Martha Graham vs Hurricane Sandy By Erica Hochstedler
Hurricane Sandy hit the Martha Graham Dance Company hard, destroying decade’s worth of costumes, over 5,000 of them. Other necessities like sets, shoes, posters, programs, sewing machines, and dance floors, were not spared. Total cost of damages is estimated at $4.6 million.
Martha Graham vs. Hurricane Sandy
By Erica Hochstedler
This is, this is no beauty anymore. It’s more history.
Yep, that’s a story here.
This project is very special. It’s, umm, uh restoration after hurricane sandy.
I love old antique things, so to me it’s beautiful in itself, but I can see how it doesn’t work for the ballet anymore, because colors have to be vibrant and clear and now it’s uh, quite a bit of mess.
You can see the damage. And elastics no longer elastic.
So here’s a, a regional solider. I put it here and you see this is not workable. So I am making eight of those now.
With this specific ballet it has to be really clear, really straight, it’s very choppy movement. Music is very defined.
Costumes is part of architecture of the dance there, it’s not, sometimes it goes against he movement in that very specific way, so there is a sense of resistance and struggle and breaking through.
It’s like, makes me so sad.
And like that, about a hundred times.
But this should be in a museum. Museum of Sandy dash Clytemnestra, Martha Graham. I hope they display those things because it’s umm, you know, it’s like antiques you know, they carry the energy of person, person who danced, who made it, who created it.
If you remember seeing the first Google doodle, then you’ve at least head of Martha Graham and her dance company. Even though Graham died in 1991, her company has been around since 1926.
Executive director of Martha Graham Dance, LaRue Allen, described the havoc that Hurricane Sandy wreaked on the company saying that water rose up to within inches of the ceiling of their basement storage facility. Just two weeks before the storm hit they had moved into the Westbeth building in the West Village, former home of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. They also moved everything they owned into the basement there.
This included many sets by Isamu Noguchi, sets my Alexander Calder, costumes designed and handmade by Martha Graham herself, plus others designed by Halston, Donna Karen, and Calvin Klein. Priceless artifacts of America’s dance history were damaged beyond repair. Many items disintegrated altogether after sitting in water for two weeks. It took them that long to find a generator and the pump they needed to pump the water out of the basement.
In all, the property damage was estimated to be about $4.6 million.
It’s a year later and costumes still need to be re-constructed. Anna-Alisa Belous, has been hired to help remake the costumes for Martha Graham’s “Clytemnestra.” The ballet follows the story of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife during the Trojan War. It’s set to be performed at New York City Center in March of 2014.
