Nancy Wozny explores how the groundbreaking technique of Martha Graham lives on in the bodies of her company’s current dancers and in bold new forms of creative collaboration and digital experimentation more than 100 years after the founding of the Martha Graham Dance Company.
Multi-media essay 'Tracing a Legacy: Martha Graham's Centuryl Long Journey to Jacob's Pillow'
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I'm Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Historian and Founding Director of Preservation, and I am excited to introduce our host for this episode, long time Pillow scholar Nancy Wozny. Wozny is a Texas based arts writer, a somatic researcher and Editor in Chief of Arts and Culture Texas. Together we explore how Martha Graham’s groundbreaking technique lives on in the bodies of the company’s current dancers and in bold new forms of creative collaboration and digital experimentation more than a century after the company’s founding.
Nancy Wozny: I think of the dance field as just that, a field, where there's lots of room to explore. As dancers, choreographers, scholars and audiences we may find ourselves gravitating toward one end of this field over another. As someone who has spent most of their adult life immersed in somatics, the science of embodiment, I have focused on the dancing body, its history and its evolution. There’s always been a strong focus on choreographers as the primary artistic force. Yet the people who enter the creative space bring the agency of their own dancing history. There is no blank slate in dance. Bodies are shaped by lives lived and the dances danced. Consider Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, growing their own food, and building the structures still in use today. Not only did the movements of labor end up in Shawn’s dances, but the labor itself. Movement shaped by life. The body is a technology that dancers continue to mine, hone, and refine. The growth of dance science, the infusion of somatic principles in dance techniques, exposure to non-Western dance forms, hip hop culture, and embodied technological advances all factor into the changes we see in contemporary dancers.
Let’s take a deep dive into the dancing body through the lens of the Martha Graham Dance Company, the oldest modern dance company in America, celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2026. Since Janet Eilber took over as Artistic Director in 2005 the company has vastly expanded its repertoire, dynamically situating Graham’s classic works next to work by contemporary choreographers. Most recently, their expansion continued enlisting technology to further the boundaries of the dancing body. I had the privilege of serving as the scholar in residence for the Graham Company at their 2016 Pillow engagement. During a PillowTalk entitled “Dance as a Museum Piece,” I spoke with Eilber about the very idea of the evolving Graham body.
Nancy Wozny: In preparing to do the pre show talk on Martha Graham I watched every, every bit of Martha Graham Company on YouTube. I know all of the clips. Every single that I could watch and I wandered into A Dancer’s World, which is a film made in the ‘50s. And I watched Yuriko and Mary Hickson. Their, their bodies look trained just, I'm guessing, mostly by Graham. It looks to me that way, like there's so, so much has changed in how dancers move and how the training, their DNA changes. And then the next thing I watched was maybe in the ‘90s, and I could see that the dancers had a lot more ballet training, that they had that ballet pull-up kind of, you know, the posture had changed. And then when I think of your dancers today, they have very eclectic backgrounds. They've done everything. Most of them have gone, have college degrees, you know, superb Graham training, but this really diverse, they have very diverse bodies, and they're in this program, they have to do just about everything. Did you, how do you think of the Graham body as having shifted and changed and evolved to do what you're asking your dancers now?
Janet Eilber: Well, in part, it's the dancing body in general, has changed. (Wonzy: Absolutely). I mean, every generation, it's like the Olympics breaking records every four years. (Wonzy: They're just getting…) The legs go higher, the jumps go higher, the turns are faster, and the audience expectation is also increasing as they, you know. So in Graham, when Martha was alive, we never tried to play Mozart on the original instruments, you know. She knew, she knew that the facility of dancers was changing, and she incorporated it into the choreography.
Nancy Wozny: The early modern dance choreographers created their own techniques specifically to train performers to dance their choreography. Consider Doris Humphrey, José Limón, Erick Hawkins, and Merce Cunningham. Graham was certainly one of the first to codify a full-blown technical infrastructure, which trained dancers to perform her work. She was systematically and deliberately shaping the Graham body. Eilber discusses Graham technique in that same PillowTalk. The technique changed as well, right?
Janet Eilber: The technique changed from the moment she started teaching because she had this vision, this completely new style of dance on stage, and she needed to train dancers to do it. So whatever she was putting onto the stage, she deconstructed and brought into the classroom as exercises. So it wasn't like she invented this vocabulary or an alphabet and then started making words in poetry. She had the vision, the theatrical vision first, and then dissected it to create her technique. So it's a very emotional and dramatic technique and class to take.
Nancy Wozny: After Graham’s death in 1991, the company went through more than a decade of turmoil. The idea of expanding to include other choreographers grew out of necessity. It was none other than Martha Graham’s iconic 1930 work Lamentation that provided a portal to expanding the repertoire. But before we get to that expansion, let’s listen to former Graham dancer Joyce Herring read from the section on Lamentation from Deborah Jowitt's book Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham during a 2023 PillowTalk.
Joyce Herring: For all its theatricality Lamentation is private and anguish repressed. The performer's face a mask. It lasts about three minutes. In it, she is both a woman lamenting and the embodiment of sorrow.
