>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^F00:00:04 ^M00:00:20 >> Anne McLean: Good evening and welcome. I'm Anne McLean from the library's music division. It's my great pleasure tonight to welcome Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance and choreographer and filmmaker Pontus Lidberg. Tonight as part of our Martha Graham at the Library Festival we're presenting the world premiere performance of his Woodland set to a score by Irving Fein, Fein's Notturno for Harp and Strings. Thank you've both for being here. It's very, very exciting for us. Today the Washington Post has a wonderful headline for the Library of Congress and Martha Graham the legacy lives on, exactly on the mark, exactly. So this is truly an exciting moment for us. We mark a long time partnership with the Martha Graham Dance Company that began over a half century ago. It began with the now historic evening of three Graham ballets commissioned by the library's Coolidge Foundation, Appalachian Spring, Herodiade and Darius Milhaud's Imagined Wing. Through that astonishing exhilarating collaboration the library has established a relationship that has continued to grow and flourish and your new work, a joint commission of the library's Verna and Irving Fein Fund and the Martha Graham Center is a beautiful blossoming of this tradition. We look forward to seeing it and you will be mounting this in New York very soon, right? >> Janet Eilber: April 18th will be its New York premiere and that is actually the company's 90th birthday. Martha Graham had her first concert with a group of dancers, a trio of young women, on April 18 in 1926. >> Anne McLean: So we really have a lot to celebrate. We have 180 years, we're going to be saying this throughout the evening, 180 years, 90 for you and 90 for the library and it's an amazing serendipity so we'll be talking about our history with you and about the Martha Graham collection here at the library which you were instrumental in bringing and what that is about and our shared commitment to supporting new work plus a preview of Pontus' new piece and maybe a quick glance at some of the impressive new ventures from the Graham Company like their new forthcoming YouTube channel. So let's talk about how this developed, how we got to be able to be so fortunate as to have this new piece. This was a discussion that took place over three or four years with Janet and LaRue Allen and we were very, very excited and hopeful when we knew you were going to be involved and this I know is a huge part of your forward path for the Graham Company's new work. I wanted to ask you Pontus what was the experience like of working with the Graham Company? >> Pontus Lidberg: So the Graham dancers just like ballet dancers have a very strong foundation but it's not ballet it's different. They are trained equally specifically and clearly but in a different way and I'm rather used to working with ballet dancers and these dancers came with definitely equal amounts of physicality and clarity in their movement but coming from a different place which has informed me as a choreographer as well and it has definitely informed the work. >> Anne McLean: And you studied this technique at some point yourself. >> Pontus Lidberg: Yes, well so I was a trained ballet dancer but as part of my education was various forms of contemporary dance movement and Graham technique was the first one that I was exposed to but I think in general Graham was one of the few who really codified a technique. Other choreographers have a lineage or a style of training but she actually codified a technique but most contemporary training is not like that, it's much more nebulous. >> Anne McLean: And you've also commented on the expressivity of this particular troupe, their facial expressions and the whole aesthetic. >> Pontus Lidberg: This is also something I very much appreciate because the company, the dancers have a strong confidence in their facial expression. There are certain movements of contemporary dance where the face is kind of forgotten on purpose where the movement is supposed to speak and you're not supposed to emote with your face but these dancers' faces are very alive and I find that very inspiring and true to people. >> Anne McLean: And that's something that you studied, I mean I know it's a 10-year process, right? The Graham technique, I think. >> Janet Eilber: That's what Martha used to say that it takes 10 years to make a dancer but I think what Pontus is describing is just the element of the Graham technique which is that she created this vocabulary sort of born out of body language, out of natural gesture, because she wanted to describe what she called the inner landscape, the human emotions and conditions rather than swans and flowers and kings and queens she was going for what was really going on here in the late 1920s and 30s and the vocabulary she developed is a combination of the core, emotion riding on the breath and coming from the core of the body and her famous contraction and release which is the energizing of the torso and it is a perfect marriage between that physicality, the physical vocabulary, and the emotion that it's describing so for Graham dancers they are really trained to illuminate the physical movement with an emotional image in the classroom. It's a marriage between the two. You will see in Medea tonight and Appalachian Spring the dancers really have to be actors as well as incredible athletes. >> Anne McLean: And even just in their carriage, I mean anyone who has seen a Graham performance the way they step onto the stage is like actors in a [inaudible] theater or anything else, immediate presence and charisma. That's something I took away with me from the first time I saw a Graham performance. Thinking about the music watching your work there's such musicality and I know you are a musician first, what was