The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Presents the 2024 Dance Symposium Focusing on Martha Graham

Michael Byrne, Kim Jones, Alexandra Kamerling, Lloyd Knight, Virginie Mécène, and Alexa West present research and performance on Martha Graham during her company’s 100th anniversary

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center presents the 2024 Dance Symposium, a day-long exploration of Martha Graham and her legacy as her company celebrates its centennial anniversary. Since 2015, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division has run its Dance Research Fellowship program welcoming a class of dancers, choreographers, artists, and scholars to focus on a particular topic using the Library’s archives. At the end of the program cycle, the fellows present their work through lecture, performance, and discussion at an annual symposium.

The symposium, taking place on January 26, 2024, is open and free to the public. More information, including the day’s itinerary, can be found on our website. A virtual event takes place on February 2, 2024.

The Dance Symposium consists of six presentations by a range of artists and scholars picking up on different themes of Martha Graham’s work. Researcher Michael Byrne draws upon his background in dance and digital technologies to bring to life the creative mission set forth by Graham. Scholar, dancer, and choreographer Kim Jones explores the chance connection of Korean artist Choi Seung-Hee and Graham in 1939. Writer Alexandra Kamerling illuminates the dialogue between Graham and Emily Dickinson as it unfolds in Graham’s Letter to the World inspired by Dickinson’s poetry. Using spoken word, visual diagrams, and dance, Lloyd Knight, a principal dancer in Graham’s company, attempts to understand why Graham’s life has had an effect on his professional being and belief. Choreographer, coach, and former principal dancer Virginie Mécène mines the archive to reimagine, choreograph, and make new dances inspired by two lost works of Graham from the late 1920s. Dance and visual artist Alexa Westhas explored the archive to create a comprehensive overview of the sculptural set design of Graham’s oeuvre, and has produced a set piece, a prop, and a choreographed dance that activates the objects.

“Although the topic at first glance seems narrow in focus, our current class of fellows has a diverse range of projects that includes intersections with technology, Korean dance history and set design and, collectively, the areas of research speak to the continued relevance of Martha Graham’s legacy for dance making today,” said Linda Murray, the Anne H. Bass Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. “The echoes between world events now and in the 1930s and 1940s, when Graham was making her anti-fascist masterworks Chronicle and Panorama, are startling and upsetting. We once again find ourselves contending with extremism, global war, and poverty. As Graham and her peers spoke up in their time, once again we need to hear the clarion voices of our artists, expressing our condemnation of fascism and embedding hope within us for a better and brighter future. As Graham famously stated, ‘the body never lies,’ and so we will rely on our dance artists above all to speak the necessary truths.”

Michael Byrne
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 and cultural asymmetries in monumental spaces.

Michael Byrne works at Cornell University’s technology campus in New York City, Cornell Tech, as Creative Lead for Tech, Arts & Culture, researching the collisions between dance, history, and immersive applications. He is a Research Associate of the Digital Life Initiative, and also co-leads the Milstein Summer Program in Technology and Humanity. Byrne completed his undergraduate design degree in South Africa, before continuing his performance studies at the Royal Academy of Music, King’s College London, RADA, and the University of Cambridge. For over a decade he appeared within the narrative works of The Royal Ballet, and in several touring productions for the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Ballet companies.

Kim Jones
As a former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Kim Jones centers her research and choreography on modern dance history’s “lost” elements. These elements include both the work of Choi Seung-Hee, a Korean artist not seen in the West after the division of Korea following the Korean War, as well as Martha Graham’s lost 1935 dance, Imperial Gesture, known only in photos and reviews, costumes, and music. These two artists were mysteriously intertwined: while researching at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Jones found a program that listed Choi Seung-Hee (Sai Shoki) and Graham in the same program in New York City. Did the two artists converse, dance together, or even collaborate? Jones uses artistic and scholarly methods, as well as her personal background, to reimagine, reinvigorate, stage, and disseminate works of the 20th century, and she animates and speculates about these “lost” elements of dance to reinvigorate their history.

Kim Jones is a Korean-American artist born and raised in New York City.  She is an associate professor of Dance at UNC Charlotte, a régisseur for the Martha Graham Resource Center, and founder and artistic director of Movement Migration. She danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Met Opera Ballet and performed National Broadway tours. Jones’s newest research project investigates the life and choreography of Choi Seung-Hee (1911-69). Widely regarded as Korea’s first female modern dancer, Choi lived an eventful life through the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and North Korea. In the last decade, Jones also re-imagined Martha Graham’s Imperial Gesture (1935), Adorations (1976) for the Graham Resource Center, and reconstructed Paul Taylor’s Tracer (1964) as research with permission by Mr. Taylor, currently in the Company’s repertoire. In July 2022, Jones was invited to Chicago for the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute: Making Modernism: Literature, Dance, and Visual Culture in Chicago, 1893-1955, at the Newberry Library. She is honored to be a fellow at the NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

Alexandra Kamerling
In 1940, Martha Graham choreographed a dance about Emily Dickinson entitled Letter to the World. Poet Alexandra Kamerling studied dance from an early age, and learning about Letter to the World sparked an immediate interest, prompting questions for Kamerling about Graham’s relationship to Dickinson’s poems, and the unique opportunity Dickinson’s work provides a choreographer concerned with the interior life of an artist. During her period of research, Kamerling has worked to illuminate the dialogue between Graham and Dickinson as it unfolds in Letter to the World, a dialogue that exists among a wider orbit of relationships: between Graham and her dancers, the dancers and Dickinson, and the memory of the work and its material presence in the archive. Kamerling presents her research as a critical text built around oral histories and archival footage, with the hope of bringing to light Letter to the World’s distinctive role in Graham’s life and repertoire.

