Martha Graham: movement, energy, motivation

"There's always one person to whom you speak in the audience, one." – Martha Graham

"I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements . . . I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge." – Martha Graham

MARTHA GRAHAM

"Lamentation"

Herta Moselsio
"Lamentation,"ca. summer 1937
Silver gelatin prints 

"Martha Graham's impact on dance was staggering and often compared to that of Picasso's on painting, Stravinsky's on music, and Frank Lloyd Wright's on architecture. Her contributions transformed the art form, revitalizing and expanding dance around the world. In her search to express herself freely and honestly, she created the Martha Graham Dance Company, one of the oldest

dance troupes in America. As a teacher, Graham trained and inspired generations of fine dancers and choreographers. Her pupils included such greats as Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, and countless other performers, actors, and dancers. She collaborated with some of the foremost artists of her time including the composer Aaron Copland and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi." Link

Bronze statuette of a veiled and masked dancer

Title: Bronze statuette of a veiled and masked dancer

Medium; TechniqueBronze

CultureGreek

PeriodHellenistic

Date3rd–2nd century B.C.

DimensionsH. 8 1/16 in. (20.5 cm)

Link to JSTR: Dance Research by Dee Reynolds

Michelangelo’s "Unfinished" Slaves

Michelangelo's "Unfinished" Slaves

Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle

Yvonne Rainer

Trio A

 

MoMA: "Trio A is a well-known dance sequence by Yvonne Rainer. Since its first presentation in 1966 as part of the larger performance The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 at Judson Memorial Church in New York, it has been performed repeatedly in various forms and contexts by dancers and non dancers alike. The piece comprises a sequence of unpredictable movements that unfold in a continuous motion, deliberately opposing familiar dance patterns of development and climax. Trio A is performed at MoMA by Pat Catterson, a professional dancer, and Jimmy Robert and Ian White, two visual artists and nondancers, in front of a projection of a historical recording of Rainer's own 1978 performance of the piece."

"Rainer's work has been linked strongly with minimalist sculpture: she compared the neutral, specific qualities of those objects to her own "work-like" or "task-like," "ordinary" dance, and she collaborated early on with Robert Morris. But The Mind is a Muscle manifests an agitated and contradictory relationship to the idea of "work" in the context of an affluent, postwar America. Wood describes the way the choreography of The Mind is a Muscle proposed a new lexicon of movement that stripped away the gestural conventions of dance or theater narrative in an attempt to present the human subject on her own terms while at the same time manipulating the seductiveness of the image, increasingly being harnessed by capitalism. Rainer's legacy persists through her decision to allow the Trio A from The Mind is a Muscle as a "multiple," distributed by being taught to many dancers and non-dancers, proposing, Wood argues, for the art object as code."
Catherine Wood, MIT Press

Yvonne Rainer and 'Martha Graham' (Richard Move) in 'Trio A'