In 1936, American choreographer Martha Graham declined an opportunity to appear at the Olympic Games in Germany. It was a rare moment of political dissent; Graham, who had several Jewish dancers in her then-decade-old company, refused to participate in a spectacle rife with Nazi propaganda.
Instead, she made “Chronicle,” a three-part modern dance work responding to and resisting the rise of fascism in Europe.
“Chronicle” premiered in December 1936 in New York. And it closed the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 100th anniversary program, performed Saturday night at the Auditorium Theatre in the company’s first fully produced visit to Chicago in nearly two decades.
Overt political statements were few and far between for Graham. And that has remained the case for America’s oldest dance company since her death in 1991. “Chronicle” is, in some ways, a reflection of that constraint, bookending a gorgeous, abstract sketch on the destruction and displacement of war with a pair of spellbinding solos from Xin Ying, an extraordinary interlocutor of Graham’s technique and mesmerizing presence in the Martha Graham Dance Company for the past 15 years.
It seems no accident that the Graham company chose “Chronicle” as the program’s finale. Earlier this month, they joined a growing list of artists and groups who canceled appearances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where this centennial tour was due to stop in April. The venue, long considered a living monument to the late President John F. Kennedy, has undergone sweeping changes since President Trump took office a year ago.
Unlike Graham herself in 1936, the company did not explicitly give a reason for the cancellation. Artistic director Janet Eilber was equally coy in her curtain speech at the Auditorium Saturday evening, letting the audience draw its own inferences between 1936 and Nazi Germany and the present-day United States. But here’s one parallel: History remembers the choice to decline and reject, often as saliently as other means of dissent. And in America, modern dance at its core is and has always been a rejection of the status quo.
Take the night’s opener, “Diversion of Angels,” Graham’s 1948 musings on various iterations of love. Or “Lamentation,” a 1930 sketch efforting toward pure, guttural emotion within the body. In these and, indeed, all her works, Graham routinely tapped the idiosyncratic, signature vocabulary of her making. Graham’s core principles of contract and release, spiral and breath, were born out of rebellion from the colonialist aesthetics of ballet. In her stead, Graham’s pupils, including Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham and Ohad Naharin, forged their own resistance to Graham’s stanch principles. And on and on.
A century later, the Graham technique’s eccentricities — cupped, flexed palms; copious single leg balances; bouncing bean buoyancy; adults performing cartwheels — make her dances wholly recognizable and perhaps a bit dated. That’s why Eilber has sought to expand her company’s repertory far beyond Graham, including a new addition by Hope Boykin sandwiched between Graham’s works for this tour.
Boykin, whose career on stage spanned two decades at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, clearly knew who she was working with in creating “En Masse,” exploiting a rare chance to serve up Graham’s vocabulary with a contemporary twist on dancers who obviously do it better than anyone else. She leaned so hard into Graham technique, in fact, that at first, it’s difficult to see 2026 in the work.
The air of mid-20th century antiquity is echoed in music by Leonard Bernstein, newly arranged by Christopher Rountree. Selections from Bernstein’s 1971 “Mass” (a work that premiered at the Kennedy Center) serve as a companion for an unearthed theme believed to have been composed for Martha Graham and never performed. Which is which is impossible to tell if you’re unfamiliar with “Mass,” but the dance and its accompaniment seem to portray a kind of time travel through its chunky sections, separated by blackouts. Throughout the piece, costume designer Karen Young gradually adds flowy separates in a spectrum of teals to the simple unitards worn at the beginning of the piece.
In that vein, Boykin prescribes increasingly jubilant, pedestrian passages — outside the Graham company’s comfort zone but easily in the pocket for these magnificent beings. Among the ideas carried through “En Masse’s” fits and starts necessitated by breaks in the music is a tension between the individual and the collective. Tensile bands bind one hand to the other, or one dancer to the other; breaking those bonds initially ignites a kind of collective freak out. As the dancers’ inherent dependence on each other changes from being literally tied together to moving as a group of individuals, “En Masse” begins to simmer — but never quite boils.
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance critic.
