(274) Reimagining lost works of Martha Graham: with Janet Eilber and Christopher Rountree
Today on ‘Conversations On Dance', we are joined by Janet Eilber, the artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company and Wild Up musical director Christopher Rountree. Janet and Christopher have been working together to revive and re-envision the choreographic works of 20th century giant Martha Graham and their accompanying musical compositions. They talk to us about their process in re-envisioning these works, how they attempt to inhabit the minds of the creative geniuses who bore them, and why these works are still relevant to audiences today.
The Soraya performing arts venue in Los Angeles, CA has been an integral part of these restoration projects and will be the first to present the latest project ‘The New Canticle for Comedians', a reimagined upgrade to a Graham work that was almost entirely lost. The premiere of ‘New Canticle' is this March 19, 2022. If you are in the Los Angeles area, you can find tickets at thesoraya.org or click here for tickets https://www.thesoraya.org/calendar/details/mgdc-2022.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:01]:
I'm Rebecca King Ferraro.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:02:27]:
And I'm Michael Sean Breeden, and you're listening to Conversations on Dance. Today on Conversations on Dance, we are joined by Janet Elbert, the artistic director of the Martha Graham dance company, and Wild up musical director Christopher Roundtree. Janet and Christopher have been working together to revive and re envision the choreographic works of 20th century giant Martha Graham and their accompanying musical compositions. They talk to us about their process in reenvisioning these works, how they attempt to inhabit the minds of the creative geniuses who bore them and why these works are still relevant to audiences today. The Serieh Performing Arts venue in Los Angeles, California has been an integral part of these restoration projects and will be the first to present the latest project, the New Canticle for Comedians, a reimagined upgrade to a gram work that was almost entirely lost. The premiere of New Canticle is this March 19. The if you are in the Los Angeles area, you can find tickets@thesariah.org.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:03:28]:
So thank you both so much for joining us this afternoon. We've been janet, we've had the pleasure of talking to you before on our podcast. And Christopher, we're so eager to hear about the work you're doing right now with Janet. But before we get into that, can we just get a little bit of background from both of you, how you came upon your respective art form and what that looked like in terms of guiding you into professional career.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:03:56]:
Janet, we'll start with you.
Janet Eilber [00:03:58]:
How I came upon dance.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:04:00]:
Yes.
Janet Eilber [00:04:01]:
In my life. Captain Kangaroo, which you all probably don't remember as a children's show in the 50s, had a treasure house ballerina and I just told my mom that's what I wanted to do and started once a week ballet lessons in Detroit where I lived. And I went to the Interlock and Arts Academy. My parents were on the faculty there where I got 4 hours of dance every day. With my high school training, I went on to Juilliard. I was introduced to the Martha Graham style and technique at Juilliard and from there went into Martha's company and just kept going.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:04:38]:
I love the two minute abbreviation of Janet's entire life.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:04:44]:
How about you, Christopher?
Christopher Rountree [00:04:47]:
I grew up in an ashram in Santa Monica, California and I was chanting and meditating as a little kid and so classical music was pretty out there for my entire family. But I started singing in choirs in school. I played violin as a little kid and hated it because it hurt my neck. I was an aspiring pianist and then I couldn't practice enough as a little kid and the I somehow found my way to the trumpet and then the trombone and the euphonium, and I became a brass player. And so I'm a brass player, which is perhaps a dirty secret, but I had played a violin piano as a little kid and I loved making music with people and I loved, I think, the social part about it. And then in high school, I decided I wanted to teach and so I went to school for education. And honestly, this is true actually I was listening to Philip Glass all of high school just driving around my Toyota Camry and just like listened on the beach until I couldn't take it anymore. But I hadn't heard Beethoven until I got to college, so I kind of learned about classical music in a way kind of in reverse. And then I kind of got the conducting bug at some point in college. And then I realized once I saw like I met other conductors, I was like, I'm not like these folks, but I don't know how. Probably because they started conducting when they were like ten, at least if they were in Europe they did, but also that I kind of felt like an art school kid. So as it's turned out, I've made this career where most of my work are collaborations in fields that are not necessarily in classical music, which we're definitely.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:06:25]:
Here to hear more about, that's for sure. Janet, let's pop back to you for a second and talk about how your directorship of the Martha Graham Dance Company came about.