Alexandra Kamerling is a Brooklyn-based writer. She received her BA in English from Mills College and her MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College. She previously trained in dance at the Alonzo King LINES Training Program in San Francisco, and held choreographic residencies through the ODC Pilot Program and SAFEhouse Arts. She is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Brooklyn College English Department.

Lloyd Knight
In an effort to understand the ways an artist of today makes their way, Lloyd Knight goes back in time to discover what might have driven Martha Graham to push her artistry. With spoken word, visual diagrams, and dance, Knight, a dancer well versed in Graham’s work, attempts to understand why he does what he does in his career and why Graham’s life has had an effect on his professional being and belief.

Lloyd Knight was born in England and raised in Miami. He has a BFA from the New World School of the Arts under Artistic Director Daniel Lewis. Knight joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2005 and was promoted to Principal in 2014. He has had ballets choreographed on him by Nacho Duato twice, Andonis Foniadakis, Larry Keigwin, Doug Varone, Lar Lubovitch, Kyle Abraham, Liz Gerring, Michelle Dorrance, Anne Bogart, Pontus Linberg, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Pam Tanowitz, Hofesh Shechter and Mats Ek. Dance Magazine named Knight as one of the “Top 25 Dancers to Watch” in 2010.

Virginie Mécène
While Martha Graham created 181 dances, several of her early works not performed for decades are considered lost. Among them, some may have been captured in fragmented footage, others appear only in books or shown in pictures, mentioned in interviews or reviews, and some have no traces other than their titles on a program. Choreographer, coach, pedagogue, program director, régisseur, and former principal dancer at the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance, Virginie Mécène will use the Martha Graham archive to reimagine, choreograph, and make new dances inspired by two lost works of Martha Graham from the late 1920s, Revolt and Immigrant, relevant to today’s social and political climate.

Virginie Mécène is a former Principal Dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company (1994- 2006). Director of Graham 2 since 2007 and Director of Program at the Martha Graham School, her direction has focused on training the next generations of dancers for the Martha Graham Dance Company and other companies around-the-world, and the next generations of Graham teachers through her pedagogic instructions. She was the Director of the Martha Graham School from 2007 to 2015, maintaining and developing the School curriculum. Mécène has re-staged, reconstructed, and directed numerous works of Martha Graham at universities and dance companies, as well as taught the Graham TechniqueTM at multiple national and international conferences. In 2017, she reimagined the concept and choreographed Graham’s lost solo, Ekstasis, for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Mécène’s choreographic work, which includes several acclaimed commissions, was seen at venues such as New York City Center and The Joyce Theater in New York City, the Palais Garnier in Paris, L’Auditori de Barcelona, and many others. She received a LP degree in Artistic and Cultural Management from the University of Bourgogne, France.

Alexa West
Objects and sculpture feature prominently in many of Martha Graham’s performances—as in Appalachian Spring, where a minimalist frame by Isamu Noguchi acts as a divider of the space. These set pieces function as more than just props: they inform the movements performed, and help communicate the strong American body language. Alexa West, who moved to New York at age 19 to train professionally at the Martha Graham School, developed a collaborative relationship with objects as a dancer, and eventually trained in the sculptural visual arts as well. West has used the Martha Graham archive to create a comprehensive overview of the sculptural set design of Graham’s oeuvre, in performances like Maple Leaf Rag and Acrobats of God. Her research at the Library for the Performing Arts will conclude with the production of a set piece, a prop, and a choreographed dance that activates the objects.

Alexa West is a dance artist based in Queens, NY. West studied in the professional training program at the Martha Graham School before receiving her BFA from the Cooper Union. Her work has been presented in spaces around New York, New York and Houston, Texas. She is a co-director of PAGEANT in Brooklyn, NY.

About The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Located at Lincoln Center, the Library for the Performing Arts has one of the most extensive performing arts collections in the world. The Library is an archive of dance, theatre, music, and recorded sound, and our close to eight million archival items date back to the 11th Century and include Ludwig Beethoven’s hair, Clara Schuman’s nibbled pencils, a 15th-century dance treatise of dance master Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, Anna Pavlova’s pointe shoes, the original set model for In the Heights, and the archives of many masters, including Bill T. Jones, Hal Prince, Jerome Robbins, Arturo Toscanini, and many more.