(351) Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of Martha Graham Dance Company, LIVE from the Vail Dance Festival
Photo by Christopher Duggan
Martha Graham Dance Company is one of the most storied and celebrated dance institutions in America and a Vail Dance Festival fan favorite. In recent years, the company has been steadily building its repertoire beyond the Graham classics. This live recording of the ‘Conversations On Dance’ podcast will talk with the company’s Artistic Director, Janet Eilber, about her storied career, working with Martha Graham, and her role as artistic director. Janet will give audiences a preview of what to expect from the company’s performance in Vail and some background on the work she is doing to preserve and revive Graham works.
This episode was recorded live on Saturday July 29th, 2023 at the Manor Vail Lodge. Conversations on Dance at the Vail Dance Festival is generously underwritten by the Town of Vail.
VAIL DANCE FESTIVAL IS GOING ON NOW!
Conversations on Dance events: https://vaildance.org/conversations-on-dance/
Performance tickets: https://vaildance.org/
LINKS:
Website: conversationsondancepod.com
Instagram: @conversationsondance
Merch: https://bit.ly/cod-merch
YouTube: https://bit.ly/youtube-COD
Join our email list: https://bit.ly/mail-COD
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:00]:
This episode was recorded live at the Manor Vail Lodge. Conversations on Dance at the Vale Dance Festival is generously underwritten by the town of Vail.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:00:14]:
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Conversations on Dance at the Vail Dance Festival. We are so excited to be back. My name is Michael Sean Breeden.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:32]:
And I'm Rebecca, king Ferraro. And we're so happy to be here. On a personal note, I'm excited to be back and be back with Mikey here. It's so great to be here this year and not be giving birth, so.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:45]:
We can't think of a better way to start off this festival this year with Janet Elber, artistic director of Martha Graham Dance Company. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Janet Eilber [00:00:55]:
You know, we love being here at Vail. One of the great things about this festival is the way Damian brings back artists, and we feel the sense of community. And it's such a wonderful time for us, not only the dancing and the audience, but just connecting to the world of dance.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:17]:
Yeah. So we obviously are going to talk about what the company will be dancing here tonight, but Rebecca and I are personally excited to have just you on the podcast for the first time. We've had you with others in two previous podcasts, so we want to talk a little bit about your own career a little further than we have before. So I'd love to start with just hearing maybe about how you first became aware of Martha Graham and when you knew you wanted to dance for her.
Janet Eilber [00:01:43]:
I have a really checkered career with Martha Graham, I have to say. I was a student at the Interlock and Arts Academy in Michigan, and they took us down to Detroit to see the Martha Graham Dance Company. This was in 1968 or 69, I think, and Martha was still on stage, and she would have been 74, 75. And I was 16 or 17 going, what? Why is that old lady on stage kind of walking back and forth and then the whole company dances around her? And I just had no idea. And then I went to the Juilliard School for college and had been trained in the Lemon Technique and ballet, but was required to take the Martha Graham technique. And once again, I was like, what? We have to sit on the floor for the first 30 minutes of class and then you get to stand up and you got to memorize all these exercises. And it was New York, and I was there from Northern Michigan, so I pretty much skipped my gram classes my freshman year because Chinese food I had never know. I was in New York City, and there was stuff I had to check out, but I had to learn the technique for my Juries at the end of my freshman year, so I kind of began to get a feel for it. And then my my sophomore year, I was cast in Diversion of Angels, one of Martha's most beautiful dances from 1948, a dance that's lyrical and all about love. And the light bulb went off, and I realized that these exercises I'd been learning, this contraction and release, was a vocabulary of poetry and expression and that it was truly fulfilled when it was filled with emotional images and expression. And then, of course, that was it. Nothing else gave me the same satisfaction of intellectual involvement and emotional involvement. And then the incredible power, the physical power of the Graham technique, that contraction and release, the core of the body, driving all of the movement and the leveraging against the floor, her famous falls and recoveries. Martha really designed her technique to reveal the weight of the body, the struggle of an individual. She wanted to reveal how hard it is to be a human, as opposed to the goals of classical ballet, where the goals are to be antigravity and lighter than air. This was digging in. And anyway, that's the short version. Sorry.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:04:46]:
You know what's funny? I feel like we've interviewed a lot of your dancers, and don't they almost have the same story every time, when they're like, we take a gram class and we're like, what is this?