Nancy Wozny: Next we hear Eilber discussing that historic departure into the larger world of choreography, and the origins of the now famous Lamentation Project.
Janet Eilber: In 2007, this was the first real commissioning when we began to add new work. First, we manipulated Graham's work for several years. 2007, we had an opening night on the anniversary of 9/11. And we didn't have much time or much money, so we asked three important young choreographers to create a short dance for the company in reaction to a film of Martha dancing Lamentation. And we said, we're going to give you rules. It's going to be a one-night-only thing. You can only have 10 hours of rehearsal. You have to use public domain music. You can't use sets. You can't use props. You can use any number of dancers in the company. Keep it under four minutes because that's how long Lamentation is. The palette of the costumes has to be the Lamentation palette, you know, sort of lavender and burgundy and blah, blah, blah. And Richard Move and Azure Barton and Larry Kegwin each created a four-minute dance in their own style. We showed the film of Martha. We did these three just beautiful gems of contemporary choreography that were totally organically tied to who we were. So as we began to commission more, Doug Verone was one of the next ones. A Taiwanese choreographer, Bulei Rong Pagarlava, did the one after that. And then we began to realize, well, wait a minute. We don't have to play it safe with choreographers. This material, it's an anchor, and we can go really far afield.
Nancy Wozny: And far afield they went, in pushing the boundaries of the body both for dancers and viewers. The list of choreographers who have set work on the Graham Company is a long one, and includes such diverse voices as Kyle Abraham, Aszure Barton, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Lucinda Childs, Michelle Dorrance, Liz Gerring, Lil Buck, Lar Lubovitch, Annie-B Parson, Yvonne Rainer, Sonya Tayeh, and Doug Varone, and that is just a small sample of the catalog of contemporary choreographers who have entered the repertoire.
The company went even further afield during the summer of 2025 when the Pillow’s new Doris Duke Theatre opened.
A groundbreaking exhibit in the new theater, Dancing the Algorithm, explored the growing relationship between dance and technology. A highlight of the exhibition was Lamentation: Dancing the Archive, created by Xin Ying in collaboration with Kate Ladenheim, Katherine Helen Fisher, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Alan Winslow. The work invites you to manipulate a livesized volumetric (3D) video of Martha Graham performing Lamentation. Your own movement on a bench similar to the one in the original piece signals the body in the video in a real time response, reactivating the choreography in a way to partner with Graham, to add our own bodily expression, and tether to the past. The body is now traveling in two dimensions at once. Kate Ladenheim situates us in Lamentation: Dancing the Archive in a Future Figures Artist Talk at the Pillow in 2025.
Kate Ladenheim: It's a version of Martha Graham's 1930 solo Lamentation filmed in volumetric 3D that participants can manipulate with their hand gestures. And for those of you who are familiar with Graham's visceral expression of grief, you know that this is a piece that's usually seen frontally, but what volumetric film enables is a participant to see the actual ringing of the performer's body in 360 degrees, which really illuminates the marriage of motion and emotion that is at the core of Graham's technical and choreographic project. And since the audience member is the one who controls the viewport, it also facilitates, I'm a good speaker, an embodied connection between the motion of the audience and the motion of the participant. So when I talk about my work, I often get this question, which is, how is any of this dance, which is basically insulting But also, I get it, I get it, I really get it. I make heady work with a lot of complex moving parts and components, but I actually think the deeper response here is about interdisciplinary practice writ large, which by its very nature requires a softening of our grip on disciplinary parameters that enshrine certain ideas, maybe mythologies even, about what dance and technology should be and look like. And this is what I think technology and dance really offer each other, a profound reimagining of what these forms can how they reflect and challenge the organizing structures of our world. And not to be a total nerd but like we are here at the Pillow and the archives are important. So I hope my ideas and approaches are novel but I also just want to maybe emphasize dance and technology is not. This is a hardly representative and admittedly Western-focused spattering of a 100-odd years of innovation from dance and movement technologists. We are building on a century plus of work that proves that technology in the hands of artists makes the field richer and more innovative and more vibrant and show us, as I hope to also that relationships between bodies, screens and machines are juicy and challenging and profound.
Nancy Wozny: It might be helpful at this point to consider the viewpoint of the Graham Dancer member of this creative team, Xin Ying, who is a principal in the company and has danced many of Graham’s major works. What is her bodily experience with Graham?
Listen to Xin Ying in conversation with Norton Owen during a 2025 Pillow Talk on “Dancing the Algorithm.”
Xin Ying: So I came to New York, 2010, for Martha Graham from China and I fell in love with the technique, right away, because the contraction, release, really talking to my body and I realized Oh, emotions generate your body. There is a certain energy emotion can give you…even the negative ones. So I think that’s what taught me the most because I am from a Chinese classical trained background, which is, as a female dancer, you always have to be very pretty. So certain expression you have to contain and Graham really taught me how to you know just go for it. Be raw. And then just throughout the years, I am actually from the generation where we were still just using DVD players. You know, from the beginning it was like this, we had to carry…putting the little DVD players…and then later on…funding, they say you know something unfortunate. And coming from you know the best situation we can actually [Owen: the Hurricane Sandy affected the Graham Company in particular]. Yeah, a lot of archive stuff was lost and that made people thinking how do we preserved it…we started changing the mindset. The very thing becoming digital. Now we just have link. You just go to the link and then you watch it. And…generation. So for us, we know that technology is part of us to preserve, you know, and to protect.
