“Whether it was a dance of consuming jealousy, I Medea and he Jason, or one of tender love like Appalachian Spring, he the Husbandman, I the Bride, it came so close to real life that at times it made me ill” once confessed Martha Graham. A chilling admission, it appears at odds with her public persona as the high priestess and Mother of American Mother Dance. A woman who invented an entirely new vernacular of movement. This tension, Graham’s overwhelming commitment and capacity for creation, mixed by a deep want for love, comes across quite clearly in her work. Watching Cave of The Heart leaves a viewer in a state quite similar to Medea’s: you become so wrapped up in the emotional fantasia of Graham’s, high drama appears the only position from which to act.
Richard Move, choreographer, dancer, performer, and professor of Dance at Tisch (NYU), is well aware of the emotional twists and complexities of Martha. It was the commitment to depth, of feeling, of movement, that drew them to Martha and kept them engaged far past their early days of Graham training. Moving to New York, there was a notable absence of Martha in the Downtown dance scene. Dance makers seemed to move on from Graham’s or reject her ways after early encounters.
Starting in 1996, at a nightclub in the Meat Packing District called Mother, Move decided to create an act as an homage to Martha. Both an act of impersonation and a homage, Move dressed up as Graham acting as the host of a variety show where Martha would interview other dancers. Performers included people like Mark Morris and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and at the time, an up and coming choreographer named Pam Tanowitz. For the duration of an evening’s performance, Graham would come back to life. These performances not only enacted Martha the person and choreographer, but also her archive– materially and intellectually– by honoring her role in modern dance and her effect on other choreographers, allowing for the reexamination, and at times, recreation, of dance history. In a performance in 1999 at Mother, and again in 2001 at Town Hall, Move reunited Martha and her former dancer the postmodernist choreographer Merce Cunningham. After fifty-five years, the two discussed his leaving the company and creation of his own choreographic approach, more or less a rejection of Graham’s method. In reality, Graham never spoke of Cunningham’s work after he left her company.
In 2011, the 92nd Street Y gifted Move the audio of a little known interview from 1963 between Graham and dance critic Walter Terry that – dance critic for The New York Herald Tribune. Move transformed the audio into a performance piece with Move as Martha and Tony-award winning actress Lisa Kron as Terry, and two Graham dancers to demonstrate the technique in between bursts of dialogue. The piece recreates a conversation between peers and friends and displays Martha’s public persona while revealing the depths of her internal world: her deep want to to be understood and ability to articulate her artistic contributions. Coinciding with The Graham Company’s centennial, Move will make their BAM debut with Martha@BAM, part of this year’s Next Wave Festival. I spoke to Move ahead of this premiere about the inception of this act and their personal inclinations towards Martha, their shifting relationship to the Graham Company, the depths of Martha’s vulnerability, and Move’s own approach to choreography and art making.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: How and when did this act, of you as Martha, begin?
Richard Move: I started this beloved series back in 1996 in a night club called Mother in The Meat Packing District. It was a very small place and in the 90s, people didn’t really go to that area, so it was a real adventure for people to travel there. The idea of the act was that Martha never died and she decided to host a variety show where she was the host and the mother of it all. I created monologues in her voice, culled from her writings and interviews, then made deconstructed synoptic versions of her ballets. And then she would present both emerging and very established artists, who then presented their own work. We’d have four or five guests each on each “episode” of the show. Mark Morris made two pieces for the series, which he then did on our tours to London. Merce Cunningham was a guest. Yvonne Rainer, and Baryshnikov danced, and lots of emerging artists as well.
EB: Who were some of those emerging artists?
RM: Bill Shannon, aka Crutchmaster, Basil Twist & Julie Atlas Muz, Eun Me Ahn, and Pam Tanowitz. Wayne Macgregor showed working during one of our early London tours.
EB: When did you find Graham? Thinking of your lineage, by the time you came to New York she would’ve been considered obsolete.
RM: Totally and that’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to her. She was nowhere to be found in my training.