Janet Eilber [00:04:53]:
I don't know.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:04:54]:
And then we talk to some dancers who enjoy balancing technique, and they're like, oh, as soon as I took it, I love it. So I just wonder, what is it, do you think, about the Graham technique? That kind of just takes you a while to dig in, and then once you get it in your body, it just feels right?
Janet Eilber [00:05:09]:
I think it's getting used to the idea that you have to reveal yourself. You have to be vulnerable. You cave to be powerful. You have to take charge of what you're expressing and open yourself up. Even in class, when you really get the hang of it, you should be practicing that, as Martha called it, revealing the inner landscape. You should be practicing fulfilling the exercises you're doing with emotional images, because if you don't practice it in the classroom, it's not going to show up on stage. And I think that's the real attraction for the people who wind up being gram dancers. The depth of self expression. I know for me, coming from the Midwest, again, good, repressed Midwesterner, the opportunity to really reveal not only who I was, but how I could be know, how I could be phaedra, how I could be these enormously complicated women that Martha Graham had created for the know. What could possibly be better?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:06:34]:
How was she guiding you towards those sort of ideals? Was she giving you, as you said, sort of emotional imagery or encouraging you to find that in yourself? What sort of coach or director was she?
Janet Eilber [00:06:49]:
Complicated answer. Well, she did give animalistic images often that the power would come up your spine until you revealed your incisors, like you're going to take a bite out of someone. So she often used those sorts of images, but there was an expectation that that was what you from Martha, was that you arrived wanting to reveal yourself, wanting to reach your full potential and your full power on stage. So she didn't talk about it a lot. I mean, that was just something that was ingrained in her, so she just kind of assumed it was ingrained in you. One of my first rehearsals with her, I had a position of my head with sort of a tip of my head when I was standing still or learning new choreography that I thought I didn't think it was just a way I had trained myself to show off my shoulder blades or something like that, I don't know. And she took one look at me and basically told me I had to get my head on straight. Literally. Literally. She knew that this was a default position and that was completely meaningless. She said that's 100% of nothing. And she wanted me to understand what the tip of my head meant and how to use it and how to connect it to the power of my spine. And no single movement you did in the Graham world was default. Everything was considered everything was aimed and potent and intentional. So that's kind of a life lesson, too. Not just about dancing.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:08:43]:
Right? You mentioned that she was dancing into her seventy S. How long did she dance?
Janet Eilber [00:08:50]:
She danced. I think 1970 was her last performance.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:08:54]:
So I have to assume that in the studio, she was showing a lot of this. She's maybe not telling you very specific things, but she's really showing a lot.
Janet Eilber [00:09:01]:
Not for my generation, because I joined the company in 1972 and she would cave been 78, and she was quite arthritic, but she was incredibly eloquent and could inspire you through her words. And she know. I think one of the essences of Martha Graham's genius is that she could read a person by just looking at them. She understood body language. She understands looking at you, the way you walked and the tip of your head, and could then decide how to direct you. Some dancers needed a mother, some dancers needed a dictator, some dancers needed flirtation. And she just knew how she could push your buttons, basically.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:09:55]:
Yeah. I mean, obviously this is shaping you as a dancer, these experiences. But how did working with Martha shape you as the director you are today as well?
Janet Eilber [00:10:06]:
Another long answer.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:10:08]:
We're here for sure.
Janet Eilber [00:10:12]:
Over. I've been artistic director for 18 years now, and of course, having been inside the ballets is one experience, but being outside them and watching them is just added to how I understand the Graham legacy and my job. But I think probably the greatest lesson I learned from Martha that affects me now is to embrace change. She was constantly looking for the next thing. She was trying to stay ahead of her audiences, to figure out ways to astonish them and to move things into the future before anybody else did. And basically it says, change is going to happen, so you should get in front of it. You should figure out how to use it powerfully. And so that's a huge lesson, especially when I took over. And there is a contingent of people saying, well, wait a minute, that's Martha Graham. Don't change what the company does. You have to ask, what would Martha do? You have to do this, you have to do you know, I feel like Martha was in the back of my head saying, you don't have to do any of that stuff. You got to figure out how to move into the.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:11:48]:
Want to we'll circle back to your own career and life. But this is making me think of what Damien Wetz was saying last night about tradition and innovation and when you took over the company, it has this well of tradition and some of the most iconic 20th century dances. But it was sort of your task with you were tasked with how you were going to bring the company into this century and what sort of identity it could have that could exist outside of Graham's works solely. So what were some of the first steps that you were taking then to consider who would mesh with the company's dancers, what the identity could be outside of Graham? Specifically, what were some of your first ideas?