Janet Eilber [00:06:36]:
Wow, that's a checkered past. I danced with the company all through the as a guest artist in the then went off and did some Broadway shows and some television shows as an actress. And after Martha's death, the company never really focused on who and what they were going to be after the loss of a genius and fell into financial troubles and legal troubles. And in the 2002, the organization emerged victorious out of a couple of court cases that challenged her copyrights and the trademark of her name. And I was asked to organize our archives, which at that point were about 85 years of everything in the world from sets to costumes to ballets, photos, scores, whatever. And I began our licensing business and then in 2005 took over as artistic director, overseeing that business, what we called our resources, our archives and our licensing. The Martha Graham School, which is the oldest school of modern dance in the country, and the company which is the oldest company of modern dance of any kind of dance.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:08:00]:
Was there any sort of plan at all in place for Martha's passing and what would come next or was it really just completely everything was caught off guard and you guys kind of had to pick up the pieces and decide where to go from there.
Janet Eilber [00:08:14]:
In terms of the work, there was no plan in place. Martha had an associate artistic director who was not trained arts administrator or artist of any kind and was just kind of running the company on a wing and a prayer and there really wasn't any plan for it. And at the time, modern dance of the 20th century was just thought of as kind of old. It's just old stuff. Modern dance was all about the future. Every generation rejected what the past generation had done and moved into the future. So we had this body of work, our core collection, which really was undervalued the whole field, needed to think about what we were going to do with our past. So when I took over as artistic director, that was kind of not only Martha Graham Dance Company was in the position of having to reflect on the value of our 20th century works, but the entire field really had to start valuing its past, right?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:09:32]:
Yeah. I'm very eager to get into the work both of you are doing together to bring value to that very important past. But before we do, I'm kind of curious to hear, firstly, Chris, what your relationship to dance has been prior to this collaboration, and then, Janet way your relationship is to music. I mean, I think for for dancers, it's very, quite rare that you would dance to silence. I mean, you always have some sort of rhythm. So music is almost inherently tied to dance. But, of course, music can exist in many ways without dance. So let's have Chris go first.
Christopher Rountree [00:10:12]:
I'm a terrible dancer, and weddings terrify me for the same reason. And although I guess I've been called a balletic conductor before, so I think there's certain types of conductors who I mean, the other way to say it is over conducting. Some conductors are incredibly economical, and some, like me, move quite a lot. Certainly that word has been used, I guess.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:10:40]:
Is that like, a choice that you make, or is it just something that comes very naturally to you and the music quite literally moves you?
Christopher Rountree [00:10:47]:
Well, I think I'm sure I imagine it's similar for dancers, but at some point you stop thinking about the technique and you start acting, just start existing. And the technique is always there. And I'm always, like, considering my occipital joint and considering how much tension, considering how free and available my neck is, so that I'm not ruining my back and ruining my traps.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:11:07]:
Lats.
Christopher Rountree [00:11:09]:
So I'm aware of the body, but when I'm thinking about the score, it's no longer technical. It's something that I just kind of like I'm trying to just be in it. And what that's meant is that I've kind of lost all of the things that my teacher taught me. My first teacher is Jonah Carniera, who's from Lisbon, and she conducts in this way that is totally swimming. She's always kind of doing the breaststroke. I rarely use a baton, and she always does, but there's this kind of, like, lilt thing that she does with her arm. The teacher I had right after her, who is also her teacher as well, a guy named Ken Keesler. Ken is very clear. It's all about clarity and quite American. He's from the French kind of lineage, but it's quite this American style. So I've kind of somehow defaulted to my earliest training, and I've gotten kind of more I'm swimming more as I age, I guess.
Janet Eilber [00:12:07]:
Chris is definitely dancing. We worked with Chris just back in October, and the dancers were watching him during a rehearsal. And he uses the same leverage off the floor that dancers does. I mean, his entire body is involved with the music and with transmitting the beat to I don't know the terms for this, Chris, to the orchestra, but it's totally leveraging the floor the way a dance would.
Christopher Rountree [00:12:40]:
That's great to hear that it's all physics and it's all breath. I think with the way that I am a brass player, I was many years ago, so I always think about breath, even for string players, who, of course, are breathing as they take their attack as well. And so constantly, I'm in that mode, using same physics to do I was.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:13:03]:
Just going to say, I bet Martha Graham dancers think about breath here and there, don't they?
Janet Eilber [00:13:07]:
Of course, I was going to say dance is the same thing. It's all physics and breath.
Christopher Rountree [00:13:13]:
Here we are, we're meeting in physics and bread.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:13:16]:
So, Chris, what was your first introduction to then conducting for Dance?
