Martha Graham By Victoria Thoms

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.)

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.

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.