your instrument and what made you choose the path to dance? >> Pontus Lidberg: I was trained as a pianist as a young boy and it was as I remember, and I was pretty young so I might not remember everything, but at 10 you kind of have to choose professional training for both music or dance and I auditioned for both professional schools that were available in Stockholm and I was accepted into both so I had to make a choice then and there and the one thing I remember is that the audition for the music classes were on a Sunday in the winter and I was alone with the teacher in a room and I was singing and I guess they were just testing me and the audition for the ballet school was on a Thursday night and it was full of people in the corridors and in their classrooms and on stage training and running past and it felt like a dynamic place. I honestly think that that was a deciding factor [laughter]. >> Anne McLean: Interesting. >> Pontus Lidberg: And to add to that I know many musicians and they have a wonderful rich life and also solace especially, a rather lonesome life sitting by themselves practicing. >> Anne McLean: Yes, or in a hotel room touring constantly, it's true. Thinking about the music for your work, Irving Fein's lyrical Notturno for Harp and Strings it's very interesting for us to see this work, people who know the work as a chamber piece, to see it come into a new dimension through your dance and this reminded me of Janet's phrase seeing the classics through new eyes and I was wanting to, I was thinking too about how you re-envisioned the classic ballet Raymonda. Would you like to talk a little bit about that? >> Pontus Lidberg: So Raymonda is a work I made for the Royal Swedish Ballet about one and a half years ago was the premier and it's a classical ballet, one of the classics by Glazunov but not that often performed actually and it's huge. It's very long and very big work and I reinvented it by writing a new libretto because the libretto has a lot of problems for our contemporary times. It's very racist and it's also kind of all over the place. It's one of those librettos where you think, I mean I don't exactly know but I'm pretty sure that it was written more to be able to showcase we want this kind of Oriental dance here and then we want this there, kind of like wrote their libretto haphazardly to suit various inspirations. ^M00:10:00 But I completely rewrote it while keeping certain elements and it was kind of coming full circle for me because I was trained in ballet but I very early chose to go a contemporary path. I felt like there was more to do in contemporary dance and definitely more to explore but that training just like Graham training is something you just can't undo. I mean it's in my body so it was interesting to come full circle and revisit that again. >> Anne McLean: In the piece with the music, with the Fein piece you actually reordered it slightly and made it cyclical I think you read about - >> Pontus Lidberg: So that I did with Raymonda too by the way. I reordered it to suit the new libretto but with this with the Notturno for Harp and Strings I thought that I didn't want to illustrate the work only but I wanted to somehow add a new structure to it and so I added a repeat. I framed the work with a fast section, the animato, and then I reordered the two slow sections and it kind of almost became a mirror or a cycle both. It kind of goes to the middle and then it almost rewinds but takes a different path back and I found that that was interesting because it also talks to Irving Fein which I can't do but I can add a comment. >> Anne McLean: It was so nice to see in the film about your work and about this project which you can see in our lobby here tonight. It's so nice to see the pictures of the composers that to the Graham Company has worked with including now this music from Irving Fein but you I guess you found in your archives some of those photos to bring out and music has always been a hugely important part of what you do choosing the music and so on. For us it's exciting tonight to have a live orchestra. We try every time to have a live orchestra when we can possibly do it and it sounds fantastic. It's a little challenging and we'll get to the challenges of working in the Coolidge in just a minute [laugher]. Regarding your work as a filmmaker I wanted to ask you to touch on that and ask you about how it affects your vision for your choreography. >> Pontus Linberg: It's a question I get fairly often. The first thing I would say is that when I create for film the option I have which I don't have on stage is to completely direct the eye of the audience. I can zoom in on a button for example and that is what everyone will see in film but when you put something on stage you can't do that, in fact you leave it to each individual audience member to follow their own path so you have to think differently about structure and there are very different ways of working actually. >> Anne McLean: I was wondering I was thinking about Martha Graham's experiments in technique and her inspiration from the visual arts and her statement on seeing a Kandinsky painting in 1926 before she had even become known as a choreographer in New York. She looked at the painting and her response later was I will dance like that. It's just an extraordinary comment and I wanted to see Janet if you had thoughts on the visual arts in later Graham works and today too how you are working with visuals. >> Janet Eilber: Well Martha drew great inspiration from such a variety of things. She was a voracious reader, she loved poetry. When she saw the Kandinsky in '26 or I thought it was '23 she was visiting the first exhibit in America at the Chicago Art Institute of the European abstract painters, modern painters, and she said she was relieved to see the exhibit because she was so relieved to see that there were other