Christopher Rountree [00:13:21]:
Yeah, so in my senior recital in college, I said we should stage some pieces. And so we did an Appalachian Spring, which in which there was like I mean, it had nothing to do with the grand choreography whatsoever. I think it was like somebody like, rolled someone else was rolled in a tarp and they carried them across the stage. It was like I went to the dance department and I said, who wants to make some work as one does? I think it involved, like, a funeral of every single one of my dance friends at that, you know, not not an actual funeral, but on stage. And the we and so and I also have my senior recital. We did Strainsky's. Octet. There's a choreography for that as well. And then I hadn't conducted for Dance for a long time. I did a show with Diablo Dance Company that's in Los Angeles at the Serieh, which is also where I've collaborated with Martha Graham Dance Company and Janet over the last five or six years. And then after that, Thor, who runs the venue there, he said, hey, you should meet Janet and we should talk about this project together. That's the beginning of our relationship.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:14:31]:
Right? I wanted to know about that, to know how you came to know one another and then collaborate. Let's rewind for a second and talk about this magnificent archive that the Graham Company has, this rich history, but Sandy was kind of a wake up call when there was a lot of these wonderful archival costumes and footage and photos just completely lost. So what was your reaction to that loss, Janet, and how did you seek to kind of, I guess, prevent further loss and then bolster what was still around?
Janet Eilber [00:15:12]:
Yeah, I think we should probably clarify. You're talking about Superstorm Sandy just for anybody out there doesn't know what Sandy did to us. We had all of our archives down in the basement of the building where we have our studios, and they were underwater for almost two weeks. So it was I don't know where to begin. It was devastating. It was hard work. We were down there once they pumped enough water out of there, we were down there practically in hip waiters and hazmat suits, pulling over 5000 costumes out of the water. And fortunately, the Smithsonian and many other organizations around America sent conservator type people to New York to help us to help the city government with the files that were underwater down at City Hall. And they said, Just send those. They're wet already. Just put them in the washing machine. So we managed to salvage everything in order to copy it. If it wasn't wearable again, we could copy it. Fortunately, our films and photos were on the second floor, so we didn't lose those important records of our work, but our noguchi sets and all sorts of posters and software equipment, theater equipment. Yeah, it was really devastating. But we did not miss a performance. We borrowed costumes from companies who had licensed our ballets and quickly loaned us things so we could put things together and sort of got through that next year and applied to FEMA grants and began reconstructing things as quickly as we could.
Christopher Rountree [00:17:14]:
Wow.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:17:15]:
My goodness. So when did you guys let's go now to your collaboration. And now Thor has introduced you at the Serie A. You guys have initially met. What are your first conversations like? You've had this tremendous loss of records and some work, and maybe that's in your mind. Janet, what are you guys kind of talking about and thinking about how you can work together?
Janet Eilber [00:17:41]:
Chris? I think the first time we met, it wasn't really reflecting on our losses in terms of our musical scores. I think we worked together first in, what, 2017 for it was several years.
Christopher Rountree [00:17:57]:
After, perhaps even before that.
Janet Eilber [00:17:59]:
Yeah. So I think that first coming together was just the thrill of working with you, Chris, with live music, and to have someone who is so sympodico to the idea that Martha Graham commissioned work. For several decades, she only worked with new music, and she worked with some of the greats of the 20th century. Not only Copeland, but Hindamus and Manotti and Chavez. Barbara, it's a long list. And Chris, you can take it from there. He was just so attuned to what that really meant. So it was a thrill for me.
Christopher Rountree [00:18:46]:
Well, the history of American new music and certainly 20th century music, but gets completely intertwined with Martha Graham. And we owe her and the company, I think, an incredible debt in giving us these remarkable pieces. And they're some of the most important American classical music, like, full stop. As classical musicians, we all grow up with that experience and with that knowledge. And then so to be able to engage with the company is like, at the feet of the guru. It's like, oh, here we are. This is like the promised land, in a way.
Janet Eilber [00:19:25]:
I think as we moved forward and began working with each other almost every season, and Chris got to know our rep better, and I tried to mix up the rep so that audiences would have different experiences. I think, Chris, you began to realize more and more that our musical archives were teetering a bit needed. We needed new recordings, we needed better archival systems.
Christopher Rountree [00:20:01]:
Right. I remember you and I had lunch during our first kind of time together, like our first week together. And you brought up the archive in that time. There's like a lot of forethought. You said, well, our hundred the anniversary is coming up soon and we're thinking about our archives because of that and because of Sandy. And in a way we started ideating about this archival work that we're now going to be so engaged in. We started thinking about that right away from the very first thing. So you had your eye on involves some new recordings and stuff, right.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:21:34]:
Can you tell us about some of the first major revivals that you worked on together? What were the reasons you chose these pieces? Was it because you thought they would be easy to salvage or because they were most at risk of being lost? Tell us about what that thought process was like from both of you.
Janet Eilber [00:21:53]:
I think it's a little bit of everything. Right. Some of the recordings we've been dancing to were probably made in the 70s.
Christopher Rountree [00:22:04]:
Some have a how you can hear the record player, like you can hear that the record has a work.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:22:08]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:22:09]:
And some are the type of recording that basically has one stereo microphone in the room and everybody aims at it.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:22:15]:
Which of course, is not the way it's done anymore.
