In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • American Modernism:Reimagining Martha Graham’s Lost Imperial Gesture (1935)
  • Kim Jones (bio)

There is probably no audience member alive today who witnessed Graham perform Imperial Gesture, which premiered on November 10, 1935 at the Guild Theater in New York City, and that she last performed in 1938. Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Janet Eilber, invited me to reconstruct Imperial Gesture in 2010. My research is one of a few “reconstructions” to be completed after Graham’s death and added to the Martha Graham Dance Company’s repertory without the choreographer’s explicit approval (Graham died in 1991).1 With neither notation score, musical score, nor living witness, it became clear that I would have to negotiate dance history in a manner that was unprecedented in the Graham Company. Such an honor carries with it accountability; therefore my methodology needed to be thorough and rigorous. In this article, I discuss the process of reimagining Graham’s solo Imperial Gesture, which is based on my situating Graham’s piece as a politically motivated response to her experience as an artist and citizen in the turbulent 1930s. Additionally, I discuss her shifting aesthetic practice in the 1930s with reference to her critics and their observations. Most importantly, I discuss her collaboration with Barbara Morgan, whose thirty-two photographs of Graham from Imperial Gesture were my best source of information.2 Finally, I describe the intra-disciplinary approach used to research and reimagine the work—a collaboration of several artists, points of views, and specializations.

What follows is a brief review of how I have situated the dance, the past, and my own contemporary experience of Graham technique and choreography. In 2006, dance scholar Mark Franko noted the difficulty of researching a past dance using a political lens, and stated that such areas of inquiry are underinvestigated in dance studies. He pointed to a fragmentation of methods at the time when he asked: “Must the social and political entailments of dance, the history of movements within the dance community, and of the sensibility to movement itself, be rigorously segregated within dance studies?” (Franko 2006, 10). Franko further stated that “the methodological challenge we face is to articulate awareness of the traffic between bodies and ideologies acquired by virtue of all that has happened both in dance and in dance studies with the close analysis of how dancing itself actually works” (10). My reimagining process is an attempt to articulate the traffic between bodies in overlapping generations of Graham dancers. Additionally, the process attempts to articulate the ideologies that reconstructions acquired by virtue of all that has happened in the [End Page 51] transmission processes that perpetuate a work, as well as how Graham’s legacy specifically continues to unfold. In this kind of articulation, I specifically consider how dancing in a reconstruction process itself actually works for the dancer/scholar. As a choreographer, I am also conducting a close analysis of Imperial Gesture while staying sensitive to the opinions and experiences of other scholars as well as my collaborators.


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Photo 1.

Dancer Kim Jones performing Imperial Gesture (1935, 2013), Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC.

Photograph by David Bazzle, 2014.

Situating Graham and Her “Great Stiff Skirt”

There are several areas of investigation that helped me to situate Graham’s creation of Imperial Gesture within, as Franko suggests, an intradisciplinary frame of historical, political, social, and cultural ideologies that surrounded the work then and still surround it now. The political, social, and economic factors from the past that affected Graham in 1935 included The Great Depression as a global phenomenon, the rise of Fascism in Europe, worker’s rights, the emergence of American expressive dance, and Bennington College’s School of The Dance Summer program, where Graham continued to codify her technique through her dance making. Imperial Gesture is one of several choreographic works in her repertoire that stands out as overtly political, and it is the first solo to be choreographed and publicly perceived as such.

I did not conduct archival research first and then choreograph; rather the process was integrated. For example Morgan’s photos revealed stilled moments that my own experience...

pdf

Share