The Tamesis
Modern dance superstar Martha Graham lived a life that almost ended the 20th century, with one eye on antiquity and the other on contemporary times. Her work explores Oedipal lust and spreading fascism. Isamu Noguchi created a series of spare, stunning sets, while designers such as Halston and Calvin Klein later designed the costumes for her stage performers. Although Graham lives in a separate world, with her pioneering athletic style rooted in the contraction and release of the torso, she sees herself woven into the fabric of America.
“Some things are still alive for all of us, even though so long ago,” she wrote in a letter to composer Aaron Copland while they were working on the upbeat Frontier ballet. Appalachian Spring (1944). “America will always be filled with characters who are with us in very real ways.”
Thirty-five years after her death at age 96, Graham is still with us—her ideas rekindled by members of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Graham gave her first show on April 18, 1926, at the now-closed 48th Street Theater in New York; next month, the country’s longest-running theater company will celebrate its centenary with a series of Graham100 shows downtown, not far from where it debuted. As part of the celebrations, a new two-part documentary –we are our time Show on PBS – follows the inner workings of the company through rehearsals and the tour bus until they hit the stage. (After premiering March 27, continuing April 3.) Graham says it’s all about the power of connection: “You’re not dancing to an audience of a thousand. You’re dancing to an audience of a thousand. There’s always one person you’re talking to.”
This documentary looks beyond visionaries—or camp icons, as Susan Sontag described them—to the here and now. The title is a clue, rewriting Graham’s quote into the first person plural. “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; others are just behind it,” she said.
To that end, directors Peter Schnall and Cyndee Readdean focused on the dancers over two and a half years, reserving archival footage for judicious moments like the split-screen section that juxtaposes Graham Elegy (1930) starred long-time principal Leslie Andrea Williams as two incarnations of grief in comfortable purple shrouds. Graham herself appears primarily via voiceover, with her words read by Meryl Streep, another formidable performer today. Editing is nearly complete when a window opens in the actor’s schedule.
