STANDING ROOM ONLY*
*a limited number of seats will be availble for those with disabilities
TICKET INCLUDES A POST-SHOW INTERVIEW BETWEEN XIN YING & OLIVER TOBIN
AND A WINE & CHEESE RECEPTION WITH TOBIN & YING
The Martha Graham Dance Company returns to The Church for a very special evening featuring Xin Ying, one of the company’s most beloved leading dancers. Ying will perform two solo works: Letter to Nobody, conceived and created by Xin Ying and Mimi Yin, explores generative media approaches, including emerging AI technologies, to extract data from archival footage from the Martha Graham Resources archive and bring Martha Graham back to the stage to perform a duet with Xin Ying. The piece is being reformatted especially for The Church’s space and current exhibition; and; Lamentation, a classic solo created by Martha Graham in 1930, that announced to the world that modernism had arrived in American dance. As a part of the design of this performance specifically for The Church, the artist has asked that the audience stand for the duration of the two works, approximately 30 minutes. Following the two dances, the audience will be led downstairs for a Q&A between Ying and Oliver Tobin, curator of the current exhibition MARTHA GRAHAM: COLLABORATIONS. This very special evening concludes with a wine and cheese reception for the audience and the presenters and performer.
A celebrated Chinese chorographer and star dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, Ying has created a dynamic career that earned her a spot of the cover of Dance Magazine. Known for her embodiment of powerful female roles, many of which Graham created for herself, Ying joins us during the celebratory weekend that honors the strength of women and kicks of Women’s Month.
This performance has been programmed in tandem with our exhibition Martha Graham: Collaborations. The exhibition is on view during our exhibition hours Thursday through Monday, from 11 AM – 5 Pm, until March 22nd.
About Letter to Nobody: Letter to Nobody had its world premiere at the Joyce Theater in New York on April 2, 2025. Letter to Nobody is a love letter to Martha Graham whose influence reaches beyond her physical existence; it is also a love letter to the artists who will never be known by Graham herself but who carry her legacy into the future. Based on the Graham masterwork from 1940, Letter to the World, the new duet takes inspiration from a poem by Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us!” The manipulated footage of a 1940s performance featuring Graham alongside notable company members including Eric Hawkins and Merce Cunningham provides a potent partner for Xin’s solo.
Through this new duet the artist asks, In this 100th year of the Martha Graham Dance Company, what does it mean to carry on Graham’s legacy? What privileges and burdens come along with such a charge? As performers, students, and audience members, how do we continue to embody Martha and engage in dialogue with the world around us, a world she never knew?
Created by Xin Ying, the piece features choreography by Xin Ying, Mimi Yin
Soundscape by Mimi Yin, Chris Celiz and Gene Shinozaki as SPIDERHORSE
Lighting by Yi-Chung Chen; Costume by Karen Young; and Creative Technology by Yuguang Zhang with NUUM Collective.
Letter to Nobody was made possible with a significant commissioning grant from The O'Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation. Major support for Letter to Nobody was provided by Christopher Jones and Deb McAlister, Harkness Foundation for Dance, The Hayes Foundation and The SHS Foundation.
About Lamentation: Lamentation premiered in New York City on January 8, 1930, at Maxine Elliot’s Theater, to music by the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. The dance is performed almost entirely from a seated position, with the dancer encased in a tube of purple jersey. The diagonals and tensions formed by the dancer’s body struggling within the material create a moving sculpture, a portrait which presents the very essence of grief. The figure in this dance is neither human nor animal, neither male nor female: it is grief itself.
According to Martha Graham, after one performance of the work she was visited by a woman in the audience who had recently seen her child killed in an accident. Viewing Lamentation enabled her to grieve, as she realized that “grief was a dignified and valid emotion and that I could yield to it without shame.”