Martha Graham Dance Company will present world premiere of Hofesh Shechter’s CAVE at inaugural City Center Dance Festival (photo by Brian Pollock)
Who: Martha Graham Dance Company
What: City Center Dance Festival
Where: New York City Center, 131 West Fifty-Fifth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
When: April 6-10, $35-$125
Why: Celebrating the long-awaited return to the stage in front of in-person audiences following two years of lockdown, the inaugural City Center Dance Festival kicked off March 24 with Paul Taylor Dance Company followed by Ballet Hispánico, with Dance Theatre of Harlem coming in April 5-10. DTH will be performing concurrently with Martha Graham Dance Company, which is presenting three programs April 6-10. “It’s staggering to think that we are premiering nine new creations by nine exciting and diverse choreographers at New York City Center in April,” Graham Company artistic director Janet Eilber said in a statement. “Creating new work has never been more challenging than in the past many months, which makes the accomplishments of the choreographers, our dancers, and the entire creative team even more resonant. Each of these dances provides a visceral, ecstatic, and even cathartic response to the restrictions the world has endured.”
Program A (April 6 and 9) consists of the 1936 anti-Fascist classic Chronicle, choreographed by Graham, originally about Hitler’s Germany but now relating to Putin’s Russia, with music by Wallingford Riegger (performed live by the Mannes Orchestra); the New York premiere of the reconceived version of 1952’s Canticle for Innocent Comedians for its seventieth anniversary, with a new score by Jason Moran (who will play live on opening night) and choreography by Sonya Tayeh, Kristina and Sadé Alleyne, Sir Robert Cohan, Jenn Freeman, Juliano Nunes, Micaela Taylor, Yin Yue, and Graham, for the vignettes “Sun,” “Moon,” “Earth,” “Water,” “Fire,” “Stars,” “Wind,” and “Death”; and the world premiere of Hofesh Shechter’s CAVE, with music by Shechter and Âme.
Program B (April 10) begins with Graham’s 1944 masterwork Appalachian Spring, featuring a marvelous score by Aaron Copland for a thirteen-piece chamber orchestra and set design by Isamu Noguchi, and concludes with Canticle for Innocent Comedians. On April 7, MGDC’s gala is highlighted by Ritual to the Sun, the final section of Graham’s 1981 Acts of Light, set to music by nineteenth-century Danish composer Carl Nielsen, in addition to CAVE and excerpts from the new Canticle. The works will be performed by MGDC members So Young An, Alessio Crognale, Laurel Dalley Smith, Natasha M. Diamond Walker, Lloyd Knight, Jacob Larsen, Devin Loh, Lloyd Mayor, Marzia Memoli, Anne O’Donnell, Lorenzo Pagano, Kate Reyes, Anne Souder, Richard Villaverde, Leslie Andrea Williams, and Xin Ying.