Martha Graham By Victoria Thoms | DanceSpace -- Stories for Dance

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Book: Martha Graham Gender & the Haunting of a Dance Pioneer- Victoria Thoms

In her heyday, Martha Graham’s name was internationally recognized within the modern dance world, and though trends in choreography continue to change, her status in dance still inspires regard. In this, the first extended critical look at this modern dance pioneer, Victoria Thoms explores the cult of Graham and her dancing through a critical lens that exposes the gendered meaning behind much of her work. Thoms synthesizes a diverse archive of material on Graham from films, photographs, memoir, and critique in order to uniquely highlight her contribution to the dance world and arts culture in general.

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Chapter 5. Ways of Speaking with the Dead: Graham and Queer Resurrection

Even in death actors’ roles tend to stay with them. They gather in the memory of audiences, like ghosts, as each new interpretation of a role sustains or upsets expectations derived from the previous ones. This is the sense in which audiences may come to regard the performer as an eccentric but meticulous curator of cultural memory, a medium for speaking with the dead. (Joseph Roach 1996: 78)

Through the lens of queer theory, this chapter looks more specifically toward the future. It does this by examining the work of two drag performers, cabaret dance-artist Richard Move and Roy Fialkow, former dancer and choreographer for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Their impersonations of Graham have been said to be so uncanny they raise her from the dead and the chapter theorises the effects this type of resurrection has for maintaining Graham in our cultural imaginary. It concludes by suggesting that the piece Move choreographed in 2007 for the Graham Company, as part of a larger work, Lamentation Variations commemorating 9/11, is a reanimation of Graham that moves away from the queer dimensions of drag to elicit what I have called an instance of queer mourning. In this work, Move’s communion with Graham instantiates both a corporeal and psychical ‘bringing to life’ that sidesteps the troubled relationship feminist theory has with drag performance and theorises queer mourning as a potent force for revisioning belonging and kinship.

For image 01.JPG: Katherine Crockett performing Richard Move’s Bardo. (Courtesy of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Photography by Michele Ballantini.)

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Victoria Thoms

Other selected outputs on Martha Graham:

Thoms, V. (2012) ‘American Dance Pioneer Martha Graham and the Ghosts of Feminism’. Women: a cultural review 23 (3), 346-367.
Thoms, V., and Andrews, B. (2008) ‘Using a Virtual Learning Environment to teach Academic Writing to First year Dance Students: Facing the challenge of teaching dancers to write through digital images’. Research in Dance Education 9 (3), 277-292.
Thoms, V. (2008) ‘Martha Graham’s Haunting Body: Autobiography at the Intersection of Writing and Dancing’. Dance Research Journal 40 (1), 3-16.
Thoms, V. (2006) ‘Reading Human Sex: The Challenges of a Feminist Identity through Time and Space’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (4), 357-371.

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Victoria Thoms- Vision & Bio

MY RESEARCH VISION

I am deeply interested in understanding how live and mediated dance performance has the power to inform and transform political, social and embodied understandings of identity. I favour an interdisciplinary approach that brings together feminist theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis and allows me to read the moving body across different medial, geographic and historical matrices. In doing so, I seek to reveal the complexity with which dance negotiates ideas about identity and produce effects.

BIOGRAPHY

Before doctoral study in the United Kingdom, Victoria trained in ballet, contemporary dance and choreography in Canada as part of her Undergraduate and Master’s Degree. Her research engages with recent debates in performance, gender, and trauma studies to theorise dance as a cultural practice within contemporary society. She recently published Martha Graham: Gender and the haunting of a dance pioneer (2013). Her new research projects looked more specifically at literary theory and trauma studies to understand how dance might be considered a form of bearing witness to upheaval and violence. Victoria is specifically interested in looking at the link between trauma, nation and ballet within a British context. She has published in Dance Research Journal, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Research in Dance Education, Women: a Cultural Review and is presently Chair of the Society for Dance Research in the UK.

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