And in 2018, Graham did a Google residency and I was one of the choreographers and dancers in that. I had so much fun and from there I just felt technology giving you a tool to discovering something we’ll miss. You know they’re discovering this connection as a dancer I am dancing on stage. There are two ways of sense - one is from an audience point of view, because we are watching the mirror all the time, so we know what the shape looks like. One is the embodiment - from the dancer’s point of view. And there’s the gap. There is a disconnection. I kept thinking why when I talk about, for example, a piece like Lamentation right? The old Lamentation, that piece, from the audience point of view always see it as very iconic, the shapes, very like American modern aesthetic, like sculpture-like. But for me, I am always thinking about how the tube you have to stretch it out, keep the shape their, you feel the vibration inside, you feel the sweat dripping down, you know, dripping off your body. And I was thinking, what can make, what can a tube (?) I can use to bring back the gap? That is what I was very interested in how to reactivate the archive through technology.
And then I went to school at the NYU. I just graduated actually [Owen: Yay]. I just got my MFA in Dance Interdisciplinary Research and I spent pretty much half of my time NYU Tisch ITP, which is where the technology were focused there. And that’s where I actually met all my collaborators. On the same day that I discovered [unclear word] video. I was thinking this would be so great to put the Lamentation in [unclear word], then the audience can interact with the…you can stretch, you can turn, you can actually see much more up close and also most importantly, when you watching, interacting with it, you have to dance. Forces you to dance with the archive. Then you have a sense of embodiment. The dancer is experiencing. So basically that’s kind of my focus. I did quite a few projects, one my piece, Lighter to Nobody, AI, which led me to have an opportunity to dance with Martha Graham on stage. Yeah this all the questions I am asking the gap, featuring me and Martha, for example. I’ve never met her. Now I am dancing with her for 15 years what possibility can come from that.
Um… I think just from this year I started to feel, I am not the owner of the legacy…but I started to feel the ownership of it. I think only when that happens you are actually taking initiative thinking what can you do with more. Because before you were thinking you are working for someone. And when you have a direct conversation with someone then all the options, choice start to, you know, bring start making. Even the ethical ones. You know when you start to ask questions. Do I need to do this? How can I not do this? That’s when the ethical choice, you know, at play. And I felt, I know for Graham dancer like expression is a must. Like using our body to express, which is for communication. You know she was saying if there is one person in the audience and still understand me, that would be enough. So that thinking of communication is where I see if I can do with technology [Owen: Mm-hmm]. Is there a different way, since there is already a gap. You were talking about the spectator and [unclear word] and especially when you are thinking Graham archive is so much in the past and how I experience is so present [Owen: Mm-hmm] and how we can break it. I mean this is some question we have to ask. Either way, we have to seeking questions…uh seeking answers. I don’t know, there’s a, I don’t know, how can we just stop do a because anything we do will consume energy for sure, it's how you use it.
Nancy Wozny: One of the opportunities of partnering with technology is that we can expand who gets to dance. Graham principal dancer Lloyd Knight discusses his rare chance to dance Lamentation, in this clip from a mini documentary about Lamentation: Dancing the Archive, produced by Xin Ying.
Lloyd Knight: This piece was choreographed in 1930. And you know, it started with Martha of course. And it's always been performed by women so to have the opportunity to perform this iconic dance means a lot to me. In regards to seeing this piece. Usually you are in the theatre, you are sitting in the house, and you just have that view of the dance. But with this technology, you will really get to choose what's most important to you and what you want out of the dance.
Nancy Wozny: Technology can bring us closer to the body, it’s not a replacement but an augmentation. More inclusion is possible. Xin Ying goes even deeper here on how this project welcomes the viewer inside the dancing body.
Xin Ying: We always perform in the theater. It’s not very accessible, you have to buy a ticket, and we don’t perform everywhere, all the time. We need a situation where people can just walk in…kind of like walk in to the experience itself and be very close to it. Very close to the body. Very close to the emotion. You can almost see the breathing from that human body. You can almost feel the muscles contracting. And that will trigger in you, empathy. You can watch the female version, you can watch the male version, and you can actually experience the contracting muscles, the contracting close up, and see the stretched out spine, the struggle. You cannot have that experience if you are in in a theatre. So we feel that this can actually make people [unclear word] with emotion and experience the human body in a different way.
Nancy Wozny: Graham technique with its emphasis on contraction release and spirals is grounded in human anatomy. It's no wonder that it can be generalized to dancing anyone's work. As I consider the current company members and the wealth of information that is already in their bodies as they begin their lives as Graham dancers which will live in Graham’s work and the work of future choreographers, it occurs to me that it's in the dancing body where the past and the future come together.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at DanceInteractive.jacobspillow.org and of course through live experiences during our Festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us soon, either online or onsite.