When a young Daniella Kallmeyer attended a summer dance intensive at the Martha Graham School in New York little did she know that years later she would be transforming one of her dress designs into costumes for the same stage. Last night at the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 100th Anniversary Gala, dancers Xin Ying and Lloyd Knight wore two custom Kallmeyer creations to perform a special excerpt from O Thou Desire Who Art About to Sing at the New York Public Library.
Ying’s flowing burgundy dress is a dancerly iteration of the Roma gown from Kallmeyers’s pre-fall 2026 collectsion. The original was designed with built-in support and a flowing one-shouldered drape, and so it was easy for Kallmeyer to turn the bodice into a leotard while retaining a sense of movement. The garment’s transformation turned out to be another full-circle moment.
“The irony of this piece is that before this project came to me, I had actually designed our pre-fall with Martha Graham in mind,” Kallmeyer says. “She was known for dancing in these beautiful dresses with so much fabric, and incorporating the garments into the choreography. I often think about the way bodies move within my clothes, and a lot of the proportions that inspire me come from that world.”
Knight’s matching burgundy cummerbund provides the perfect balance to the airiness of Ying’s look. “Lloyd has this amazing figure and silhouette that I wanted to highlight,” Kallmeyer notes. Both the color and the high-waisted silhouette feel very aligned with Graham, who frequently used red, white, and black in her performance costumes.
For Kallmeyer, the opportunity to design for the keynote performance felt like a culmination of many of her life’s interests. “I’ve been attending theater or dance since before I can remember, but my first time really being moved by the connection between costume and dance was seeing a live performance of Lamentation, which is a Martha Graham dance, as well as a Philip Glass Ballet that a friend took me to at the American Ballet Theatre when I first moved to the city—the costumes from that performance I’ve never forgotten.”
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