Christopher Rountree [00:22:18]:
Yeah. Now, usually in recordings, we're engaged in certainly dozens and dozens of channels of microphones and also some editing and all sorts of other stuff in almost every recording. So it's a much different kind of sound quality for sure. And there's something beautiful about that. You can hear the past and you can hear the technology of the past in those. But also then if that clarinet is out of tune, like they're out of tune forever and we couldn't listen and go like, let's do another one, or what if everyone do that? And then clarinet donut we'll do. You can play it ten times afterwards.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:22:55]:
And we'll just get the record in some cases. Is this the only thing you have of this particular piece of music? Just one recording? Is there any sheet music? What is available to you? When you're looking at something with an out of tune clarinet and the record going up and down?
Christopher Rountree [00:23:14]:
You want to jump in?
Janet Eilber [00:23:16]:
No, you go ahead. Because sheet music is there because music publishers are much more organized than dance company.
Christopher Rountree [00:23:23]:
Yeah, that sounds right mostly. Although some the thing we made during the pandemic was Immediate Tragedy, which was solo from 1937. And it was there was a score from Henry Cowell and there was the first and second page of the score which were like a prelude and an interlude. And then the piece Immediate Tragedy was just lost. I think you had the manuscript there at the offices, but only for the first and second page. And the piece itself was gone. And so I tried to channel Cowell and I just wrote a new one. It's not Cowell, it's certainly me. But I knew what the key signature was, I knew what the meter was, and I kind of knew what his I know a bit about what his music sounds like. So certainly I tried to live in that space. But that was our first kind of making something brand new that reviving something that was old.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:24:14]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:24:14]:
And what did you have of the dance for that work? Was there record of that?
Janet Eilber [00:24:20]:
One of the reasons we decided we could do a credible reinvention of it I can't say it's. The reconstruction is that we recently discovered a large group of photos that were taken of Martha dancing the solo in 1937 from the front row. A guy was dating one of her dancers and was allowed to sit in the front row and snap photos of the entire performance. And immediate tragedy was on that program. So we not only had 25 photos or so of it, we had the contact sheets and we knew what order they were in so we could kind of see when the poses happened. You can never really know exactly what she did if there's no film. But it was inspiring enough that we thought, well, we've got to do something with this archival material.
Christopher Rountree [00:25:08]:
Also the top down graph of the piece as well.
Janet Eilber [00:25:12]:
Yeah, somebody had made a SkyCam map of her staging pattern. Her production designer in Bennington in 1937 evidently watched a rehearsal of performance with his pencil on a piece of paper and he just followed her pattern around the stage. And I found a photo of it in an old dance magazine. So we knew that she entered from Upstage. Right. We knew she did a lot of diagonals. We knew there was a square in the middle of the stage and she didn't exit. So we got some information off of that, too.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:25:49]:
So, Janet, are you then responsible for filling in those blanks? The way that Chris composed an entirely new score in that vein?
Janet Eilber [00:26:00]:
Yeah, I did. For immediate tragedy. I decided to channel Martha as best I could.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:26:06]:
That's so cool.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:26:08]:
I love that. I think this is like the work you're doing is so important. I can think of other instances where dance figures are treated a little too preciously and then the pieces end up being lost entirely. And I just think, like, something like Martha's legacy, it's much more important to uplift it through these sorts of the way that you're breathing new life into it. Like you said, we can't reconstruct it, but we can reinvent it and still pay homage to it and not lose it. And I think that's just so beautiful.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:26:42]:
We were talking with Chris Offline before the interview, and we were talking about how sometimes it can feel scary for some organizations to try to reconstruct something when they don't have very much information. Maybe they think that it would be wrong to call it the exact thing. But I think you guys are not saying we created this solo again. You're saying it's a reinvention of it. So how are you kind of explaining that to audiences? How are you sharing that this is something different? Like, you are trying to maintain what you can, but it's still not the very original, but it's the best that you can do.
Janet Eilber [00:27:20]:
We do program notes in the in the credit listings. We we say choreographed in 1937 by Martha Graham. Reimagined choreography by Janet Eilber. Yeah, we've decided reimagined is really the right word. Reconstruction for restaged makes it sound like it's the real thing. Things are not.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:27:46]:
Can you tell us about the project you're working on right now, which is it a reimagining of the new Canticle comedians. How is this different from the last project? Do you have similar types of information, more or less?
Janet Eilber [00:27:59]:
No, it's completely different, Michael, because we're not trying to reimagine what Martha Graham did.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:28:05]:
Right.