Janet Eilber [00:12:28]:
Know, we didn't jump right into commissioning new work when I took over. It was much more of a seismic shift, understanding who we were going to be without this genius gathering audiences. People would just come to see what Martha Graham was doing next, even in her 90s. So asking the question, who are we going to be without Martha Graham? And who cares? Who is our audience and why should they come see us? And there were some important audience studies at the time by the Knight Foundation and the Rand Foundation, asking audiences why they came to the theater. And it was everything know, it was babysitting too expenses, is the parking lot too far away? What makes an experience memorable? Do you talk about it around the water cooler the next day? The sort of thing that I took away from understanding these studies was that audiences wanted a deeper, richer experience in a shorter amount of time, and they wanted context. It's the information age. They didn't want to come into a dark theater and just have something in front of them without being able to Google and say, why is she doing that? And who's that character? And they wanted information immediately. So we began to look at other art forms and ask, what do they do to bring context to an audience? Because modern dance is really young. It's a little over 100 years old. And it was born out of revolt. It was always out with the old and in with the new. And audiences were trained and funders were trained, and the whole field of Modern Dance was trained to reject its own history. It didn't even admit it had a history. When I took over the Gram Company, we didn't call the major works of the 20th century classics. Modern Dance did not have classics because we were always moving on to the next thing. So we looked to other fields that had this hurdle at some point, what do the contemporary art museums do with their classics of the 20th century? Their signage, of course. But there are also audio tours now, and the opera uses supertitles. And so we began to experiment. The first thing we did was add a spoken introduction to all of our programs. It's like a museum's audio tour, just a little. And Damien does it all the time here. We'll do it tonight. Just a little bit of information of what to look for in any dance that you're going to first. The critics said, Why is she up there talking? But the audiences really loved it. It opened new doors to our classics, and we started adding media and narration on stage. We started partnering unusual partnerships. We had a two week residency at Google. We partnered with the American Psychiatry Association. When we were talking about Martha's psychological ballets, we did online video competitions, the Clydemestra Rematch Challenge with cash prizes. And we posted solos from Clydemaster online and said, do whatever you want to them. You can learn them and dance them. You can add music, you can edit them, relate the character to someone or something in the news today. And one of my favorites was they took our Helen of Troy and they meshed it with Britney Spears trying to escape the paparazzi. So just finding ways to surprise people. People said, what is the Martha Graham Dance Company doing? And I loved it. So as we kind of got on a roll with that kind of experimentation in 2007, we had an opening night on the anniversary of 911 in New York City, and we wanted to figure out a way to honor the day, remember? But of course, we didn't have much time or much money. So we said, okay, we're going to invite three young choreographers to create short works for the company, inspired by a film of Martha Graham dancing her iconic solo, Lamentation. It's the one in the stretchy tube of fabric where it's only four minutes long. And we said, you only get 10 hours of rehearsal. You have to use public domain music. You have to keep it under four minutes because that's how long Lamentation is. No sets, no props, simple costumes. You can choose any number of dancers in the company, and it's a one night only event. And we invited Azure Barton and Richard Move and Larry Kagwin, and Azure did a duet and Richard did a solo, and Larry used the full company. We showed the film of Martha and these three gems of contemporary choreography, one after another, that were so intrinsically tied to our legacy. Lamentation is like the essence of modernism, the essence of Martha's revolution, and it was revelatory. Of course, we forgot the one night only thing. We started doing it every night and touring around the world and commissioning new lamentation variations. Damien and the Festival commissioned one from Doug Verone a few years ago. We brought the lamentation variations here, and that was the kickoff. A few years later, we're up to 15 variations now. Michelle Dorance has done one. And Laur Lubovich and Sonya Taya and Kyle Abraham. It's really been a remarkable journey for us, but we also started commissioning more substantial works. Nacho Duato was the first one. Mats Ek Has Worked With US and Pam Tanowitz and Annie B. Parsons. And Well, You'll See tonight Hofesh Shector and City Larby Sherkawi. There's quite a list of extraordinary artists.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:18:48]:
So as an artistic director, you mentioned that some people are like, we want to keep it Graham. We don't want to do anything new. And then you're saying, Look, I've looked at this research. I think this is the way we should go. And then you start going full steam ahead in that direction. As an artistic director, you have so much to think about. It's not just, let me do whatever I want. There's donors, there's a board, there's all these people involved. So what is the feedback you're getting as you start to steer the company in this direction? And how do you trust your gut to really go with your vision?
