Martha Graham Tube Dance - Lamentation

Martha Graham - Lamentation dance; R Williamson, digital drawing; 2023

A digital sketch of a moment during Martha Grahams' iconic solo dance, ‘Lamentation’, as I watched it in a show at the Seattle Art Museum last year. Don’t remember the show per se, just stumbled on the drawing again and the simplicity and drama still had the power to draw me in. Definitely a feeling that has been going around in the past few weeks.

A video of the performance is here on YouTube, but I think that the one I saw was a different version. The performance is notable for the strong expressiveness that she achieves by reducing the complexity of the figure to a soft geometry by cloaking herself in a featureless tube. She makes use of knees and elbows to create angles that she then folds into strong silhouetted shapes. The rich monochromatic tones here suggest a mezzotint print which appeals to my early printmaker days.