I was a drama student in high school, and we were encouraged to take movement courses. My first dance classes were Graham technique. I was very struck by it. I found it almost impossible to do well as a novice dancer. I grew up in rural Virginia, and somehow, in my neighboring town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, there was a woman teaching in the local dance studio who had studied with Helen McGehee, who was a very important dancer in the Graham company in the 50s, 60s to early 70s. I remember mounting the stairs to the studio one day, and seeing this woman in black turtleneck leotard, long sleeves, full face of makeup, bleach blonde hair pulled in a tight, high Graham bun. She had almost a religious kind of spiritual dimension, and I was transfixed. It had nothing to do with the rest of the world I was living in.
Then by the end of high school and in college, all I wanted to do was dance, but suddenly Graham was nowhere to be found. In my summers as a scholarship student at the American Dance Festival–this would be the early 90s, late 80s– there was no Graham offered, and the Graham company was never presented. I was always kind of perplexed by that. One thing to make clear, is my obsession with her is not that I wanted to be in the company. That was not going to happen. I am not the kind of man that she would have put on the stage. She was very old fashioned about gender. She discussed how on her stage, the men were men and the women were women. She was not a gender ideologist like I am. It wasn’t about dancing for her, but an obsession with her persona and her history. That’s one of the reasons I was so compelled to give her a voice Downtown, because she couldn’t be found there.
EB: There is an element of drag to this act. Do you consider this performance partaking in that tradition?
RM: Oh God, I don’t even know how to address the drag question, because I just feel that my gender is gender. Looking at the performance we’re doing at BAM, Lisa and I, in these roles, feel so natural. We don’t even think about the gender of the characters or the ideology of inhabiting them. It doesn’t even occur to us because we are so connected to who these characters are as people. They’re in us. There is no film record of the 1963 interview, nor are there any photographs. All we have is the audio recording. We built this performance– back in 2011 when The 92nd St Y gave me this archival footage– by listening to the audio recording of the interview segment by segment and section by section. We’d then repeat it back to each other verbatim. This is the same way we rehearsed this past summer for the upcoming performance. We try to capture the pregnant pauses, the breaths, the stutters, the “ughs” and “ums”. Martha in particular absolutely gets lost in her thoughts a time or two. The accuracy in enactment is integral to our process, but beyond that, I don’t know that that has anything to do with gender. Does it? I don’t see the connection.
EB: Graham was and is so much more than her womanhood.
RM: I think so and I would say I feel very aligned in the trajectory of performance history where the archive of certain artists gets activated in a very meaningful way. I’m thinking of historical reenactments, people who obsess over Renaissance Fairs or particular Civil War Battles. What we’re doing is somewhere in that tradition. I think this act could be thought of as drag if I considered myself solidly a man or if this performance were a satire. When really, the performance is about the force of her archive and wanting to convey her persona.
EB: Can you explain how it isn’t satire?
RM: All I can really say to that with complete certainty is there’s nothing satirical about our approach. I can’t control the audience’s reception, but there’s nothing satirical about our process. We’re trying to relive this conversation with the use of two dancers to demonstrate what Graham talks about. For the two dancers, Peiju Chien-Pott and Catherine Cabeen, it’s an actual performance, with the same stakes as any other kind of performance. They were both in the Graham Company. Cabeen has had a career outside as well with Bill T. Jones and her own work. Peiju was a principal in the company. In their roles as the Graham dancers for this performance, they dance these parts as if they were company members.
If humor emerges, it’s for two reasons. One, we’re deadly serious, and two, because Martha could be funny, and in this particular interview, there are many very light hearted moments. And then, of course there’s Martha’s persona: she is the quintessential diva. If there’s camp, it, again, goes back to Martha’s persona. Martha was used as an example for Sontag in Notes on Camp: “every step the aging Martha Graham takes on stage she is being Marha Graham.” Graham became a quotable version of herself, according to Sontag, which is one of the many definitions Sontag discussed in the essay. Camp is something in quotes.
EB: What’s some of what’s discussed in the interview with Walter Terry?