Janet Eilber [00:19:21]:
It was kind of out of necessity that we started trying new things, because after Martha's death in 1991, the company was people were considering it old and musty and museum, because the whole field of modern dance was just kind of like, we don't do old. And there was some contest over Martha's will and who owned the ballets, and we went through a really rough period. So when Le Roux Allen, who's our executive director, and I took over, the company was about $6 million in debt. So we had to try stuff. We had to say, no, we're not going to do exactly what went before because it wasn't working. Clearly it wasn't working. So that kind of gave us permission to really go far afield and say, we're going to pull out all the stops because we're in survival mode. So with that as a launch pad and with audiences coming to kind of go, what the heck is the Graham Company doing? But we began to bring in new audiences. We began to see a much younger audience. We began to get press from the unusual activities we're doing. And that launch continues to drive the range of things that we can do.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:21:03]:
I'm wondering, now that we have so many, like an extensive catalog of works by new choreographers, how do you juxtapose them with Martha's works? So, for instance, tonight I think we're seeing two works by Martha and then only one. One work by Martha.
Janet Eilber [00:21:18]:
One work by Martha.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:21:19]:
Right. So then how do we decide what's going to balance with the newer Know.
Janet Eilber [00:21:25]:
We when we started commissioning new work, the one thing I was determined to do was to use choreographers who had very distinctive and different voices from Martha Graham. And this continues to surprise Know, especially choreographers who come to me and say, I've been so inspired by Martha Graham, and this is I think my work would be perfect for the company. I cave to know I really have to look for different voices. Having something Graham esque next to something Graham is not a successful formula. Right. What we've done throughout the years is have a season theme so that works that are quite different can live on the same program because contextually, they belong together. We had a theme, Myth and Transformation, where we were able to do many of Martha's works that are inspired by Greek myth. And we commissioned a work from Andanas Phoniadacus. Believe it or not, he's Greek, who has a style that is wildly different, a physical style than Martha's. It's very flung and very fast. But he chose a Greek myth to create a new ballet around for us. And the combination on stage was thrilling to see Martha's transformation of Greek myths beside a contemporary choreographer's transformation. So we've continued to do this kind of thematic curation which allows us to have really rangy choreography, which our dancers have become multilingual. I know you're going to ask.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:23:13]:
I was just going to say that not only it's a win win, the audiences love seeing something different, and then the dancers are fed in this different way. And that just must also be so gratifying for you.
Janet Eilber [00:23:22]:
It's really gratifying for me. I'm not sure the dancers would say they were being fed. Yeah. But they are remarkable in the way they have become such, as I say, multilingual in these various dance techniques.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:23:40]:
Let's talk about the specific Graham work that we're seeing tonight. It's, erin into the maze. Tell us about the history of this.
Janet Eilber [00:23:45]:
Work signature role for Martha Graham from 1947. Erin Into The Maze is based on the myth of Theseus, who traveled into the maze to battle the Minotaur. Martha, of course, sends a woman on this journey, and it's a metaphor for a journey into the woman's own fears. The character of the Minotaur is called not the Minotaur in our program, but the creature of Fear and the dance originally, and we still dance it this way, has a beautiful set by Isama Noguchi. If you know the sets that he designed for Martha, you may have seen the Appalachian Spring set, which just gives you the expanse of the American frontier, the way the rafters of the house reach out into the audience and you're just in open spaces for Aaron in the maze, he closes you in. It's a cavernous, dark space inside the woman's brain, if you will, inside the maze. And so it's a battle. It's a woman confronting her own fears. She meets the Minotaur in this dance three times and you just see her journey. There are moments where she's after the first or second time, she thinks she's done it and she's quite relaxed. And then the fear takes over again. It's very visceral. It's a prime example. You'll see the Martha Graham technique so brilliantly used in this ballet. The deep, folded contractions as she's expressing her fear, and the triumphant release and explosion at the end.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:25:45]:
The next work on the program that we're going to get to see, we actually had the pleasure of talking to you about Canticle for Innocent Comedians. It has quite an interesting background and I feel like it enmeshes really well with everything you've been saying about how to bring the company into a 21st century sort of sensibility, or how do you honor your past while moving to the future. So I would love to kind of tell that story again, tell the audience how this idea for the work came about and then putting it together, what that was like.
