Like social groups, complex machines are constituted by various inter-related parts, each of which fulfills a specific function, contributing to the whole. In this session, students have the opportunity to consider these inter-related actions, to transfer the actions to bodily movements, to demonstrate movement material for others in the class, …
Martha Graham’s dance theater piece, American Document (1938), featured text written by the choreographer. It was revised by Graham in 1989 and inspired a new work of the same name created by the Martha Graham Dance Company and Ann Bogart’s SITI Company in 2010. All of these iterations sought to …
Pearl Primus was a member of the New Dance Group where she was encouraged by its socially and politically active members to develop her early solo dances dealing with the plight of African Americans in the face of racism. Strange Fruit (1945), a piece in which a woman reflects on …
Subtitled “homelessness – devastation – exile,” Martha Graham’s 1936 dance Steps in the Streets depicts the aftermath of some terrible tragedy. Images seen in the dance can easily be linked to contemporary displacement of people during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, ongoing fighting in Iraq, or the 2005 …