people who thought the way that she did to see this abstract work and the Kandinsky had a streak of red in it. She said she would make a dance like that and that's our dance Diversion of Angels from 1948 which is unfortunately not in this program but when she was choreographing she would bring in huge coffee table art books with specific paintings or sculptures or sometimes natural things, leaves and trees that she was drawing inspiration from on whatever new work that she was creating and it was just one of the many ways she filled herself with inspiration before she started to choreograph. >> Anne McLean: And she was also very much involved in union psychology studying that as well, right? Joseph Campbell and - >> Janet Eilber: Joseph Campbell was married to one of the members of her company, Jean Erdman, yes, so that was in the '40s. Erick Hawkins who Martha married for a short time had studied the classics at Harvard and we think that is why the Greek period appeared and Erick was inspiring her and after she divorced Erick she was [inaudible] analysis [laughter] so she was kind of drawing inspiration from all over the place but the Dark Meadow suite on tonight's program is a suite of highlights from the much longer work, Dark Meadow, and Dark Meadow is considered to be her [inaudible] piece created while she was in analysis about life's greatest adventure, I'll quote it tonight in our introduction, the adventure of seeking so it's a ballet about questioning. There's no dramatic narrative, it's about life's journey. >> Anne McLean: And this is something, these areas that we're talking about the psyche and myth of poesis and so forth, these are very much in the line of thinking of Isamu Noguchi and as many of you in the room know we've had the pleasure of having an exploration of the connection between Graham and Noguchi in the past week. It's been really exciting and fun, something very different for us, but I was thinking back to the art again how she took Noguchi to the I think MoMA to look at a work there and said this is what I have in mind and then he said okay I understand and I don't think the book that we were reading [inaudible] or his biography sort of says he didn't really want to go to the museum or he didn't need to go to the museum but it just showed me how much she was involved with this kind of visual impetus and so on. In talking about him I really got a kick out of reading an article by you where you talked about the challenges of working with these Noguchi set pieces as a dancer and I'd love it if you would talk to the audience about that. >> Janet Eilber: Well it was a little bit tongue in cheek but the dancers really have to --, they have a very intimate relationship with these sets, Noguchi designed sets that are totally practical. We scramble all over them, we swing off them, doors open, chairs a spin. Tonight in Medea you'll see she climbs inside this beautiful brass bush of thorns but they don't always act exactly as you'd like them to act [laughter] and for example in Appalachian Spring because Noguchi used to the angles of the house to create perspective and to give such a beautiful provocative design to the audience but the rocking chair that the pioneering woman has to sit on for so long is about as big as a bicycle seat, you know it's almost two dimensional. At one point you will see the four followers sit on the little bench that's up against the wall of the house. Well that bench is only about four inches wide and it's raked, it's on an angle so they really can't even perch on it so there's all sorts of stories. In Cave of the Heart, the big aorta that is at the back of the center stage has corners, we call it the elephant because it looks like an elephant on the back with his feet sticking up, and dancers have to step from corner to corner and not look down and look very self-assured as they walk around this thing and it takes a lot of rehearsal. There's a little bit of swearing that goes on I think [laughter]. >> Anne McLean: And I wanted to, following up on this I wanted to ask you both about the experience of working in the Coolidge Auditorium, what it's been like for you, and I was thinking about Noguchi's comment that he tried to make our very small stage which is only 19 feet deep and 31 feet wide appear larger than it is and he said I tried to create a really new theater with hallucinatory space so we were all amazed to see how much you Pontus and you Janet and your dancers are able to do with the space. How has it been for you? >> Pontus Lidberg: Well we taped it out in rehearsal studio. We just arrived yesterday so I only had an idea. I had seen pictures and we had taped out the measurements so I knew it was small. I don't think it looks that small though. I mean it's small but it's also the room or the auditorium itself has angles, perspective that makes it look bigger than it is. ^M00:20:03 And I actually to be honest I thought that first I need to create the piece knowing that it will be here of course but I don't want to have in my mind that there will be limits. Rather I created things and they are adapted to reality when needed to but actually not much needed to be adapted. >> Janet Eilber: Well we're adapting entrances and exits because in the Coolidge there's only a downstage entrance on each side and we're used to being able to exit in four different wings so you'll see sometimes dancers sort of running along the side and then coming in and we did remove one couple from the Dark Meadows suite. There are usually four on stage, just in one section we went down to three, so we've been adjusting for the last few weeks to make sure no one got kicked or anything like that [laughter]. >> Anne McLean: I was amazed to see how completely at ease they all seemed on our stage. That's a tribute to what you've done to plan and so forth. >> Janet Eilber: There's also