Janet Eilber [00:26:10]:
Right, well, Martha did a ballet called Canticle for Innocent Comedians in 1952, and it was her ode to nature. It was made up of eight vignettes, each one named for nature sun, Earth, Wind, Water, Sun, Moon, Stars. And the final one was death rebirth. And it was reported to be absolutely magical. It was well received. Paul Taylor saw it when he's, a student at Juilliard, said it was the reason he became a choreographer. But it was very poorly documented and it's really considered to be lost. One section was filmed. It's part of the film A Dancer's World, a documentary in 1958 about Martha, the Moon duet. So we looked and looked at trying to recover it and just didn't think we could authentically bring it back to the stage and say that it was a work by Martha Graham. So we decided that we would borrow her title and borrow her structure and fill it with all new choreography except for the moon duet. And we realized we could have a different choreographer do each vignette, which is what we did. And to give the piece some cohesion, we brought in Sonia Taya and she created the work for the ensemble who weaves through these eight vignettes. And we also commissioned a score from Jason Moran, the great jazz pianist, and he created a score for the entire thing. So the choreographers are a range of different types of physicality from inui the Chinese choreographer whose work comes her original roots of her dance was in Chinese classical folk dance. She now has a very contemporary style. The Elaine Sisters came out of athleticism and track and field but then went on to dance with Akram Khan and have their own physicality. And Michaela Taylor comes out of street dance and hip hop, as does Nunez, Juliano Nunez. So we wanted really different physicalities to be represented in this work and well, you'll see tonight, I think it all comes together and sort of creates a world community and speaks about our common responsibility to nature and the planet in a way.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:28:57]:
Right?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:28:59]:
When we talked with you last time, we talked a little bit about the music, which has such an interesting backstory. Can we dig into that a little bit and kind of how that composition came about for this?
Janet Eilber [00:29:11]:
You know, people generally assume that a choreographer picks a piece of music and then starts doing the choreography to the music. And that was never Martha's style at all. Her early mentor and partner, Louis Horst, musical director, said, martha, your work, your dance has to be the center of the art that you're creating and music should frame and support it. So she would often do the work first and then Louis Horst would create the score to it and that continued. She sent Copeland a scenario and Copeland then wrote music for her scenario. So that is basically what happened with Jason Moran because we started this piece in COVID. So like, the sun solo existed long before Jason joined the process and he came into the studio and would improvise watching the dancer as he did. Also with some of the other works were already done. I think the Earth Duet and Stars was not done yet. So Jason did Stars and then we gave the music to Michaela Taylor and so it all came together sort of in an unusual way. But I love this score. It's really so poetic and beautiful.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:30:33]:
The final work we'll be seeing, we got a little taste of last night Hova Schechter's cave and it's just been really such a big hit with audiences. I mean, I remember when it had its premiere, multiple people reached out to me, sent me text messages the next day saying, can't believe you missed this. It's the best thing I've seen in ages. And it's something audiences are clearly really responding to, but it's so different from anything else on the program. Can you talk a little bit about the commission when HOFISH is invited to say, I'm going to do a rave dance and you're like, well, that's great. How does this end up happening?
