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The unintentional irony of the immensely tall Richard Move’s personification of Martha Graham in the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 80th Anniversary Celebration revealed the essentiality of her transgender art form for a new century. He well deserved the honor for keeping the technique and quest of Martha alive in the shadows of the official New York dance world during the crucial millennial passage in which performance of her works was officially banned. |
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Move as Martha – Lisa Paul Streitfeld
The unintentional irony of the immensely tall Richard Move’s personification of Martha Graham in the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 80th Anniversary Celebration revealed the essentiality of her transgender art form for a new century. He well deserved the honor for keeping the technique and quest of Martha alive in the shadows of the official New York dance world during the crucial millennial passage in which performance of her works was officially banned. Bypassing the early 20th century movement of which she was a female figurehead and ignoring the postmodernist breakdown of these forms to follow, Move’s leap from the underground to the NYU Skirball Center highlights Graham’s quest for vital and alive expression of holism for the 21st century. This emerging icon, the hieros gamos, is captured by Move in a dangerously brilliant impersonation that utilizes the angular thrust of Graham’s kundalini charged body and vocal language as missiles to launch a new order of gender equality. Within the chronological structure of this illuminating evening, Graham’s legendary quest to capture the transmigration of the Goddess through world cultures was ironically achieved in the universalism of her final work, Maple Leaf Rag. In this light-hearted piece of Americana, dancing partners on a tightrope created joyful mandalas of gender equality in dynamic motion.