one thing to note that part of the Noguchi set for Appalachian Spring does not fit on this stage. At the very center of the back of the stage there is usually a doorway framed with the beam of the house coming to it and like Martha did at the premier that frame of a doorway is not present on this stage. We are actually using the upstage door that is built into the Coolidge but that's a historic adjustment at this point. >> Anne McLean: Today somebody mentioned thinking about Martha Graham and the library's long connection to her that today is the 25th anniversary of her death which I didn't know, April 1, and we were looking earlier in the afternoon at some quotes from her talking about walking the high wire of circumstance, practicing living at the instant for a dancer. She says at times I fear walking that tight rope, I fear the venture into the unknown but that's part of the act of creating and the act of performing. That is what a dancer does venturing into the unknown. And I was just wondering this is maybe a good spot to talk with both of you about you each have a troupe, you are responsible for a big aesthetic vision and maybe something about the world of contemporary dance today and what you see for it and your hopes and plans. I know you for example I heard you had a big film project with your company coming up. >> Pontus Lidberg: Well my company is more realistic for contemporary times. What I mean by that is that there are very few actual institutions made anymore. It just doesn't work out that way rather dance has always been very fluid. Dancers have been fluid, ephemeral and moving around and wanting to experience different kinds of choreographers and cities so that's not new but it's certainly been solidified that that's kind of the lifestyle of dancers nowadays and my company is not an institution. We come together when there is funding and work and projects and sometimes that's a lot and sometimes that's a little and then I also create works for companies such as the Martha Graham Dance Company and many others and so my time is filled. Sometimes I'm with my own group and sometimes I'm with others and actually that works out really well for me because I get so much more information from my work this way but yes I am working on another film right now with my company. >> Anne McLean: Janet and I talked a little bit the other night about the amazing new paths that you are leading for the Graham Company and I wanted to ask you to talk about your expanding access to audiences through these innovative ventures. >> Janet Eilber: Well that kind of also speaks to what's going on in the dance world these days, you know modern dance is a really young art form. It's just over 100 years old now and it was born out of revolt, each generation rejecting what had gone before and moving forward but as we hit our 100th birthday or so the field itself is looking back and saying wait a minute there are things in our past that we don't want to throw away. The art form has new classics and Graham certainly has many of these classics but the modern dance has really not focused on how to keep their classics, how to celebrate them, how to keep them relevant, how to engage audiences with them. The audiences for modern dance really have been trained and the funders to appreciate the new, it's all about the new so we've really been experimenting with how to bring more points of access for today's audiences to our classic works everything from simply spoken introductions on our programs. We started by asking well what's the modern dance equivalent to a museum's audio tour or to opera super titles you know how do you bring context to the classics so that audiences can enter into them and appreciate their [inaudible] and beauty. So we've done spoken introductions, we've done contextual programming, we do season themes like inner landscape focusing on the psychological ballets. We're the first company to stream a rehearsal live. We've done online video competitions. We partner with all sorts of different educational institutions and cultural institutions and our school has many creative projects and this has all led us to commissioning new work because we believe there's a real conversation between new work and the classic works and we've discovered by having both on our programs it's really kind of a one plus one makes three. The classics bring a context to the new work and the new work brings fresh eyes to the classics and so that's a very short --, it's not such a short answer, but I could be much longer on that topic I'll tell you. >> Anne McLean: That's the exciting thing about tonight. We'll have this chance to see both the master works and a new one and I was thinking back just to finish up on your technological innovations but I was also interested in your comment about Graham herself and the company have always been on the cutting edge and you now have a new mobile app that's downloadable if anybody is interested - >> Janet Eilber: And free, free - >> Anne McLean: What's exactly on there? >> Janet Eilber: Well Google came to us about a year ago and said you know we're expanding our Google Cultural Institute which you are able to take virtual tours of museums on their Cultural Institute and we're expanding it into the performing arts and you were the first dance company that we have invited to be part of this so we were delighted because we have been spending a lot of time organizing and digitizing our archives which are the largest dance archives for any single living artist, dance, not living, sorry any single dance artist so we were kind of poised to help share them on the Google Cultural Institute and on December 1 they launched this new part, the performing arts. We're part of it as well as the Bolshoi as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company, I mean there are a number of wonderful institutions