After watching ‘Clytemnestra’ tonight and then sort of discussing ‘Appalachian Spring’ I decided to try to find at least a little bit of it on YouTube and post it here. I spent a lot of time this fall watching videos of Graham’s work because at the College of Wooster when you are a senior you have to do this thing called Independent Study and it’s this big huge thing that sucks your life away and me and another dancer took part in a dance major’s I.S. and had to learn a lot of Graham and Nikolais (that was a major run on sentence). After seeing all these tapes I assumed that YouTube of all places would have at least her best known works, but my search resulted in nothing. So instead of a video, you have this lovely story of why there is no video. I find it strange/interesting/frustrating/etc that the enormous impact Martha Graham made in the dance world doesn’t always show up in pop culture.
One of my professors often talks abouts how modern dance should reflect the current state of the world, otherwise it doesn’t have meaning. I’m still not sure if I entirely agree with her on that point. However, Graham seemed to follow that idea in a lot of her pieces, such as Panorama, and yet if you asked 10 people who have never danced before who Martha Graham is, probably only half would be able to tell you who she is with any sort of detail (such as ’she was a dancer’). I’ve played that game before with some of my friends and it amazes me the amount of people who don’t even know that she has any correlation to dance.
Graham had such a steady grasp on the world around her, but today it doesn’t seem to be much of a mutual relationship.
