REVIVALS

Invited by the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Hellenic dance Company performed in New York an important work from the repertoire of the renowned artist. Panorama, created during a turbulent time like ours, is an invitation to resistance, to battle. It was presented as part of the Celebrating The Graham / Greek Connection gala, hosted by Martha Graham Dance Company in New York City from March 19-22, 2014. The beginning of the new academic term that year brought a great surprise and an even greater honor to the professional team of the National School of Dance, Hellenic Dance Company (HDC). Martha Graham Dance Company invited HDC to a creative partnership. Specifically, for the 2013-2014 season, Martha Graham Dance Company was scheduled, to perform as part of the thematic cycle of events, Myth and Transformation, both in and outside the United States. The performance intended to illuminate how often timeless myths become the inspiration for new formulations by important creators. One such creator, after all, was Martha Graham, who frequently turned to the myths and epics of ancient Greece in order to address critical issues of her time through works that are emblematic examples of the writing of the founder of modern dance. In this context and remaining faithful to the ideas of its late founder, the group invited the dancers of the Hellenic Dance Company to perform in collaboration with artists of similar caliber, an important work of the creator’s repertoire. Panorama is a powerful work performed by forty women that Graham inspired and created in 1935, at a time when the oppression of minorities, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism were of serious concern for all free creative spirits. Infused with these concerns, Panorama was born to express the power of humans to change things.

Cubism was the art movement of the 20th century that put forward the concept of the tangible and solid object concisely and clearly. Forms in cubism like an anaglyph, emphasize the structure and syntactic outline of forms.
A representative work of cubism, “La Création du monde”, expressed the re-creation of the world (1923) through a cubist collage with choreographic dramatization on the stage of the theater. The artists who created it were the painter and sculptor Fernand Leger, and the great choreographer of the 20th century Jean Börlin, who reached the peak of his career when his avant-garde kinesiological approach met with the unique visual costumes of F. L., influenced by the landscape of Africa and the oceans.
Primitivism and illusion prevailed as a denial of the conditions and the stalemate following World War I. The characters of the dancers according to gender, place and hierarchy expressed the supernatural size of the soul and the human body. Divine figures represented a mysterious magical world.
When the important founder of the Fluxum Foundation, Cynthia Odier asked Millicent Hodson (former dancer of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham) and Kenneth Archer to revive “La Creation du Monde”, they trusted the Hellenic Dance Company to perform it. The work was staged at the Athens Concert Hall in February 2018 with music by Manuel de Falla and Darius Milhaud, live from the Athens State Orchestra. The project was presented with the collaboration and exclusive support of the Flux-Fluxum Laboratory.
Millicent Hodson is a US choreographer and dance reconstructionist. She studied literature at the universities of Indiana and California, Berkeley, and dance in California and New York, receiving her Ph.D. in 1985 in the history of dance and the visual arts. In 1987 the Joffrey Ballet premiered her reconstruction of Nijinsky’s Sacre du printemps and with her partner and collaborator Kenneth Archer (British designer and reconstructor of dance design. He trained in art history at the universities of Antioch and Essex), she has subsequently reconstructed Nijinsky’s Till Eulenspiegel (Paris, 1994), Jeux (Verona, 1996), Börlin’s Skating Rink (Zurich, 1996), Balanchine’s Cotillon (Joffrey Ballet 1988), Le Bal (Rome, 2005), and Massine and Prokofiev’s Pas D’ Acier (Princeton, 2005) among others.

A Choreographic Offering was taught H.D.C. by Risa Steinberg who has been active in the dance community for more than 35 years as re-constructor of Jose Limon’s work and mentor. She has toured the world teaching Limon’s technique extensively. Jose Limon is an important dancer and choreographer of 20th century who expanded the repertoire of modern dance in works that explored the strengths and weaknesses of the human character. Much of Limon’s choreography was developed from natural gestures and expressed, as he said, ” human grandeur, dignity and mobility” through themes drawn from history, literature and religion. A Choreographic Offering 1964 to Bach’s Musical Offering, in this revision of the piece. Within the solos and ensembles, large and small, the dancers are deployed in shifting assemblage as if they were the instruments or sections that often mirror Bach’s scoring. The result is a contrapuntal interplay of masses that is at once fluid, dramatic and visually arresting.