and if you go to the Cultural Institute in search Martha Graham you'll see our exhibit which is going to be expanded but it's a wonderful foundation about the Martha Graham technique and Martha Graham herself and the Martha Graham Dance Company and you can go to the iTunes store and download it as an app as well but there's more information online. >> Anne McLean: That's so cool I wish we had an app. We share some passion for digitizing our archives and I was going to say in addition to the Graham Company we are also very fortunate in having a vast archive of Martha Graham works and sketches and manuscripts and memorabilia and photographs. You can look at the library's website too and look up Martha Graham Dance Collection or just the Martha Graham Collection and you can access these online too so we are very proud of that and we're very, very proud of this collaboration for this celebration. So now we want to just give you a chance to ask a couple of questions and then we'll let them go back and get ready for tonight. Does anybody have a question? ^M00:29:27 [ Inaudible Speaker ] ^M00:29:42 >> Janet Eilber: Can you hear? He's asking what the difference is between the Martha Graham technique and ballet? You know you've got two arms, two legs, how many different things can you do? But Martha discovered as she was searching for a style of movement that would reveal emotion she discovered that emotion rides on the breath when you laugh or when you sob or when you are nervous, it changes your breath and she developed a style of dancing driven by the torso, her contraction being the exhale and the coiling in of the torso and the release being the inhale and the sending out of energy and tonight on stage all of the movement in the Martha Graham works are driven by the torso, the core muscles. She used this energy to also leverage herself against the floor and to use gravity. She wanted to show effort. She wanted to show the human condition as opposed to ballet which was very sort of antigravity and above the ground she went into the ground and you will see there's a series of wonderful falls that she created that are part of the Graham technique tonight in Cave of the Heart you'll see Medea as her heart is breaking just legs opening and the whole torso drops down into the floor and then rebounds and recovers so it's a much more shall I say gutsy percussive earthbound technique than ballet. >> Anne McLean: Anyone else? ^M00:31:31 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:31:35 >> One of the films the library showed on Saturday was the wonderful film that WQED in Pittsburgh made with Martha Graham and I think an introductory material talked about the challenge to them at the time was shooting it from multiple angles with different cameras and it dawned on me that it must have taken multiple takes and been a real challenge for the dancers perhaps so I was wondering since both of you are working in film if you could talk a little bit about that both what it's like for the dancers to have to go through the same piece especially if the cameras could be moving or shooting them from different angles? >> Pontus Lidberg: Well that's kind of normal for film work. Either you have a lot of money and you have and A camera and a B camera and a C camera and you have somehow arranged that they are not in each other's path so they are not filmed, that one camera doesn't film the other camera, and you try to have few takes and that's very expensive but you win time or you usually have smaller budgets and that's 99% of the time true and you have only one crew and one camera and instead you have to do one set up and then you have to move to another one and change the lens and so on but there's enough rest in between and it's not really a problem. >> Janet Eilber: I don't know about that [laughter]. I've been in a few dance films where we did it again and again and you had to stop and prepare - >> Pontus Lidberg: It's certainly tiring. >> Janet Eilber: the needs of the costume, it's tiring, and of course dancers --, Bob Fosse said dancers are the last soldiers of the theater because they really are disciplined and work to get something right so we will do take after take after take. >> Pontus Lidberg: Yes but I think what's --, as long as there's a clear goal why it's not a problem and of course you don't destroy anyone, that's never clever, but you might have to work very hard [laughter]. ^F00:33:37 ^M00:33:44 >> I studied with Bill [inaudible] >> -- microphone. >> I'm sorry, I studied with Bill Bales, who was early Graham and it was very swoopy, much more lyrical. I was at the studio in the 50s and 60s which had become much more percussive and angular. Has the technique itself evolved as it seemed to do while she was alive? >> Janet Eilber: Yes and she lived for such a long time that she set us a good example because the physicality of each generation keeps changing. It's like the Olympics every few years people break a record. The legs go higher, the jumps go higher, the turns are faster, the falls you know, and Martha actually loved that and would keep incorporating it into her classroom exercises and her choreography as she was creating new work but also into the classic works. She didn't expect us to dance like the casts from 1947 or 1957 or 1967 had danced the works. She wanted to use our facility and the effort was she wanted to maintain the dramatic intent. She felt that that could happen, that you could let the legs go that you could use the facility of the contemporary dancers and yet remain true to the message of the work so that's a lesson I take from Martha and of course today's dancers are absolutely astounding. The job is to use that in the service of the dramatic intent of the work. >> Anne McLean: Anyone else? I think - oh yeah one there, okay. >> Hi, I was curious, the dance that you choreographed did you have an idea of the dance and then apply the music to the dance or did you listen to the music and then create the dance from the music? >> Pontus Lidberg: I listen to the music first and I work in many different ways actually. I work in both of those ways in combinations of the two and I didn't decide which way I would work because first I did research. I didn't even choose the music straight away I had some pieces. In fact I chose another piece first that I really wanted to choreograph. I think it's a beautiful piece of music, great for dance, called Serious Song for Strings but then I had a problem combining it with something else. It was such a standalone piece and as such it was too short so I changed my mind but I think one of the challenges of working with Irving Fein's music is that it is particular. There is a lot of music that is popular among choreographers today that is more like a landscape or an ambience that goes on for a long time. It's less specific but this music is very specific and so I found that it would be difficult for me to superimpose something on that. It just didn't work so then I decided well in that case I will really work with the music and listen to it and choreograph what I hear and work with it that way so in that way it's not a conceptual piece because sometimes I do conceptual pieces and then you choose all the elements that strengthen the concept but this is not one of them. This is a musical piece and it's also the encounter with the dancers and the encounter with the music is really the piece. >> Do you let the dancers contribute to the choreography? >> Pontus Lidberg: Yes. ^M00:37:33 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:37:37 Yes I can explain that [laughter]. As a young choreographer I was very interested in creating steps not to the point of codifying a technique or anything like that but I was certainly interested in this is my step which is of course not really true because the patterns that you move in are conditioned so they are not mine at all but anyway I was interested in making the choices. This is the step, this is the phrase, this is the sequence, these are the angles, this is the you know all of it and I did that for quite a long time to the point where that wasn't inspiring anymore but rather I started being more interested in seeing what can I draw out of someone else and so then I kind of just throw a ball and then see what they do with it and from then I start like okay and I saw something in what they did and I said actually if you just do with slightly different, go this way instead, and that way it's conversational so I can shape the choreography with the dancers. The strange thing is that the choreography always, well to this point at least, turns out instantly recognizable as my choreography even though I don't give steps anymore [laughter]. >> Anne McLean: Maybe one more question, over there. >> This is wonderful. I'm learning about Martha Graham's approach and style to dance. What else will be demonstrated about her particular style in the pieces tonight? You mentioned a few other things. >> Anne McLean: What else will be demonstrated? >> That's peculiar to Martha's approach. >> Janet Eilber: To Martha's style and her vocabulary? Well tonight's program actually the three Graham works give you a wonderful overview of several different periods. You know she lived so long it's almost like Picasso and Appalachian Spring of course is from her Americana period and Dark Meadow and these dances are fairly close together. Appalachian Springs '44, Dark Meadows '47 and Cave of the Heart is '46 but Dark Meadow is very abstract modernist work. The chorus work is very geometric and the patterns that the dancers make on the stage really harken back to experiments that she did in the early 1930s before she started using the Gucci sets, experimenting with the geometry of the stage and the lines of force and drawing inspiration from Guggenheim Fellowship she had where she traveled and lived in the Southwest and visited the rituals of the Pueblo communities there. There's a lot of the Southwest and the Native American ritual in several of Graham's works and particularly in Dark Meadow and then Cave of the Heart inspired one of her wonderful Greek works by Medea. Again of course she's a modernist so the thing about Cave of the Heart is that she distilled the story into only four characters to represent this emotional battle of Medea and Jason the princess and the chorus so you're really getting a nice view of different approaches, different inspirations for Martha but I do encourage you to watch for those torsos because really everything comes --, even when a Graham dancer lifts his or her arm it's because the shoulder blade is dropping down the back and you are leveraging the power from the floor to lift that arm. It's never just a simple arm. I have to demonstrate one thing. When a baseball pitcher pitches, when I watch a baseball pitcher pitch I see him first go into big Martha Graham contraction [laughter], so if home plate is down there --, he comes way back here, his torso is coiled, it's leveraging off the mound and he throws the ball from the center of the planet, right? He presses away. All of the energy goes all the way through the release of the torso, the contraction and bam the ball goes, right? So a Graham dancer does not dance like this. Every movement is coming from the center of the body from the floor so look for it. They're not going to throw a ball at you but they're throwing energy in the same way [laughter]. >> Anne McLean: Wonderful, that's a great way to end. I think we're about to the point of going into the concert hall. Please take a look at our exhibits by the way. We have a lot of interesting material and thank you so much. ^M00:42:42 [ Applause ] ^M00:42:55 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.