RM: Well, it’s very varied. Walter Terry was a close friend and at this point he’s written about her for about 20 years and she’s been his guest the 92nd Street Y before. Graham felt very comfortable with him, which is what contributes to her expressivity. Terry is interested in having Graham describe how she creates her roles, her entire process, from reading the plays to traveling for research. Graham goes into detail about how she developed Medea (Cave of The Heart) and her piece about Saint Joan (Seraphic Dialogue). To make Seraphic, Graham read all of the transcript of Joan of Arc’s trial. She went to the church in France where Joan was said to have heard voices. Graham had a particular experience where she saw the light come in through the stained glass that she believed Joan might have had too. Then Terry wants her to describe what she considers the most important principles of her technique. She explains that in both broad strokes and very specific exercises. He wants to know how the technique evolved and changes and Graham comes to a kind of conclusion midway that each of the heroines had their own way of walking across the stage. She demonstrates the walk of her characters like Clytemnestra and The Bride in Appalachian Spring. Then they talk about comedy. Graham found her comic pieces to be the hardest to do, and that’s maybe why she made so few of them. She only cites two. One of the things I find so touching about the interview is that Graham really wants to be understood and you really feel it.
EB: This leads nicely to my next question! Do you think that Martha was a very vulnerable person?
RM: Very vulnerable. I do. Particularly at the time of this interview. She oddly considered herself a dancer first and a choreographer second, which is a problem when you’re in your 70s. This is also around this time she starts to get rheumatoid arthritis. Beginning in the late 60s and early 70s, she wears gloves in every photo taken of her and she’s never again seen with bare feet. She labeled the end of her dancing career her first death. So, yes, there’s a lot of fragility there.
EB: The last time I saw Cave of The Heart, it came across as a heavily biographical. I feel that Graham felt so scorned by past lovers and by love in general.
RM: Yes, and that comes through in this interview as well. There is almost a reveal of a personal quest for love when she discusses The Bride in Appalachian Spring. She’s adamant that that’s real love, and particularly in relation to the Greek heroines. Phaedra in particular, she’s adamant, was not real love. Company member Eric Hawkins, who she married, seemed to be the only real love of her life, who we later learned was gay. Poor girl.
EB: It’s like she wishes she could be the bride of Appalachian Spring.
RM: Oh, totally, which is why she was still dancing that role in her 60s. But she couldn’t be the simple wife. She had to become, you know, the mother of modern dance. It does beg the question. Could she have done all she accomplished and been a happy woman at home with children? It’s a question I’ve often had. During what might have statistically been her childbearing years, she was making, making, making and struggling financially.
How could children have been folded into that? And yet, how could she not have noticed that aspect of her life was passing by?
EB: How much do you think the company is responsible for upholding her persona?
RM: It’s very hard to figure out how to sustain these legacy companies. I feel like Janet [Eilber] has been very successful as Artistic Director, particularly with the Lamentation Variations Project, which of course refers to Lamentation Graham’s piece from 1930. I was one of the first choreographers to contribute to that initiative. When things are connected to Graham and her legacy that makes sense to me, otherwise you risk becoming a repertoire company, which is another animal. But at the same time, how do you keep that legacy alive and bring in fresh voices? I really loved the Hofesh Shecheter piece last April and I think the Greek work should still be seen no matter how complicated it is. But it must go back to her and always stay connected to her.
EB: I know your relationship with the company has ebbed and flowed over the years. What is your relationship like now?
RM: Oh, it’s fine. It’s good. It started with cease and desist orders and threats of lawsuits, but by 2006, for their 80th anniversary, I performed with them at Skirball Center as Graham. A year or two later, Janet started the lamentation Variation Project, and I was one of the first to contribute. And then in 2012, the company did the piece I made for Baryshnikov called The Show (Achilles Heels). So I think it couldn’t be better, really.
EB: What was the basis of the suit? That you were in some way harming the legacy?
RM: Their argument was that I was confusing the public into thinking that Martha Graham was still alive and performing. Mind you, she’d been dead for years, several years by this point, and this was happening in a nightclub in The Meat Packing District. After the initial cease and desist, we included the disclaimer, which will even be in the program for BAM, that this event is in no way connected to or sponsored by any of The Martha Graham entities, which includes the school.
EB That’s so ironic because your act and this work is about the notion of the living archive and enacting the living archive through performance.
