1st Place: $500 cash prize and a Martha Graham Dance Company T-Shirt:
JOHN BLANCHARD
2nd Place: $250 cash prize and a Martha Graham Dance Company T-Shirt:
SARA SARCUNI
3rd Place: $250 cash prize and a Martha Graham Dance Company T-Shirt:
PAUL MORALES
CONGRATULATIONS!
ON-LINE VOTING FOR THE TOP TEN “POPULAR CHOICE” VIDEOS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MAY 31ST!!!!
Thanks to all of you who have participated!
Blakeley White-McGuire, a principal dancer for the Martha Graham Dance Company, writes about her experience performing Clytemnestra in Paris via Dance Magazine : http://www.dancemagazine.com/blogs/guest-blog/2775
Today is the final day of the Martha Graham Company’s week-long run at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. What a thrill! It’s been a bit tiring dealing with jet lag, language differences, long work days in the theater, interviews, classes and even company auditions. But in my opinion, it has been a tremendous success.
Of the three programs we presented here, I danced in Errand Into the Maze, Maple Leaf Rag, Clytemnestra, Chronicle, and Lamentation Variations. My regular repertory was pared down since I am recovering from an injury; I even have off for the final show tonight. Typically, I don’t enjoy nights off; like any other dancer I’d rather be onstage. Tonight, however, I took it as an opportunity to get a new point of view and had fun sitting with the audience in such a beautiful theater to experience the dance with them. The closing evening’s performance was Clytemnestra, Graham’s evening-length work based on the Greek legend of the House of Atreus.
This lost pop-princess is hurt. Jealousy has turned her into a criminal. In this video Clytemnestra (Nastia) anticipates murdering her husband. Love kills…
Daniel has a secret. Things haven’t changed from the days of the Greek Legend Clyemnestra, drama, deception, jealousy and murder are still everywhere and this popular star has a role to play in these sinful games. No more Trojan Horses needed, in this age of technology, Daniel has a different kind of wireless communication as the Messenger of Death.
Our residency at NYU will conclude this Friday with a very special showing of Clytemnestra. We’re very glad to say that seats are completely sold out. However, if you’re an NYU student, I would encourage you to try your luck - sometimes there are no-shows.
This past week, we have been working through Clytemnestra, and have had many guests visit us during rehearsals. Another exciting event featured a performance and panel discussion with Janet Eilber, Deborah Jowitt, Bruce Altshule, and Gay Morris. The panel was moderated by Julie Malnig and included an insightful response by Sharon Friedman. A few people asked about the supertitles we are including in the production. In response, we will be posting the full text right here. Check back shortly.
Additionally, if you were at any of these events or showings, leave your impressions here.
We’d love to hear what you thought.
Finally, take a look at our YouTube page. We recently redesigned it, in preparation for A VERY SPECIAL SURPRISE.
This video features Blakeley White McGuire performing the role of Cassandra during a rehearsal.
Regards to all of you who were part of the Skidmore residency! Even though the Graham Company’s schedule was beyond full in the weeks following Skidmore, we have missed you and our time together. Many of us have commented on the remarkable synergy created at Skidmore — a combination of hard work, concentration, discovery, accomplishment and above all, creativity. This was all simmered in a wonderful connection between different levels of artistry — students, emerging artists, professional artists. Everyone involved in the residency fit under each of these categories at one point or another, and we were surrounded by this amazing creative energy and exchange.
Our work at Skidmore has inspired us to find new ways to connect with young artists and develop new possibilities with university students. We’re currently planning a residency at New York University — the next step in the Clytemnestra Project — and exploring ideas to involve students and audiences at other campuses. In the next few weeks, we’ll be alerting you to Clytemnestra ReMashed, an online competition that is based on your Name-calling projects (!)
We’d love to hear more about you and “Life After Skidmore” — what’s your perspective on your Graham experience now that you’ve had a few weeks to think about it? Has it inspired any changes in the way you dance, the way you think, the way you live? Do you miss us at all?
Also: Do you have any ideas for us about staying connected? Is anybody interested in participating in a Q&A with company members? Any projects that we might initiate online that would engage you and others? A live chat of some kind?
While we wait for the answers to roll in, check out some of your colleagues in this new video posted on YouTube and Carly’s blog for Dance Spirit
Make some noise! We want to hear from you!
