“It was important for me to not see Martha Graham,” declared Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company. “I didn’t want things that were Graham-esque. We have Graham. We have the most fabulous 20th century choreography that exists, in my opinion. So to bring someone in and ask them to do something like Martha is just too much of a mountain to climb. I really look for people who have developed their own distinct voices and ask them to take inspiration from one of Martha Graham’s ideas, but to create a completely different dance, something that is their own.”
The project about which Eilber is speaking is The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians which is having its world premiere this Saturday at The Soraya in Northridge. The original version by Graham debuted in 1952. But there is no permanent record of that work. All that exists were the memories of one former dancer and a film of one of the eight parts that make up the work, even though the original Canticle was revived in both 1969 and 1987.
“It was kind of a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy if anyone remembers what Xerox was in 1969,” she said of those revivals. “The initial performances were never filmed. So 18 years later many of the original cast came back and tried to remember what they had danced and they put together a revival. That revival was not filmed. In 1987, another 18, 19, 20 years later with an entirely new company, a few of the original cast came back and said, ‘we sort of did this. Maybe we did this. Let’s use our collective knowledge of Martha Graham and put something together.’ So when I was researching bringing it back to the stage again with no filmed record of any of those earlier efforts, I thought I’m not going to pretend that we know what Martha Graham choreographed back in 1952. But we had her structure, we had her blueprints. And I thought that would be great inspiration for some of these young emerging choreographic voices that I wanted to work with. Martha’s blueprint for Canticle for innocent Comedians, with its eight distinct vignettes about nature, gave me an excuse to have eight different choreographers involved.”
Joining one vignette choreographed by Graham and a second recreated by Sir Robert Cohan, a dancer in the original production, are works by Sonya Tayeh, Kristina and Sadé Alleyene, Jenn Freeman, Juliano Nuñez, Micaela Taylor and Yin Yue.
Tayeh may be the best-known of the choreographers for her work on So You Think You Can Dance and her Tony Award-winning choreography for the stage musical Moulin Rouge!
“Sonya’s choreography is very emotionally descriptive. And she has her own physical vocabulary that is quite different from Martha’s. But it’s still this idea of using using motion and movement to describe emotion.”
Emotion and heart are the keys to The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians maintaining a connection to the original work by Graham.
“You’ll see, even in this brand new version, that the emotion is just the emotion that comes through the dancing that we do,” Eilber offered. “Certainly the Martha Graham classics are all about the physicality that she invented to reveal emotion. To reveal, as she said, the inner landscape, the heart and that comes through. That was the core principle in all of her choreography. And I think it’s certainly true of our New Canticle – even though it’s got a great variety of creative artists who have put it together.”
Another artist joining in this project is musician/composer Jason Moran who has created a new score. For the world premiere he will be performing his music live. Two days later he’ll be recording the score for use in other upcoming Martha Graham Dance Company performances of The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians.
“Jason has gone in his own direction. It’s a long piece – long in a good way. It’s about 40 minutes for solo piano. It’s a tour de force for him to play for 40 minutes. Jason had carte blanche and he did not really have direct contact with any of the individual choreographers. He’s been working with Sonya and me. He came into the studio several times and you could just feel the sparks flying once he saw our dancers in person. He sat down at the piano in our studio and just began to create sounds and phrases that went with the choreography Sonya had already created.”
The New York Times, in a review of the 1987 revival, called the original work by Graham one of her “most atypical pieces.” It’s an assessment with which Eilber agrees.
“One reason that made it atypical in 1952 was that Martha Graham was not in it. The works that she was creating in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, for the most part, revolved around her. She was choosing narratives – borrowing stories from the Bible, from Greek myths, from wherever – to have a vehicle for herself as a leading actress and dancer. It wasn’t just a narcissistic trip. She often transformed these stories in genius, revolutionary ways.”
With Canticle, Eilber says, “She’s not creating a vehicle for herself. She’s creating virtuosic solos and duets for her company. So it’s an ensemble work. It does not have a narrative. There’s no bad guy or anything like that. So it’s a much more sort of poetic and abstract idea without a leading lady at the center of it.”
As for the leading lady, Martha Graham, Eilber thinks she’d be very interested and supportive of this new version of her work.
“As long as we’d ask her to bow and bring her up on stage she’d be happy,” Eilber said followed by a joyous laugh. “The other answer is, people think of Martha as the sort of old-fashioned, staid diva who wanted things a certain way, but it was quite the opposite. She was a revolutionary. She embraced change until the last day of her life and was always looking for new. She had an appetite for the new and and she was always looking for ways to astonish her audience; to figure out what was new and what she could do. So I just have to believe that she would be behind us all the way; that she would be interested in the experimentation that we’re doing.”
To watch my full conversation with Janet Eilber, please go here to our YouTube channel.
For tickets and more information on The New Canticle for Innocent Comedians please go here.
Main Photo: Martha Graham takes a bow (Photo by Martha Swope/Courtesy NYPL Archives)
