Exploring Dance The Martha Graham Dance Company at 100 What Martha Means to Us Today
Marina Harss, dance writer
In 1926, Martha Graham founded her independent dance company and school in New York City. Over the course of almost seven decades, she created a completely new way of moving, as well as a repertory of dances that explore the outer reaches of the female imagination, drawing from literature, myth, psychology, religion, and the relations between men and women. The company she created turns 100 this year and continues to tour around the world. We’ll discuss how Graham changed dance and what these ground-breaking works mean to us today.
This presentation is part of Marina Harss' Exploring Dance series.
Marina Harss
Marina Harss
Marina Harss is a dance writer based in New York City, with her work featured in prominent publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, Ballet Review, Dance Europe, Tanz and Dance Magazine. In 2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux published her critical biography of choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet.
Harss has been recognized with the Robert and Ina Caro Research and Travel Fellowship, was a fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts in 2019 and is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Beyond writing, she has moderated and conducted interviews at public forums on dance, both live and online, at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, the National Arts Club and the New York Public Library.
In addition to her contributions to dance literature, Harss is an award-winning literary translator, translating fiction and nonfiction from French, Italian and Spanish. Her translations include works by Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzatti, Juan Forn and Élisabeth Gille. In 2012, she received the French-American Foundation translation prize for her translation of Gille’s Le Mirador.
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