Janet Eilber [00:31:11]:
No, no, it's much more of a journey than that. And actually started with Daniel Simkin. You know, Daniel, the fabulous international ballet star who is very creative and experimental in the work that he produces, as well as being unbelievable in Don Q. Of course, Daniel came to us and know, I live in Berlin the nightlife the techno scene is incredible. The music is incredible, the lighting is incredible, and the dance is terrible. And he said, I have this idea of weaving choreography into a techno cave in a rave in a rave space, not on stage or anything. And we were thrilled when he said, and Graham was the first company I thought of who might want to do this experiment. I said, oh, thank you, Daniel. So we said, yeah, we want to do that, but we also said, we tour. 95% of our work is on the road and on stage, so we'd like a proceedium work to start with, a proceedium work that we can take on the road. And then once that's made, it could be deconstructed and turned into the first idea. So everyone agreed to that. And Daniel actually said, how do you feel about hofesh? Shector? I said bring him on. Yeah, we would love to work with Hofesh. And Daniel was the one who reached.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:32:49]:
Out to Hofesh and brought him interesting. I mean, I was watching it last night and thinking how effective it is in a know, I still love it through that gaze. I mean, it can really live in that space, for sure. It's so effective. But you might, immediately, upon hearing what the idea of the work is, be skeptical at first, but I think everyone's going to be so fully absorbed in what world it's bringing.
Janet Eilber [00:33:17]:
Know Hofesh is a brilliant choreographer, so you're not going to see a work where people are just out there dancing around improvising. I mean, that's what Danielle was trying to get away from. Right. I do think the idea, the initial seed idea that this would be choreography that inspired non dancers to dance, to be woven into a dance party, inspired Hofesh in a way that throughout the work, he was considering that connection to the audience. So it's a work that from the beginning, you just feel the audience wanting to be part of it, and that's not true of every dance. He's really tapped into that basic human urge to move to a beat and to dance with strangers and to just have that release. And the other thing that was going on was he created it during COVID And it's very cathartic, the idea of dancing with other people and the idea of just dancing and getting out of your solitude and the restrictions that we all lived through.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:34:39]:
I felt that so much like we were standing in the back last night and just I mean, I couldn't stop moving. And it just the way the music just encapsulates the whole audience, and it just really feels that way. How does that feel for you, sitting in the audience, watching your dancers? Just like I mean, they just were so into it and they just were so energetic. God, it looked like so much fun. How does that feel for you, to just feel the success?
Janet Eilber [00:35:02]:
I'm with them all the way. Don't sit next. To me, I yell louder than anybody else, and I'm moving. And it's a thrill for me. I mean, I do live vicariously through my dancers, I have to say, in the gram works, in the new works, but in this one in particular, because you can dance at any age in some way, and this dance just invites you to move as much as you possibly can in whatever way you want to.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:35:36]:
How do you feel that this work maybe is different from other things that you have in the repertoire?
Janet Eilber [00:35:43]:
Well, it's certainly the different vocabulary, quite different from Martha's. And again, well, it's that element of connecting with the audience from the moment the music starts. And that being the point of this work. The point is that connection, rather than some thematic something else that you're supposed to go home and think about, which is almost every other dance. This is simply about pure, unadulterated movement. So I think that's the essential difference.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:36:27]:
Well, we can't wait to experience it again and in its entirety, but I think we have a little bit of time now to open the floor to audience questions. If anyone has something, we have a.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:36:37]:
Microphone this year, and Sierra is going to bring it over to whoever's asking a question. We can capture your question. All right. How about right here?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:36:49]:
Right here.
Janet Eilber [00:36:51]:
I wonder, in school you still have a school, don't you? We do. The Martha Graham. Do you teach her technique? So people are learning her technique? Yes, we teach her technique. We Cave teachers all over the world teaching her technique. Our school is very international, and we have a large contingent of international students and always have. I mean, the school, like the company is almost 100 years old. We haven't talked about our upcoming anniversary. So the technique now.
Janet Eilber [00:37:27]:
At any rate. Yes, the technique is taught. We also teach in our school, ballet and more contemporary works. We want to have our students now that the company is multilingual and speaking so many different dance languages, we want to prepare our students.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:37:43]:
Highly recommend following the company and the school on Instagram. Really great to see what the dancers and the students are up to. It's really fun.