Janet Eilber [00:28:05]:
We're using her blueprint. We're just using the title and the idea for Cantacle for innocent comedians, the work she did in 1952, which was her celebration of nature, and she created eight vignettes for the stars of her company titled Sun, Moon, Stars, Earth, Water, Wind. The last one was Death Rebirth, and it was well received, considerably magical. Paul Taylor said when he saw it as a student it was the reason the became a choreographer. Wow. But there was no film except for the Moon Vignette. We have Martha Graham's choreography for the Moon Vignette and we'll be using that. But we've been commissioning new work for over ten years now and mostly experienced name choreographers, and we were sort of itching to work with some up and coming the next generation, find a way to support them. So we decided to commission a different choreographer for each one of the vignettes. And we have a lead choreographer who is sort of bringing the whole thing together, giving it some cohesiveness and that's Sonya Taya. She'll do the opening dance, the closing dance and the interludes between these vignettes. We have Martha Graham's moon duet. And we have Michael Taylor doing one. And the Aleen sisters from the UK. Juliano Nunez, who's based in Germany, in UA, the Chinese choreographer, who's in New York. Jen Freeman, who's in New York. I'm hoping I'm not leaving anybody out. And the wind vignette has been done by Sir Robert Cohan. He was the original dance in Wind in 1952 and I asked him to create a new vignette for us, which he did in 2019, fortunately, because he passed away just last year. So we've got one of his last pieces of choreography. So it's such an eclectic group of artists and creative types. With Chris's and Thor's recommendation from the Serie A, we reached out to Jason Moran, the wonderful jazz artist composer, and he's again in a cohesive move, creating one score for the whole thing. At one point we even talked about having different composers for each vignette, but then we thought that would be too crazy. Sorry, it's a long story, but it's hard to describe.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:30:50]:
That's what we want to hear all about. It so fascinating. Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:30:56]:
I want to go on detour for a second just because I'm curious. Chris, in the music world, can you think of instances where there are things, projects like this going on? Like, I don't know, is there a Tchaikovsky symphony laying in a Russian archive.
Christopher Rountree [00:31:14]:
Somewhere that certainly we have a lot of stories like that. Wild up is the group that I run and I founded twelve years ago and we're engaged in a big project of an American composer named Julius Eastman. And Eastman died in 1990. And it's a different story, but it's a similar story. Eastman was his works are all polemics. They're really incredibly progressive. He was gay and black and his works in the 70s all have really, really incredible titles like Gnarly titles like The N Word isn't a bunch of the titles and he's like, these pieces are for any disenfranchised person. But he was evicted at his house in New York in 1982, the winter of 81, 82, we don't know what month. And all the scores were thrown into the snow, but he had a practice of and they're beautiful, they sound like Steve Reich and filled glass and some are more modern, but somehow this beautiful minimalism of them about the so the scores were many of them were lost. He made some archival recordings. So we have recordings, but not scores. And then we have some scores. He would write love notes to his friends. He would say, for you and he would write, you know, not write a note for them and give them the score. And so we have his scores. Just because he wrote these love notes on the scores and gave them to his friends.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:32:33]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:32:35]:
Wild up is certainly we're working on it.
Janet Eilber [00:32:36]:
We're.
Christopher Rountree [00:32:36]:
Like part of our work in terms of documenting work is making archival recordings is a big part of our everything we're working on is in that recording area as archival is probably the most similar analog to this as well, although, albeit much more recent, actually, in the.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:33:01]:
This was work that you were doing prior to meeting up with Janet, which is that why it made it such a sympotico relationship for you guys.
Christopher Rountree [00:33:09]:
Perhaps. So, yeah, we started working on this project back in 2012 and then really in earnest in about 18. So we got the idea to form it into something that would be that looks like seven years worth of anthology recordings.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:33:23]:
Right, so what are you doing specifically on this project? The Canticle project.
Christopher Rountree [00:33:28]:
Yeah. So Wild Up is not in Cantical, but we're doing a giant we're doing this, like 100 minutes of music where we're making new recordings for Graham at the same time. So we're playing Chronicle and some other things on that program. On the program with Canticle, the live.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:33:45]:
Performance is correct live.
Christopher Rountree [00:33:47]:
And then we go into the studio and we're in the studio for two weeks and we make a ton of new ton of new recordings. And also it's going to be pretty thrilling to have that to be like, the tempo is this and it needs to be this. And also now finally, we can have it be what it needs to be right in this moment. And of course, we can fix all of the fidelity issues about the recordings in terms of the sound quality.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:34:10]:
Quick question. Is Chronicle as hard to play as it is for the dancers to dance?
Christopher Rountree [00:34:14]:
It's actually quite easy. What we found is most of the moments where I'm like, let's do it, let's do it. This is easy. Let's do it, let's do it. Are all the moments that it's like the tempo must remain absolutely up and down.
