Martha Graham - Martha Graham Dance Company

Martha Graham Dance Company

See also: Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance

The Martha Graham Dance Company is the oldest dance company in America, founded in 1926. It has helped develop many famous dancers and choreographers of the 20th and 21st centuries including Erick Hawkins, Anna Sokolow, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor. It continues to perform, including at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in June 2008, a program consisting of: Ruth St. Denis' The Incense; Graham's reconstruction of Ted Shawn's Serenata Morisca; Graham's Lamentation; Yuriko's reconstruction of Graham's Panorama, performed by dancers from Skidmore College; excerpts from Yuriko's and Graham's reconstruction of the latter's Chronicle from the Julien Bryan film; Graham's Errand into the Maze and Maple Leaf Rag. The company also performed in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, with a program consisting of: Appalachian Spring, Embattled Garden, Errand into the Maze, and American Original.

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    “We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.”
    —Martha Graham (1894–1991)

    “You’ve strung your breasts
    with a rattling rope of pearls,
    tied a jangling belt
    around those deadly hips
    and clinking jewelled anklets
    on both your feet.
    So, stupid,
    if you run off to your lover like this,
    banging all these drums,
    then why
    do you shudder with all this fear
    and look up, down;
    in every direction?”
    —Amaru (c. seventh century A.D.?, Kashmirian king, compiler, author of some of the poems in the anthology which bears his name. translated from the Amaruataka by Martha Ann Selby, vs. 31, Motilal Banarsidass (1983)

    “But since Thy loud-tongu’d Blood demands Supplies,
    More from BriareusHands, than Argus Eyes,
    I’ll tune Thy Elegies to Trumpet-sounds,
    And write Thy Epitaph in Blood and Wounds!”
    —James Graham Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650)

    “My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
    Shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay.”
    —Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)

    “In the old days, one married a wife; now one forms a company with a female partner, or moves in to live with a friend. And then one seduces the partner, or defiles the friend.”
    —J. August Strindberg (1849–1912)