The Ongoing Innovation of Martha Graham Dance

It’s appropriate that Santa Barbara gets the third stop on the Martha Graham Dance Company’s (MGDC) new tour, the beginning of a three-year celebration of the legendary dancer-choreographer’s work and legacy in anticipation of MGDC’s centennial in 2026. After all, Graham graduated from Santa Barbara High after her family moved here from Pittsburgh when she was 14, and it’s where she first started her lifelong love of dance. 

“The contrast in the culture and the light and the space was life-changing for her,” explained Janet Eilber, who has been artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, School, and Archives since 2005 after a performing career that included a long stint dancing under Graham. “She really credited all those elements with her approach to theater and dance.”

Graham, of course, is credited with innovating an American art form, creating a revolution in dance, one borne of her beliefs that the rhythms, the physicality and the mentality of our nation were unique, as was our relationship to time and space, the spirit to be imbued in the dance, Eilber said. 

“Her genius was based on her own intuitive sense of body language and the challenges of being human,” she said. “She took that idea of identifying how a person feels by the way they move, and she turned that into a dance language.”

Graham’s vast output and influence made a three-year celebration a fitting approach to marking the milestone of her company. 

“There is just so much in her history and legacy that there was no way to fit it into one season,” Eilber said. 

Eilber came up with three themes in putting together the programs for the seasons. “American Legacies,” highlighting Graham’s social activism, Americana, and modernism, will be followed by “Dances of the Mind,” focusing on the choreographer’s more psychological works, and “The Masterpieces,” examining the question “What is an American?” from Graham’s 1939 work, American Document.

Each individual program will feature at least one of Graham’s works and one by her contemporaries as well as new pieces representing either recent repertory work or commissions. But calling them classics vs. contemporary, or tradition vs. innovation doesn’t fit, Eilber said. 

“Martha Graham and her company were always on the forefront of the art field. It’s only as the company got older that tradition started to creep in,” she said. We couldn’t be a museum until we had a collection, and the collection was created out of innovation. My job has been to continue that trajectory of innovation and use it as a frame for what we now call our classics.”

To that end, MGDC will perform Graham’s 1946 modernist work Dark Meadow Suite and, for the first time, Agnes de Mille’s 1942 Americana classic Rodeo, alongside CAVE, a 2022 high-energy work by Hofesh Shechter that serves as a visceral collective movement experience drawn from the rave and techno club scene. For its reconstruction of Rodeo, the company commissioned a reimagining of Aaron Copland’s score from composer-arranger-fiddler Gabe Witcher of Punch Brothers, who will lead a live bluegrass ensemble on stage. 

“Copland borrowed actual American cowboy songs and wove them into his score, so by orchestrating it for bluegrass, we’re almost returning those songs to their roots,” Eilber said. 

While CAVE pushes a much more extreme edge, Eilber said it’s all part and parcel of Graham’s legacy. 

“When you put the new works on a program with ‘classics,’ the audience experiences the trajectory of dance,” she said. “Today’s choreographers are the beneficiaries of this legacy of innovation, the history of contemporary dance for the last over 100 years. The classic works bring a historic perspective to the new works and the new works bring a fresh eye to the classics.”

Martha Graham Dance performs at 8 pm Wednesday, October 4, at the Granada Theatre. For tickets and information call or visit (805) 899-2222 www.granadasb.org or (805) 893-3535 | https://artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.