Janet Eilber [00:34:28]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:34:29]:
Do not speed up because something is here that is incredibly, terrifyingly difficult for the dance.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:34:36]:
Oh, my gosh, I love that work. I saw Leslie that was the first time I ever saw it live. And Leslie was just I just couldn't believe how challenging it was and she was so wonderful. Okay, then this is another great subject. There's another path to go on. Is conducting for dance. I mean, are there moments where you're just like, you feel taken, like you want the music to take you a different direction and you have to just admit it?
Janet Eilber [00:35:09]:
Chris, talk about Appalachian Spring. Talk about appalachia. No, you want to do that opening slower?
Christopher Rountree [00:35:15]:
I want that opening to just be like sunrise. And we just sat and watched every single minute of it, and it took as long as it took instead of like, no. The sun comes up and we're meeting the characters now. We have a few actions.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:35:26]:
We got to move this around.
Christopher Rountree [00:35:28]:
Let's get this show on the road, which is our the job of a conductor is always negotiation. That's what the act actually, the job is like, half therapy, half negotiation. A little bit of and then a lot of rehearsal planning.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:35:41]:
Sure.
Christopher Rountree [00:35:43]:
Did we bring all the drums for this? That king of stuff. And how are we going to use every single minute? Because it's really tricky with musicians, how our schedules are always too tight. So the negotiation part of it. I know it's the same way with dance. I can imagine it's the same way. It's like everybody to get into the room, everyone has to be an Olympic athlete and be just an absolute A plus player. But what that means is, of course, as you get better and better and better and better, you get more self sure and more self sure opinions down there.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:36:14]:
People with opinions. Yeah, of course it happened in dance at all.
Christopher Rountree [00:36:19]:
And so we've got between 30 and 80 people, depending on what the show is usually for. Graham so it's about 30. We have 30 people in the pit, all with a different opinion about how something is going to go. And I have to kind of negotiate so that we all agree on it.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:36:33]:
And then you have the dancers needing something else, and that's it.
Christopher Rountree [00:36:37]:
And then I'm like, I think it's this, and it's just not it's just simply sometimes not that. And the dance always wins. And it doesn't mean that we don't push sometimes we don't push back. Pierre Bullet is one of the great conductors and composers of the 20th century. Bulez always said the would teach young students, the would say, when you speed up, contemplate slowing down. When you get louder, contemplate being softer, and you'll have a more metered and more beautiful kind of transition to those things. And I think this is what we get, is I want to do the beginning of Operation Spring very slowly, and it's very simple. It does need to just move.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:37:14]:
Yeah.
Christopher Rountree [00:37:15]:
And those two things in relationship to each other can create something that feels like that, like when you're moving your arm in water, there's resistance between the two choices, what's needed and the choice that I can't make right, and that those two are in relationship. And the audience, of course, doesn't know that. But the players, they're playing with a different touch because of it, that they can feel both. And I wonder if it's there on stage as well. Hopefully, it's not ever too wrong that it causes a problem.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:37:47]:
Yeah.
Janet Eilber [00:37:48]:
It's similar to what the dancers are going through in the opening going of an Appalachian Spring because they've got a very simple, slow walk, hopefully not too slow, depending on Chris. But at the same time, the story of Appalachian Spring is about a wedding day, and in order to get everyone's motor going so that it's not lugubrious walking, we talk about the anticipation that the characters are all coming into the scene with a great anticipation and excitement, even though they're simply walking about what's about to happen. So there's that two sided thing that has to be there just to kick the whole thing off in the correct way.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:38:34]:
Yeah, right.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:38:35]:
I was going to ask Chris. I staged a ballet at Indiana University, and we had two wonderful pianists that had never played for dance before. And every time I would say just shave, like, a little bit of the tempo off, you get like half. Was there an adjustment to musicians? Is there just an inherently bigger range that you can play faster or slower as the human body can only go so fast or slow?
Christopher Rountree [00:39:02]:
For sure. Janet and I often sit at a laptop and we'll have a question. Janet will be giving me a note or something from the night before, and then we watch it on the video. Not the night before, but from the archival. We'll watch it and then I'll just clock it with my Metronome right in front of us.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:39:19]:
Right?
Christopher Rountree [00:39:20]:
And I'm like, okay, so it's 88 here. Could we afford 86? Could I do 82? I know I can't do 60.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:39:30]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:39:32]:
So we have that we find the range, and then it's up to me to have the recall to place it within the range. I think without that type of study and that type of going over and over the choice. What happens with music, at least as I found conducting certain musics, they sit at four or five different tempe the right way. And so you get these kind of, like, little ledges where this could work in any of these three places, but you really can't work in a fraction less. It has like a pocket. Like there's this kind of middle section of Appalachian Spring. There's this one spot where like, wow, 144 really feels great. And really it can't be 144. And for other musicians, it's so easy. At one point, it's very hard.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:40:23]:
Right?