Janet Eilber [00:37:52]:
Yes. When you were testing your mic, you told a little bit about how all the stars came on the stage last night and how they were incorporated into the dance. Can you talk a little bit more about that process and how it you know, you all know Damien just loves to have creative projects on the stage and collaborations. He and I have been kind of for months talking about how we could add extra people into the end of Cave and have a dance party, but the devil is in the details. So, like, the day before yesterday, we said, well, okay, when are we going to rehearse this and who's going to be where. And my wonderful dancer Xin Ying, who you saw dance the solo immediate tragedy last night. And I kind of discussed this before we left New York, and she said, okay, Ballet X, we can teach them this move. I said, you sure? And she said, yeah, they can learn that really fast. And then we'll get to the jam circles and we'll drag the four stars in. And I said, okay, Yang, it's all yours. So, yeah, our dancers had a rehearsal with Ballet X on Thursday, and they were ready yesterday. And then Robbie Fairchild and the other stars that were with us last night were thrown in in about half an hour yesterday afternoon. And it worked pretty well, right? I mean, they all showed up. There must have been about 30 dancers on stage at the end of the evening last night.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:39:29]:
Gosh, they look like they were having fun. Any other questions? Sure.
Audience Member [00:39:36]:
Thank you. You commented on coming out of the Pandemic and Cave being a wonderful cathartic rebirth. Would you talk generally about the challenges that Martha Graham faces as a result of the Pandemic and the different landscape for a successful company post Pandemic in terms of audience participation, development, financial integrity of the company? For the company, but also for dance companies in general?
Janet Eilber [00:40:03]:
Yeah, of course. Where do I begin? With the Pandemic, we were able to keep our dancers on about half of their salaries and on full health insurance. We were lucky. We had just digitized our archives, and we pivoted so fast. We had Whiplash doing online offerings like our Martha matinees on Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, which showed off some of archival films with live chat. And I was at home with my mask on, kind of really. And our school pivoted to zoom classes, that sort of thing. The recovery is still challenging because not just how hard companies were hit individually, but our income theaters were hit very hard. Universities where we often perform budgets were I mean, across the board, people's incomes and budgets are really decimated. There was a recent article in The New York Times about how many small theater companies are closing, that Bam has cut 13% of its staff and that the New York Public Theater has cut a large percentage of its staff. So, yes, we are feeling it deeply and doing everything we can to be in front of audiences in this year, hoping to rebuild. We are in debt this year, I can tell you, from for the first time in 18 years since Lew and I took over. But we are launching this fall the first season, a three season celebration of the Martha Graham Dance Company's 100th anniversary, which is the birthday is in April of 2026. And when I began thinking four or five years ago, what are we going to do for our 100th? And thinking about the depth and breadth of Martha's legacy, the many iconic, incredible works of 20th century art that we own and curate. I just couldn't figure out how to fit it all in one year. So we're doing three years. Actually, Vale is kind of the run up, the precursor. We actually launch it in September. And of course, we're going to have thematic, each season will be thematic. The first one is kind of Americana, martha's social activism, her modernism. The next season is Dances of the Mind. And the final season is going to be the masterpieces, the masterworks. Each year, we'll have commissions. This year, we've commissioned Jamar Roberts with a new score by Rhiannon Giddens, certainly to feed into our Americana themes. We're also working to the American conversation really has not changed since Martha Graham was creating works about it. And we want her relevancy, her ongoing relevancy to be woven into our celebration. So for our Americana season, we're also reviving Agnes de Mills rodeo. We're reorchestrating the Copeland score for a bluegrass ensemble, opening conversations about the roots of American music, living in the black community, and hoping to present our iconic 20th century works in the expanded today's context of an expanded history of the 20th century, which is more inclusive. Our theme, Dances of the Mind, martha's psychological ballets. We're looking at the theme in America today of what is truth? How do you perceive truth on stage or in your life? And the final year of Martha Graham dance company turning 100 aligns with America 250, the country's turning 250 years old and as the oldest company in the United States. And certainly Martha's works of they're all so intrinsically American. Even the Greek themed works are from an American point of view, that alignment, we think, is exciting, relevant, powerful. And PBS is doing a documentary and we're doing a coffee table book with the NYC Dance Project. The New York Public Library is doing a huge exhibit. The 92nd Street Y is co commissioning some. So we've got a lot going on.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:45:05]:
Wow, I can't wait. Now, this is so much to look forward to, but first, we got to start with tonight. Okay? Thank you all so much for coming out, and we hope you come to the performance. And, Janet, of course, thank you most of all. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you.
Janet Eilber [00:45:19]:
Thank you. So, you know, my favorite subject, so thank you.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:45:26]:
Thanks, everyone.
Janet Eilber [00:45:30]:
Thank you.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:45:38]:
Conversations on Dance is part of the Acas creator network. For more information, visit conversationsondancepod. Pod.com.