductor Christopher Rountree, will join the dancers to provide a live performance of the Carlos Chavez score for Dark Meadow Suite. For Rodeo, a new musical arrangement of Aaron Copland’s original score will be composed and performed by fiddler Gabe Witcher who will be joined by his bluegrass ensemble.  This new musical rendering was co-commissioned by and will be recorded at the Soraya, in preparation for ongoing touring, a significant contribution to the Graham centenary.

“The Martha Graham Dance Company has made The Soraya its West Coast home since 2015, and now audiences can expect to experience the beauty of the Martha Graham Dance Company at The Soraya through our 2025-26 Season,” said Thor Steingraber, The Soraya Executive and Artistic Director. “The early days of Graham’s life as a dancer were spent right here in Southern California, and so The Soraya ensured that Los Angeles plays a major role in the Martha Graham Dance Company’s centenary.”
 

In a recent interview with The Soraya, Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance company, said the company takes pride in knowing it is the oldest in the United States—and the legacy deserves more than just one celebration when it turns 100 in 2026.  “A celebration encompassing 100 years of artistic innovation informed by vast social, political, and technological changes, needs a broader canvass than one season can provide!” Eilber said. 

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