Christopher Rountree [00:40:24]:
There's that little difference. And they ever have this little bounce, and it's just so simple with their bow. And the other one is, like, quite specific, and it just engenders a different kind of playing. So it's convincing all the players that that slower tempo, the touch can still be similar.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:40:38]:
That's interesting.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:40:39]:
I love that because we had moments, like, doing complicated scores at Miami City Ballet. We often danced to Stravinsky. And I remember one time the conductor told some dancers privately because everyone complaining, we want it faster, we want it faster. The was just like, whatever instrument it was just couldn't that was very technically demanding for them. So that was our turn to kind of scale back, right?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:41:05]:
Yeah. I wonder how often are you both referring to archival footage for the tempo? Like, Janet, do you at all think Martha maybe did it this way, but maybe we could speed this section up? I would like to see that, or do you really try to stay true to her intentions?
Janet Eilber [00:41:24]:
Well, there's a couple of different answers to that. We try to stay true to her intentions. However, her intentions, she created things until she was 96 years old, so she often made changes and adjustments in the course of her long career. Certainly dancers, the facility of dance changed every decade, and she loved that. And when corporate, they could move faster, they could jump higher, so there were many adjustments. But there are other things. Like, again, back to our recordings. Diversion of Angels, for example. When I danced it, there are three different couples in Diversion of Angels. The couple in yellow kind of sprightly teenagers, couple in red more lyrical, passionate, and the couple in white. And I was always the woman in white, and that role was the slower, more mature, not in a rush role. And when I came back as artistic director, we were using a recording that did not really accentuate the difference in these three couples. And particularly the white couple is dancing much too fast in our current production. In our current production, we've been dancing too fast for 2025 years with that recording. That wasn't really right, but it was a good recording and they decided they had to use it. The other one was degraded or whatever. So it's going to be my great pleasure to go into the recording studio with Chris and restore that original tempo for the white couple in particular, because it's essential, really, I believe, to really the poetry of the work.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:43:10]:
Yeah, I really love that. I wonder too, Janet, what you will be doing. You mentioned you're going to be in the recording studio, and obviously this has been such a collaborative process the whole time. So tell us what that collaboration will look like in the recording studio, because I think maybe people might not appreciate what a big deal it is for you guys to have this opportunity to have musicians playing exactly what you want so that you can use this beautiful, high quality recording.
Janet Eilber [00:43:37]:
Yeah, I think Chris and I have kind of had a mind meld over the years we've been working together, and I don't want to ask him for anything that destroys the musicality of a piece. And he wants to make it work for the dancing. So we'll be working that out in the recording studio.
Christopher Rountree [00:44:00]:
It's an incredibly rare opportunity to do this, and it's a huge undertaking, and it's tons and tons of hours and just lots of the way we prep for recording is not the way we prep for something live.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:44:13]:
How's it different?
Christopher Rountree [00:44:13]:
Well, musicians are obsessed with things that are permanent.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:44:17]:
Oh, I bet.
Christopher Rountree [00:44:18]:
I'm sure the energy I mean, Wild Up is an ensemble that loves to improvise and stuff, and we love to just be like, today, this is today. Go. But when we go into the studio, it is a different thing. And everybody you see, everyone kind of gets there. They have their zone and they have their water bottle the right way and they have their tea and they're kind of like, okay, there's like this different energy that is quite ferocious and it's ferocious about being perfect forever.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:44:50]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:44:51]:
And it's a different thing. And so, of course, then it's my goal to be like, okay, now this has to be perfect just the once. And also we have to be perfect here in the heart as well. If we just get it perfect on our instrument, we're not in good shape because we won't feel it. It's a cool thing, but it's very detail oriented. You have to build extra time. So we've done that and then kind of we prep everything, get it to the place and we kind of present it in a similar way that we would for a show. We get everything ready, we do it once and then Jan's, like, I have these 15 notes, this.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:45:29]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:45:30]:
But as we know, it's going to be kind of permanent. It's a different thing and we notes have to be a little more specific. Also, I have to do a lot of prep work to figure out where all the edits are. So if we like one version of one section, we can get that one version. So there's a collage part of the work.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:45:48]:
Sure. I was going to ask that, actually, because speaking of permanency, it makes me think of Michael. We did a few. Not nearly as many as the dancers used to do in generations before us, but like a TV, a PBS special, when we were at Miami City Ballet, and just the amount of takes and it is that permanency where we would normally just do the ballet and be done and walk off stage, it was just so different. So I can imagine it's quite similar. And finding where they can do the cuts like you mentioned as well.
