100 Years on, martha graham’s dancers still make america confront its own reflection
The curtain at New York City Center will rise next month on a body that first contracted in 1926. One hundred seasons later, the Martha Graham Dance Company is betting that contraction—spine folding inward like a question mark—still answers something about the States.
The gamble is a two-week sprint called Graham100, timed to the exact calendar square when a 31-year-old reject from the Denishawn school rented a 48th-Street dump and dared an audience to watch her “stand and fall.” She kept falling forward for seven decades, mapping fascism, fratricide, frontiers and Freud onto a pelvis that never lied. Now the troupe she never wanted fossilised is unpacking those same maps for viewers who scroll faster than they breathe.
Why pbs just handed meryl streep a dead woman’s diary
The bait is We Are Our Time, a diptych landing on PBS 27 March and 3 April. Directors Peter Schnall and Cyndee Readdean spent 30 months inside Westbeth’s top-floor catacomb—soon to be pickleball country—filming dancers who trade H-1B gossip while warming up the same Achilles that once carried Merce Cunningham to Merce’s own exit. Their rule: no sepia porn. Graham appears mostly as disembodied voice, read by Streep, who chose to record seated because “I’ve only seen Martha sitting.” The effect is séance, not syllabus.
Archival heroin hits arrive, but only in split-screen combat: Graham in 1930’s Lamentation versus Leslie Andrea Williams in the same tube of purple jersey, both women kneading grief like dough. The cut lasts 12 seconds. It took the editors six weeks to calibrate—long enough to remind you that grief, like cotton, stretches but never snaps.
A former alvin ailey star learns to curse in contraction
Episode one trails Jamar Roberts, Ailey royalty, as he builds We the People on Rhiannon Giddens’ banjo riffs. Roberts thought he knew grounded—then Graham feet showed him earthquake. His soloist Lloyd Knight ends the piece face-down, wrists crossed like an arrest. Opening night in Minneapolis fell two weeks after Amir Locke’s body camera went viral; 2,000 seats sold out. No one mentionned the word protest in the lobby, but the program note quoted Graham’s 1938 warning: “The body says what words cannot.”
Janet Eilber, artistic director since 2005, keeps a running tally of visas and ticket stock in the same Moleskine. Her mantra, repeated on camera: “We’re not a museum; we’re a relay.” Translation: commission, tour, fundraise, repeat, all before the next hurricane redecorates the basement.
China, bologna and the skirt that refused black-and-white
Episode two chases the company through Shanghai’s thaw and a Bologna square where Williams whips Spectre-1914 so hard the red-lined skirt draws blood from the lens. The directors intercut Graham’s 1936 refusal to dance for Hitler with a 2023 visa stamp. No narrator spells out the parallel; the frame does the talking. Schnall’s only concession to color was that skirt. “Cyndee wouldn’t let me drain the red,” he admits. Fascism, apparently, films better in RGB.
Back home, high-schoolers in Minneapolis re-choreograph American Document with Zoom recordings of parents crossing deserts. The finished mash-up includes Ecuadorian sanjuanito and Oromo shoulder dance. Eilber calls it “mind-blowing”; the accountant calls it “grant fodder.” Both are right.
Westbeth’s last plié and the pickleball court next door
By May, the company abandons its flood-damaged lair for a Midtown tower where Broadway ensembles rehearse Hamilton next door. Rent is triple, but the new studio comes with a sports-science annex. Eilber already plots warm-up drills around neon balls. “If it pays the knees, we’ll dance on asphalt,” she shrugs.
The documentary ends where the tour begins: City Center, two blocks from the 48th-Street hole that once smelled of fresh sawdust and bootleg gin. Graham’s recorded voice, filtered through Streep’s larynx, lands the last word: “No artist is ahead of her time. She is her time.” The lights cut to black on 500 dancers past and present, breathing in the same four-count. One century, zero funeral.