Choreography and Costume: Martha Graham

Restaging: Miki Orihara

With: Miki Orihara

Neon Installation: Tim Etchells

Music: Henry Cowell
Light design reconstruction: David Finley
Light: Martin Beeretz
Sound: Mattef Kuhlmey

“Deep Song” premiered at the Guild Theater in New York in 1937. Set to music by Henry Cowell, the dance was composed in response to the Spanish Civil War. Deep Song was a cry of anguish, an embodiment of Martha Graham’s fears for a world torn apart by man’s inhumanity to man. “The fierce, fighting anguish of Deep Song is as direct and as objective as a shout,” wrote one critic.
According to program notes, “the forms of the dance – its swirls, crawls on the floor, contractions and falls – are kinetic experiences of the human experiences in war. . . It is the anatomy of anguish from tragic events.” The tragedy of Spain is universalized through the choreography. “It is not Spain that we see in her clean impassioned movement; it is the realization that Spain’s tragedy is ours, is the whole world’s tragedy.” The dance disappeared from the repertory in the 1940s, and it was not until 1989 that it was reconstructed by Graham with Terese Capucilli.

Long-time Graham dancer and Dance On Ensemble member Miki Orihara will dance a restaging of “Deep Song” as part of the program “Making Dances”. 

“Everything/Nothing” is neon text installation created by artist and performance maker Tim Etchells, in response to Martha Graham’s seminal work Deep Song. Designed to be hung above the stage as the choreography is danced by Miki Orihara , the full text of Etchells’ work is a quotation from Federico García Lorca’s 1931 poem ‘Ay!’ reading simply: Everything in the world is broken. Nothing but silence remains.  

Arranged as a constellation of neon words in dispersed arrangement above the stage Etchells’ work enters a porous dialogue with Graham’s choreography, the words illuminated one at a time to make a brief time-based intervention in the work, in which Lorca’s text haunts the air above and around the piece. In the gesture of bringing this particular text into dialogue with Deep Song, Etchells closes a circle of connection between the legacy of flamenco’s deep song, Graham’s powerful choreographic response to the Spanish Civil War, and Lorca himself who lost his life during the conflict. Placing fragmentary language, as individual words, in dialogue with Graham’s ambiguous choreography of a suffering female figure, Etchells’ neon directly addresses the concerns and context of the dance as well as acknowledging the limits of language when it comes to speaking of traumatic experience.

This work can also be presented singularly in the appropriate conditions.

This production of Deep Song is presented by arrangement through Martha Graham Resources, a division of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc