BAY HARBOR — This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Crooked Tree Arts Center School of Ballet is celebrating her legacy with performances, exhibits, lectures and more.
The “Dance Legends: Little Traverse Bay Celebrates Graham100” series will have the guiding hand of project director Peter Sparling. Sparling, a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and The Juilliard School, is a former principal dancer with Graham’s company.
Sparling described Graham as “the major mover and shaker in the area of modern dance.”
“I had an amazing time working under her as her apprentice,” he said. “I was her assistant. I danced all the male roles, toured the world, oftentimes under the auspices of the State Department, and was kind of groomed to see contemporary dance as a means of cultural exchange, as a means of demonstrating America’s ability to generate its own art forms — modern dance, tap dance, musical theater, jazz, the ’50s abstract expressionists, its amazing authors, films, cinema. Martha was very much of that era in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s where modernism and really sophisticated dance forms were emerging.”
Sparling went on to join the staff at the University of Michigan in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance and later founded the Peter Sparling Dance Company.
“I always taught the Martha Graham technique, which is a very sophisticated set of exercises that Martha evolved over 70 years to train her dancers,” he said. “And, so I took that around the world as a kind of a calling card to get jobs … although my main interest was choreography.”
Sparling has collaborated with the CTAC School of Ballet several times and has even been in residence with the school before to mentor students.
“I’d say this is maybe our fourth or fifth collaboration with Heather Raue, a brilliant director and a really generous person, smart, wants for her dancers a broader reach of techniques, of styles, to give them context and to better prepare them for careers. To really give them a comprehensive education. And I very much respect that and support that,” Sparling said. “This one, I think, is by far the largest scale, because it entails reconstruction of Graham works on dancers who probably never studied Graham. So it was a tall order. And the range of dancers range from eighth, ninth grade students up to mature professionals … So I’m able to choreograph at many different levels of expertise and in maturity.”
The performance includes three dances. It opens with an eight minute lecture with video by Sparling about Graham’s life and work. That is followed by “Lamentation,” which features CTAC alum Marie Millard, and then five excerpts from “Appalachian Spring,” featuring CTAC alum Taylor Naturkas, who is now principal dancer with the Miami City Ballet, Sam Epstein, company dancer with the Grand Rapids Ballet, CTAC alum Benjamin Cheney and Millard.
“The second act brings something very different, which is a reimagining of a work that Martha made in 1938 entitled ‘American Document,’” Sparling said. “And in that work, Martha had two actors, and she chose five documents representing kind of the trajectory of American history, something from the Declaration of Independence, from the Emancipation Proclamation, from a Puritan preacher, from an Indian chief, from a former slave. And she set dance episodes to follow these spoken texts.”
That work has been re-imagined into an original 45-minute ballet for the CTAC dancers.
“I came up with the idea of creating a past, present, future specifically looking at Little Traverse Bay,” Sparling said. “I think the most challenging task was for Act 3, the present, to choose and then interview nine or 10 local citizens to get their answers to questions such as, ‘What does it mean to you to live in a democracy in Little Traverse Bay? What do you see as the tensions that are here? Where do you feel the safest? Do you feel you have enemies? Do you feel you serve your community?’”
Sparling described it as “a complicated piece.”
“As I listened and transcribed these oral histories, I realized that, really, one could look at Little Traverse Bay as kind of a microcosm of the rest of the country. And so I tried to be specific, but also allow for more of a universality to emerge,” he said. “We have tried to be honest and fair in our ‘Own American Document,’ and if it presses certain people’s buttons, then all the better. Art is not always safe. And I think arts needs, at times, to speak to current conditions, and so I’m hoping that it’ll get people thinking and it’ll move them, as well.”
The cast includes about 20 performers who have been working on this show for almost a year.
“I started building, or teaching dancers, their parts last July. There was another phase in September, another one in October and another one in February of this year,” Sparling said. “We had to spread it out because of people’s availability. And the fact that I don’t live here … So it’s been a little hair raising and nerve wracking to keep the threads alive in between. But I’m always amazed at the dancer’s body memory, and how they, once they learn it, it doesn’t take much for them to remember.”
In addition to the dance performance, the Graham100 celebration includes a summer gallery exhibit dedicated to original Barbara Morgan photographs of Graham and her company in the 1930s and ’40s.
“It’s an extraordinary selection of photographs by the most famous photographer of dance ever, Barbara Morgan,” Sparling said. “And these are photos that everyone needs to see. They’re very precious.”
In the Gilbert Gallery, “In Motion: Making Art Dance” offers visual art pieces juried by Sparling.
There will also be presentations as part of CTAC’s Coffee @ Ten lecture series, including “Historic Dance in Film” on June 4 and “Dialogue and Movement” on July 23.
Heather Raue, artistic director for the CTAC School of Ballet, is excited to see all of the hard work from so many people coming to fruition for the series.
“Peter and I have been working on this, or talking about it at least, for three years,” she said. “It’s like a dream come true. So many moving parts, dancers from around the country and the Barbara Morgan exhibit, just the whole thing is surreal to see put together.”
The dancers will debut their show for local students as part of the Great Lakes Center for the Arts’ Next Gen series at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, May 29. That is followed by the official performance at 7 p.m. Ticket prices are $40 for adult, $10 for students, $75 for box seats and $150 for Friend of the School of Ballet.
If you miss the performance on Friday, there will be a second chance to see it on Aug. 22 at John M. Hall Auditorium in Bay View.
“I’m most excited to bring people who have never seen Martha Graham, and who have not really been able to develop an appreciation for dance as an art form,” Sparling said. “I mean, that’s been the case as long as I’ve danced. America, unlike Europe, has had less time to kind of grow its own appreciation in terms of culture in the arts. And it’s always a shaky business for we artists as to whether we’ll get our paycheck, whether we’ll get audiences, whether we’ll get funding to mount our works. So, I’m still most excited about just exposing people to this kind of dance, to get them excited about it, so that the next time this happens, they’re going to buy tickets and be back in the theater.”
— Contact Jillian Fellows at jfellows@petoskeynews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Years in the making, Crooked Tree ballet debuts ode to Martha Graham
Reporting by Jillian Fellows, The Petoskey News-Review / The Petoskey News-Review
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