 
***BOTH MASTER CLASS AND PERFORMANCE SOLD OUT***
Martha Graham Dance Company Tuesday, April 19, 2011 | 7 p.m.
Fine Arts Center’s SaGāJi Theatre
Tickets: $50
Premier Seating with Special Reception
Tickets: $75 (max. of 120)
Call 719.634.5583 or visit csfineartscenter.org
Master Class co-presented by Colorado Springs Dance Theatre, Colorado College and the FAC
April 18, 2011 | Start time TBA
Colorado College’s Cossitt Hall
Tickets: $20 (max. of 50) Tickets
Image credit: Katherine Crockett in "Move Variation" by Richard Move Photo by Costas. Copyright Costas |
THE RETURN OF THE MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY
The FAC presents the Martha Graham Dance Company on April 19, 2011, performing in the SaGāJi Theatre in honor of the historic Martha Graham performance on the very same stage in 1936.
The Dance Company will perform Lamentation Variations, a series of vignettes by contemporary choreographers that interpret the theme of the classic Graham piece, Lamentation, performed at the FAC in 1936, and Steps in the Street, also originally choreographed by Graham in 1936, among other numbers.
The Martha Graham Dance Company has been a leader in the development of contemporary dance since its founding in 1926. Informed by the expansive vision of pioneering choreographer Martha Graham, the Company brings to life a timeless and uniquely American style of dance that has influenced generations of artists and continues to captivate audiences.
Janet Eilber has been the Martha Graham Center’s artistic director since 2005. Her direction has focused on creating new forms of audience access to the Martha Graham masterworks. She says, "We have 20th Century masterpieces being danced by 21st Century athletes. It’s extraordinary to see the classics of modern dance alive and bristling with the energy of today’s dancers.”
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MARTHA GRAHAM AT THE FAC in 1936
 Herta Moselsio "Lamentation,"ca. summer 1937
Silver gelatin prints Library of Commerce Music Division Purchase, 2001 (233.2)
“The aim of my dancing is to impart the sensation of life, to energize the spectator, to send him away with a fuller sense of his own potentialities and the power of realizing them,” said Graham.
The dance recital on April 21-22 consisted of 10 pieces, accompanied by Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), prominent Hungarian composer and musician, including Lamentation—Dance of Sorrow. For the now-famous Lamentation, Graham was dressed in a tubular costume that enclosed the dancer and allowed her to change shapes as she depicted grief.
“When Miss Graham in her Lamentation depicts the dumb agony of grief, she does not droop like a flower, or attitudinize like Patience on a monument, she is grief from the first stricken bewildered gropings of her head and torso to the last moment when she averts her covered head with a finality that is pitiful and terrible.”
-- Edwin Schloss, Philadelphia
The Gazette and Telegraph reported on April 22 on the first performance: “Martha Graham's dance recital last night was another triumph in the annals of the new Fine Arts Center . . . It has set a breathless pace in a community quite used to calm. History indeed is being made in the city of General Palmer's dreams. The new zest that has gripped social life here carries with it something that revives the glamour of by-gone days. It matters little that the entertainment provided in this beautiful theater is the last word in modern art..."
“The audience last night that greeted Miss Graham was one of the best dressed gatherings ever seen in Colorado Springs. There were more gorgeous evening gowns and wraps, more tails and top hats in evidence than have ever been seen here. The setting of the theater is so luxurious that an audience of this kind fits in perfectly with its surroundings, and the audience, whether it desires to or not, becomes part of the performance."
Elizabeth Hylbom reviewed the recital: “Martha Graham's is not a performance upon with one comments in familiar stock terms; it is a thing to be experienced, to be felt, and, from there, to be accepted or rejected, according to one's individual ability to harbor the austerity of her hyper-modernity. Epoch making, however, the appearance was in its every aspect, bringing to the newly-opened Fine Arts Center one of the greatest living innovators in perhaps the oldest of the arts, an art which she chooses to present with total renunciation of the past, with the manifestation of emotions, as she feels them, through the plastic line of bodily movement.”
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