Christopher Rountree [00:46:17]:
Precisely. Yeah. It's a different I sean, I think it's a different kind of a thought process, a different beat. Yeah. And still so many of the best recordings ever are all in one take. So there's that thing of like, how do we build something that works and is totally cohesive and feels as if it is one arc, when perhaps it could be I mean, in some cases, people are doing 1 bar at a time. We're not going to do that.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:46:42]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:46:42]:
But there are some pieces of new music where it's so challenging that everyone's like, okay, let's just do that 1 bar. It's just death to find. Let's just get it. And they just drop it in and they do the 1 bar.
Janet Eilber [00:46:52]:
Doesn't seem fair somehow.
Christopher Rountree [00:46:55]:
It is not fair. But you can hear it.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:46:57]:
You can hear it, I would bet. Yeah.
Christopher Rountree [00:46:59]:
So a lot of our recordings we've been doing, we'll do one big take of something and then we'll find all of the one bars to drop in after. So we're like, we nailed it. We put in this one note. Great. Done.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:10]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:47:11]:
Which is tricky, but it can work.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:13]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:47:14]:
So how many works are you all recording together?
Janet Eilber [00:47:18]:
Maybe eight. Yeah, that sounds right. I don't think I've counted a few. They run the gamut from really early stuff by Louis Horst, like Frontier, the solo she did in 1935. We're also doing lamentation, which is not Louis Horace. That's kodai. Two diversion of Angels in 48. And well, chronicle is 30. So it's a range chronicle. I don't know how many players.
Christopher Rountree [00:47:50]:
Chris chronicle is just in the low 30s. So it's the Chronicle is the biggest the biggest group. And we have things that are down to chamber. Yeah.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:48:01]:
These are such important hallmarks of your repertoire. So no matter where our listeners are, it's possible that the next time they see the Graham Company, they're going to be hearing this recording. So cool.
Christopher Rountree [00:48:13]:
That's the plan.
Janet Eilber [00:48:14]:
The sooner the better.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:48:16]:
This has been so fascinating. But I'm wondering, before we wrap up, is there a dream project, maybe an idea, Janet, you have of a work that you would like to bring Chris's expertise into, like the next big Gram Reimagining?
Janet Eilber [00:48:34]:
Chris, shall we talk about it?
Christopher Rountree [00:48:36]:
Yeah. Spoiler alert. We love it. Go ahead.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:48:42]:
Exclusive.
Janet Eilber [00:48:42]:
Well, we are talking about Martha only did one full evening length work, and it's Clyde, Martha, the Trojan War, all the characters, agamemnon, Electra, Cassandra, the works. And it's renowned as a dance. But we really think that it's got potential to be turned into an opera and to borrow elements of Graham's choreography, borrow elements of the noguchi set, possibly elements of the score. We're not sure exactly how much we'd like to mess with it. Well, we know we'd like to mess with it a lot, but we want to put together a creative team that will take whatever elements they think will work well into creating the contemporary opera out of Martha Graham's work.
Christopher Rountree [00:49:47]:
Yeah, that's the whole other part of my life, is that I do a lot of opera and a lot of new American opera. I'm music director at Long Beach Opera here, which is, like, the longest running opera company in Southern California and also has been doing experimental work for its entire history.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:50:03]:
Right.
Christopher Rountree [00:50:05]:
We'll see if Long Beach if it ends up at Long Beach, actually. But certainly that's a huge passion of mine.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:50:09]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:50:10]:
Wow. So is this just like a dream project or, like, maybe wheels are in motion?
Christopher Rountree [00:50:18]:
A few conversations have happened. Certainly my colleague James Dara at Long Beach, who's a brilliant director, brilliant American director, lives in Los Angeles, is interested. So we'll see if James takes it on. It's in conversation. And there's that big anniversary coming up. A big piece is appropriate.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:50:43]:
I love that.
Janet Eilber [00:50:43]:
Our 100th is in 2026, so we're hoping that in the next four years, we can make this happen.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:50:52]:
We'll have to have you guys back on to talk about it if that comes to fruition. That sounds so fabulous.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:50:57]:
That sounds incredible.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:50:57]:
And I'm sure there'll be so much to talk about. So thank you guys so much. This was so wonderful. We wish we could be there to see it, but we know that our listeners in La. Will definitely get their tickets, go to the soraya what else is on the program other than canticle?
Janet Eilber [00:51:14]:
Janet we're opening with lamentation. We decided to do everything that was well, not everything, but do three pieces that are going to be recorded. So we're opening with 1930 lamentation. We're going to chronicle, which is 1936 intermission and then the new cantacle.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:51:34]:
Awesome.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:51:35]:
Well, we wish you guys the best. We know it's going to be wonderful and the audiences will love it.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:51:39]:
Thank you both for joining us so much.
Janet Eilber [00:51:41]:
Great. Thank you. Pleasure.
Christopher Rountree [00:51:43]:
Thanks for having us.