With a life that nearly bookended the 20th century, modern dance titan Martha Graham had one eye on the ancients and another on the contemporary moment. Her works explored Oedipal urges and creeping fascism. Isamu Noguchi created a series of spare, transfixing sets, while designers like Halston and Calvin Klein later dressed her performers for the stage. As much as Graham existed in a world unto herself, with a pioneering movement style rooted in the torso’s contraction and release, she saw herself woven into the American fabric.
“Certain things are alive for all of us, although far in the actual past,” she wrote in a note to the composer Aaron Copland, as they worked on their optimistic frontier ballet Appalachian Spring (1944). “America is forever peopled with characters who walk with us in the present in a very real way.”
Thirty-five years after her death at 96, Graham still walks with us—her ideas reanimated by members of the Martha Graham Dance Company. It was April 18, 1926, when Graham presented her first show at the now-shuttered 48th Street Theatre in New York; next month, the country’s longest-running troupe marks its centennial with a series of Graham100 performances at City Center, not far from the site of that Midtown debut. As part of the celebration, a new two-part documentary—We Are Our Time on PBS—follows the inner workings of the company, through rehearsals and tour buses and onto the stage. (After premiering on March 27, it continues on April 3.) It’s all about the power of connection, according to Graham: “You don’t dance for an audience of one thousand people. You dance for a thousand ones. There is always one to whom you speak.”
The documentary looks beyond the visionary figure—or the camp icon, as Susan Sontag framed her—focusing on the here and now. The title is a clue, rephrasing a Graham quote into the first-person plural. “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times,” she said.
To that end, the directors Peter Schnall and Cyndee Readdean kept their attention trained on the dancers over a two-and-a-half-year span, reserving archival footage for judicious moments—such as a split-screen section juxtaposing Graham in Lamentation (1930) with the longtime principal Leslie Andrea Williams in the role, two personifications of grief in their snug purple shrouds. Graham herself comes in mostly through voiceover, her words read by another of today’s formidable performers, Meryl Streep. Editing was nearly complete when a window opened in the actor’s schedule.
The sound engineer at the Pasadena recording studio asked if she wanted to stand or preferred a chair. “She paused and said, ‘I’ve only seen Martha Graham sitting, so I’m going to sit,’” Schnall recalls. Streep’s first takes sent a ripple through the booth. “We all just went, ‘Wow, this is what we’ve been waiting for—and more.’”
The veteran filmmakers, both newcomers to dance, witnessed several arcs unfold onscreen. Near the start of the first episode, titled “American Spirit,” the choreographer Jamar Roberts begins rehearsals for We the People (2024), his first work for the company, set to the buoyant music of Rhiannon Giddens. A former Alvin Ailey star versed in the Graham technique, Roberts understands how rooted in the earth the dancers are—and expects them to dig deep. “There’s the spirit of the untamed that I think lives here,” he says in the company’s sunlit West Village studio, “and you just don’t find it everywhere.” By the episode’s close, the curtain rises on the finished work, shown in a generous five-minute excerpt. The magnetic Lloyd Knight, bare-chested in a denim vest, performs his solo in weighted silence. He ends face-down on the ground, hands crossed behind his back.
This expanding repertory is one way Janet Eilber, the artistic director since 2005 and herself a celebrated Graham dancer in the ’70s, is shepherding the company into its second century. “We’re not making sort of a sacred altar to Martha Graham,” she says in the film. “We’re honoring her appetite for the new.”
That embrace of novelty extends to the company’s far-flung travels. The second episode—“Athletes of God,” borrowing another Graham phrase—sees them on tour in China soon after the post-pandemic reopening of its borders. The principal Xin Ying tearfully reunites with her mother there, as her young American-born daughter tries to make sense of the emotions. When the company heads to Europe, the filmmakers weave in the story of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Graham refused the Nazis’ invitation to perform. “We didn’t want to make a film that was expected,” Readdean says of their inclination to avoid didactic explanation. As we hear Streep read Graham’s letter, Williams holds court in a Bologna piazza, performing the gripping solo Spectre-1914—part of the 1936 ballet Chronicle, which Graham used to sound the alarm against fascism. The costume’s full skirt, lined in red, heightens the drama with sharp flashes of color. “That’s the one [scene] Cyndee wouldn’t let me do in black and white,” Schnall says with a laugh.
There is an inherent tension between film and dance, the indelible and the ephemeral. A few company members in the documentary have since moved on. Even the backdrop to so many scenes—the Martha Graham headquarters, on the top floor of Westbeth—is theirs for only a few more weeks. They took over the space in 2012, following the death of Merce Cunningham (an early Graham dancer) and the closing of his company. Hurricane Sandy swept in three months later, flooding Graham’s basement storage area.
“That’s been underwater for 10 days,” Eilber says during a visit to her office, referring to a stiff black costume on a dress form—a relic from Episodes, a 1959 collaboration with George Balanchine. Come May, the company relocates to new studios within a Midtown building, home to offices and Broadway rehearsal spaces and a pickleball court. “We can do a warmup and a cool-down to protect their muscles, ankles, knees,” she says, part joke, part scheme to shore up funding.
Eilber circles back to the documentary’s title, the we as important as the our time. “It’s not Martha’s centennial,” she remembers telling the filmmakers early on. That happened in 1994. “This is about her greatest collaborators—almost 500 dancers who have now danced in the company.” Some of these performers turn up as interview subjects, regal with gray-streaked hair. Peter London, whose decade-long tenure began in 1988, also teaches a master class in the second episode. “Draw inside that sweet sacred place of your soul—that was Martha’s directive,” he intones.
“Part of her genius was just to feel the human condition,” Eilber says in her Westbeth office. “Her ballets speak to that.” The centennial tour put the company in Minneapolis earlier this year—“two weeks after Alex Pretti had been murdered.” Roberts’s We the People was on the program; so was Appalachian Spring, with Copland’s wartime reworking of a plaintive Shaker tune. The dancers, some of whom are on visas, had wondered who might turn up amid the protests, but the 2,000-seat theater was packed.
Months earlier, the company had connected with a Minneapolis public high school, inviting students to develop their own homage to Graham’s American Document. The 1938 work, which folds in such texts as the Declaration of Independence, the letter from Red Jacket of the Senecas, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, was reimagined in 2010, drawing in part on Barbara Morgan’s well-known photographs. During the company’s visit, a school administrator explained that the students, many from immigrant households, had been hard at work—albeit kept at home on Zoom. When the teenagers presented their composition, “there was audio about why their family came to America, and then they danced the native dances of their home countries,” says Eilber, ticking through geographic locales like East Africa, Ecuador, and Mexico. “It was mind-blowing.”
Outside Eilber’s office, across from bins of costumes lent out for student productions, a suite of Barbara Morgans hangs on the wall. “The only record of a dancer’s art lies in the other arts,” Graham acknowledged in the introduction to their book of photographs—true too for a PBS documentary. Whatever the medium, it’s a window into the way Graham reveals the “common denominator of us all,” as Morgan put it: “the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, and the creative potentials of life.”