Photo Credit: Photo of Michael Byrne.
Get tickets here: Lament for the Land: Monumentality, Identity, & Innovation in Martha Graham Tickets, Monday, October 19 • 7 PM – 8 PM EDT | Eventbrite
This rebroadcast of the 2024 Dance Division Symposium features the presentation from Dance Research Fellow, Michael Byrne.
Join us online for the rebroadcast of the 2024 Dance Division Symposium where the eighth cohort of Dance Research Fellows presented their work from the acquired collection of the Martha Graham Dance Company.
One year before the beginning of World War II, Martha Graham created American Document in response to rising fascism in 1930s Europe. Today’s current events offer an uncanny resonance, embedding Graham’s historic work with a recursive sense of futurity and prescience. Michael Byrne has used his fellowship to explore how we can vivify Graham’s ongoing spirit of innovation and societal critique through the intersection of (re)performance, technology, and archival practice. Leveraging “Lament for the Land” from American Document as a generative prompt, Byrne draws upon his background in dance and digital technologies to bring to life the creative mission set forth by Graham for future audiences. More significantly, he animates choreographic themes relating to cultural identity and invisibility, using Graham’s 1938 dance-drama as a heuristic for interrogating historical asymmetries in monumental spaces.
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