The Church will host two programs this weekend in conjunction with its current exhibition, “Martha Graham: Collaborations.”
Knowledge Friday, which features presentations by community members who share their knowledge and expertise, will bring Margaret Garrett, a former dancer turned visual artist, to the Sag Harbor cultural center on Friday at 6 p.m. After exploring Ms. Garrett’s own history with dance, the program will turn its focus to a particular Martha Graham Dance Company project: “The 19 Poses.” Ms. Garrett will talk about the poses and discuss her work with them before leading the audience through them at the end of the program.
“The 19 Poses” was developed as part of the Eve Project, the dance company’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. A guiding force behind the company’s 2018–19 and 2019–20 seasons, the Eve Project not only honors the progress of women in the last century but also “provides access to today’s most pressing conversations about gender and power,” according to the company’s website, accentuating Martha Graham’s revolutionary representation of women onstage.
Drawn from a curated selection of photographs of Graham in evocative poses, the project led to an Insta-Graham challenge, which invited women everywhere to utilize the 19 poses in their everyday lives.
Ms. Garrett’s practice includes painting, collage, printmaking, and video art. Training to be a dancer while growing up, she joined a professional ballet company at the age of 16. In her early 20s, she discovered painting, finding the movement of line and color spiritually akin to dance.
She has exhibited in New York City at Planthouse, Danese/Corey, the FLAG Art Foundation, and Birnam Wood Galleries. Recent achievements in large-scale public work include a 40-foot glass mural commissioned by the NYU Langone Art Program and fabricated in collaboration with the Peters Studio in Germany.
Tickets are $10, free for Church members who R.S.V.P.
On Saturday afternoon at 5, Xin Ying, one of the Graham Company’s leading dancers, will perform two solo works, “Letter to Nobody” and “Lamentation.” Conceived and created by Ms. Ying and Mimi Yin, “Letter to Nobody,” which premiered at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea in April 2025, explores generative media approaches, including emerging A.I. technologies, to extract data from the Martha Graham Resources archive and bring Graham back to the stage to perform a duet with Ms. Ying. The piece is being reformatted especially for The Church’s space and current exhibition.
“Lamentation” debuted in New York in January 1930 at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, to music by Zoltán Kodály, a Hungarian composer. 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 said to present the essence of grief.
According to 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, she said, as she realized that “grief was a dignified and valid emotion and that I could yield to it without shame.”
Ms. Ying joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2011 and performs many of Graham’s own roles, including “Herodiade,” “Errand into the Maze,” “Chronicle,” “Cave of the Heart,” and others. Her performance as The Chosen One in “Rite of Spring” was described as “transcendent and heroic” by The New York Times.
She has also been featured in many works created for the company by contemporary choreographers, including Nacho Duato, Annie-B Parson, and Hofesh Shechter. Her work has been commissioned by CoLab Dance, Ballet Arkansas, Art Bath, and the 92NY for its 90th-year celebration. Her piece “In the Folds of Her Purple” is premiering this spring at the Guggenheim Museum.
The artist has asked that the audience stand for the duration of the two works, which last approximately 30 minutes. A limited number of seats will be available for those with disabilities.
Tickets include a post-show interview with Ms. Ying and Oliver Tobin, the exhibition’s curator, and a wine-and-cheese reception with Mr. Tobin and Ms. Ying.
Tickets are $95, $90 for members. However, The Church has created a discount code that, when applied online, reduces the tariff to $75 and $70. The code is INSPIRECREATIVITY, which can be entered on the ticket page in the promotion code box.