Hugs to each of you,
Janet
Yes, it has only been a day since the Martha Graham workshop ended, and my body’s going through contraction withdrawal. Maybe I’m being a bit melodramatic, but it was Martha who showed the world that the hysteria of one’s emotions is meant to be personafied into a public display of generalizations of humanity. Yet, unlike the foe poets and misguided artists, I’ve come to accept the honesty behind Martha’s works.
These past three weeks has been an interesting experience that unfolded in an elevated simplistic manor. What I mean by this is that my objective prior to the workshop was succeeded by the end of the program, but it was a padded-down process that forced me to go beyond a technical experience supported by a legend’s name and rethink my role as a dancer/ my role as an installation artist. As a dancer, you are requested to perform a variation of artistic expression in a confined space, and you are lucky enough to even be given the chance to perform, but most importantly you are lucky enough to understand why you are there.
The other night Peter Sparling conducted a presentation of his dance media works that he has been working on for the past few years, and he really caught my attention when he asked, “How do we as dancers document our portraits?” That was one of the first times that I ever felt invited to think of dance in a space separate from sprung floors and dusty curtains. As a dancer it is easy to fall into the pattern of bounding your thought to the hope of one day earning the accomplishment of performing in a “Major” dance company. But the idea that dancers are individuals portraying physical literature that deems the possibility of showcasing honest self-expression is completely liberating and once again invites the dancer to create and not just imitate. I realize that the great thing about doing Graham is the ability to reconstruct masterworks, but the most interesting thing that I took from doing Graham is gaining the courage to ask why I am here and an inspiration to create my own work.
Honestly, I hope I am making sense, because I’m just allowing my thoughts to sprinkle onto the page. So I sum this up with the contentment of surviving a legendary experience. The people I met were incredible, the work was intriguing, and I’m still thinking. It’s good to know that in my mind it is not over, because too often we conclude our experiences when a deadline is given. But I’m still regurgitating all this stuff that has accumulated in my mind the past three weeks. So Cheers to everyone who made this experience possible and I hope everyone gained somethings out of it.
Over the past three weeks every time I spoke to any of my friends or family on the phone or wrote them emails about the dance intensive, I was met with the phrase “You sound so happy.” And I guess at the very core of it, that’s why we dance. I know that’s why I dance. Because even when I’m doing a dance full of sadness, I can’t help but feel good about getting to dance. At some point in these three weeks, one of the company members said, “Above all we are movers. We need to move. That’s why we dance.” And it’s true.
The Graham technique is about expressing emotions through movement and although I understood that before attending this intensive, I never really applied it to my dancing. I didn’t think of all the despair in the world when I contracted or all the happiness in my life when I released, but now I do. Maybe not exactly those thoughts, but I have a deeper understanding of why movement becomes more powerful when you put genuine emotions behind it.
The pure joy of moving, of being able to display your inner emotions through your body, is what we as dancers live for; there a very few things that feel better than learning a dance in 5 days, cleaning it in 4, some how creating this weird little ensemble and performing it in front of hundreds of people almost flawlessly while dancers you admire stand in the wings watching. There was a lot of adrenaline pumping through our veins that night. So much so that as we bowed, both the person to my left and to my right’s hands were shaking as well as mine. And it was great. And it all came from the fact that the 35 or so of us need to move in order to live.
One of the coolest things about this program was being able to sit in on rehearsals. To wittness the process of putting a show together, is an opportunity that doesn’t happen very often. To be able to see the Martha Graham Company’s Clytemnestra come together piece by piece has been really educational and inspiring. Especially since we learned pieces from the name-calling and watched the older version of the piece, we had a greater understanding and deeper connection to the work. Watching the open rehearsal for the prologue to Clytemnestra was amazing. At the end I wish I could have seen more!
From watching some of the rehearsals for Clytemnestra, I was able to see bits and pieces of the work in progress, and so it was really interesting to see all the pieces come together at the open rehearsal. I really hope I am able to see Clytemnestra when the company comes to NYC next year, I am really looking forward to seeing how the whole work comes together. To have the opportunity to see the inner workings of a company has been an amazing experience and really was one of the best parts of the program.
Tonight, at 7:30pm, we will be streaming all student composition work, as well as a LIVE rendition of Panorama, and a few special surprises.
You can watch the video below, or follow the link here.
Check back at 7:30pm for this very exciting event!
While you’re waiting, you can check out some of our other videos.
This is an interview with Blakeley White-Mcguire, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. This interview was conducted by the students learning the part of Elektra from Blakeley at Skidmore College’s Summer Dance Intensive.
You can find a link to the video here
