This morning's Google's animated doodle celebrating pioneering choreographer Martha Graham's 117° birth anniversary must have made quite a few dance enthusiasts like me pretty happy.
It's undeniable that, at times, doodles celebrate rather bizarre events (remember the 119th sundae anniversary?), but, in this case, it really made my day seeing this little animated sketch based on different choreographies by Graham, among them also "Lamentation".
I already mentioned the choreographer and the costume she wears in "Lamentation" a while back on this blog in connection with Givenchy's Spring/Summer 2009 Haute Couture collection, but, if you're a fashion designer, it would be maybe worth to sit down and re-watch some of Graham's choreographies and study a bit better the dancer's movements as they may help you redefining an aesthetic of the body.
Unanimously considered as a dance with a strong poetic component, "Lamentation" was a sort of meeting point between the aesthetic element and the mythic element. To represent this metaphysical encounter, Graham used her entire body, perpetually changing it in a constant movement.
There is a very important component in this choreography, the costume.
This basic lavender jersey tube that encased Graham's body leaving her face, hands and feet exposed, allowed her to sinuously bend and twist, while sitting on a bench.
This choreography was extremely revolutionary for many different reasons.
Graham went indeed against one of the main principles of dance, that is seeing the body of the dancer physically performing different acts, from running to jumping, walking and performing specific dance routines.
The main inspiration for "Lamentation" actually came from the Old Testament and more specifically from The Book of Lamentations that opens with the sentence “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become a widow”. But, while in the latter Jerusalem is personified as a widow, in Graham's choreography the dancer represents a universal female figure in mourning.
Her body movements are therefore used to highlight that condition of grief, dramatised also by the jersey cloth that encased the body.
As she stretched her body Graham used her costume to create architectural figures, at times angular, at others more fluid, altering and morphing her body, turning it into a bird, a spider, an aquatic creature or a twisting and turning spiral.
The spectators perceived therefore the body movements - based on contractions and relaxations - through the fabric and through gestures that visually attracted the attention of the spectators towards the interior and the outer body (please pay attention to this point if you're a fashion design student and experiment with fabrics trying to see which ones can help you creating these effects).
Some dance critics compared the costume in Martha Graham's "Lamentation" to the costumes employed in Loïe Fuller's choreographies in which she inflated and deflated the fabric manipulating air currents as if she were a butterfly.
In a way the comparison is not that incorrect since in both Fuller and Graham's choreographies the costume and the way fabric moved on the body was extremely important.
There is actually a rather obscure performance by the Ballets Russes choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska that could be linked with "Lamentation", it's "La Nuit sur le Mont Chauve" (Night on a Bare Mountain; music by Modest Mussorgorsky).
The ballet was premiered on 19th January 1924 at the Théâtre de Monte-Carlo.
The main connection stands in the costumes created by Natalia Goncharova (who also designed the sets for this ballet).
The dancers were clad in loose (as opposed to Graham's stretchable tube) blue gowns with strips of fabrics hanging under the sleeves that created variable movements.
Fashion-wise an interesting comparison could be made with some of the designs from Thierry Mugler's Autumn/Winter 2001-02 ready-to-wear collection and in particular with his fluid tunics matched with tight hooded body suits in metallic colours that seemed to be crossovers between Graham and Goncharova's costumes.
The comparison seem to work pretty well if you think that, at 14, Mugler started dancing with the Rhine Opera Ballet.
The most embarrassing comparison between fashion/pop culture and Martha Graham remains instead Lady Gaga who claimed a while back in a Billboard interview that her Grammy performance “had a Martha Graham energy to it” (Graham, forgive her, for she does not know what she is saying...).
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Google is always doing such things whenever there's a thing that they're celebrating. It's a good thing about Google. They never forget important memories:)
Posted by: khaki suits | May 12, 2011 at 12:40 PM