RM: That’s the heart of it. I’m very thankful for the cease and desist order. It was stressful when we got it, but it became a press item. This was before the age of the internet and word got out and people became really curious and we were able to build an audience. One beautiful thing that happened was all these old Graham dancers started coming to the performance, really from the start. Bertram Ross, who was Graham’s partner in the 50s to early 70s, came and told me that the lipstick I wore should be more blood red. That was beautiful and he was right, because I had been studying Graham in black and white photos and Ross would’ve looked at her face on the stage and in the studios for decades. Then Stuart Hodes, who partnered her in the 50s, 60s came. He even performed with us twice, maybe three times. Yuriko, rest her soul, was a rehearsal coach a few times. She went right to Graham’s company in the 40s, from a Japanese internment camp, and then Linda Hodes really was involved. She was our rehearsal director for the original production of The Interview in 2011 and in 2014 when we took it to Singapore, and she was on board to start rehearsing with us in August, but she died in July. She was the co-artistic director of the company with Graham during the last decade of Graham’s life. That was so beautiful and meaningful to me, to have everyone involved like that.
EB: What does your own choreographic approach and process look like?
RM: Well, I would say first I’m very assignment based. I’ve been pretty deep in this Herstory of the Universe Series, which is site specific, performances on Governors Island, Dartmouth, and the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island. We’ve done a few variations, iterations that are responses to the site of the performance. There’s a lot of guided improvisation and collaboration with whoever the dance artist is. That’s a very postmodern way of working, to be task and score, but Graham’s rigor and approach to pre production is very much with me. I too, like her, read a lot, think a lot, sketch, and storyboard a lot before ever going into a rehearsal.
EB: As an audience member, I feel the intellectual rigor and legacy of Graham has really been sustained under Janet. That’s a huge feat in 2025.
RM: Graham, in the interview, uses the term “we” when she’s talking about building the technique, because it was built with the people with whom she worked. She credits those company members who devoted so much to her before there was any kind of real financial compensation. Linda Hodes talked about how Martha had a method of assigning parts of choreography to the dancers of the piece she was working on. The Preacher solo in Appalachian Spring was made for Merce Cunningham, but it was a product of this approach. Martha gave Merce the parameters and a section of music and told him to make something. It was a very company oriented approach to collaboration.
EB: Cunningham is remembered for leaving The Graham Company and going on to produce his own very different work. He is the backbone, perhaps the Father, of the Downtown postmodern movement. Is there any record of Graham commenting on Cunningham’s work after he left the company?
RM: That was actually the premise of a piece with Merce at Mother that we then reprised at Town Hall in 2001. The idea was that we hadn’t seen each other since 1944, when Merce left the company, but that Graham had heard that he went on to do his own work and wanted to ask him about it. In reality, Merce’s work wouldn’t have been on her radar. Graham was completely absorbed in her own world.
EB: And I could see her seeing it as a type of betrayal because Merce strayed so far from her method.
RM: Yes. I imagine Eric Hawkins felt like a betrayal too because he wanted to get away from psychology. I never studied his technique, but I know one of his ideas was to employ as little tension as possible. Yeah, those men definitely went… well, there is that great Cunningham quote where he says, “I wanted Dada, not a Mama.” That kind of says it all.
EB: The notion of a legacy can be trite, but how should we be using Graham? What should her place be in, in the future?
RM: People shouldn’t be afraid of the technique. Catherine Cabeen is an amazing Graham teacher, and she brings a post modern Bill T Jones sensibility to the material. So I think it can be taught in a way that is adaptable. Something we’ve already discussed as it relates to my own approach to work, but Graham’s rigor, commitment, and relentless pursuit to figure things out should be considered. We could use probably more of that. It’s important, in making work, to figure out what you’re doing and why it’s important and how you’re going to get there. And it will, in fact, take a lot of time and effort and thought. I think those are good things, and from the interview you can glean that Martha thought this should be the standard.
EB: When you’re performing as Martha, do you still feel like yourself?
RM: No. There are times where I can’t remember huge parts of a performance. Someone will mention part of a conversation we might have had backstage and I’ll have no idea what they’re talking about. In the interview, and I understand this a bit, Graham talks about how characters come at her out of the atmosphere and take a hold of her. She equates it to a seizure, not a medical seizure but an experience that is almost like a type of possession. I have moments like that for certain. I spend a very long time getting ready for a show, makeup, hair, body warm up, voice warm up. That helps me transition to be her.
EB: She comes back every time you do the show. You’re keeping her alive.
RM: I guess so. She’s definitely present and I feel she wants to have a good showing.
EB: This performance coincides with the company’s centennial.
RM: Yes. I decided I wanted to do something for the 100th anniversary, and so here we are.
Photo by Amy Arbus. Left to Right: Lisa Kron, Katherine Crockett and Richard Move.
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