The Brooklyn Rail

While the Martha Graham Dance Company officially celebrates its centennial 2025–26 season, performance artist, dancer, and scholar Richard Move plans to mark the occasion with a signature downtown flair. In Martha@BAM—The 1963 Interview, Move and Tony Award–winning Lisa Kron recreate a little-known live interview that Graham gave to dance critic Walter Terry at the apex of her career. The show will run as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave 2025, October 28–November 1, at BAM Fisher.

Move has performed in the persona of Martha Graham for nearly thirty years, beginning with a variety show at Mother, a nightclub in New York’s Meatpacking District. In addition to Move and Kron, Martha@BAM—The 1963 Interview features former Graham company dancers Catherine Cabeen and PeiJu Chien-Pott, with scenic designs by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo and Roberto Montenegro, costumes by Pilar Limosner and Karen Young, lighting design by Donalee Katz, and rehearsal direction by Linda Hodes.

Karen Hildebrand (Rail): Hello Richard. I was wondering if you might arrive in your character of Martha, or as yourself.

Richard Move: Oh, I’m so sorry to disappoint you, it’s just little old boring me.

Rail: I’m happy with that choice. Interviewing Martha Graham is quite an intimidating prospect, which helps put your upcoming show into perspective. She’s a very large personality. I love the doubled cross-gender casting for Martha@BAM—The 1963 Interview, with you as Martha and Lisa as Walter Terry.

Move: We’re gender ideologists.

Rail: Lisa, how is it to take on this male-identified role?

Lisa Kron: I’ve never thought that much about taking on a male persona in performance. What’s fun about playing Walter Terry is that the text is taken verbatim from the interview. So it has a kind of Anna Deavere Smith-ian attention to pauses, coughs, and then just the strange phrasing of actual speech that’s fun to reproduce. Walter Terry has that kind of mid-century cultivated voice that many people did at that time, almost like a southern gentleman accent. It’s very musical, the way that he talks.

Rail: Graham also spoke with an elevated diction. Richard, did you know her when she was alive?

Move: Oh, God, no. Because remember, she died in 1991, which was around the time I first came to New York. One of the reasons I was so attracted to her is because she was nowhere to be found at that time. As an example, in my three summers as a young dance student at the American Dance Festival, the Graham Company was absolutely not presented. There was not one Graham teacher on faculty.

Rail: She was out of style.

Move: She was considered completely irrelevant. And that was my draw. It was never like, “Oh, I need to get to the school (at that time on 63rd Street) and try to get into the company.” I was drawn to her as a person.

Rail: Did you study Graham technique?

Move: The nearest dance studio when I was fifteen, growing up in Stafford, Virginia, was forty minutes away in Fredericksburg. I climbed the stairs one evening and there was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen: in a black turtleneck kind of leotard, long black skirt, full face of makeup, bleached blonde hair in a bun, Margaret Ann Moss, teaching this thing called Graham Technique. It was like a religious experience. But later, once I began to study seriously, with my BFA, Graham was just nowhere.

Rail: How did you first come to embody her as a performer?

Move: I had this crazy idea to do a dance legends kind of evening. Robert La Fosse from City Ballet did Vaslav Nijinsky. That was my very first performance as Graham—a tiny little nightclub called Mother in the Meatpacking District. I realized that people—non-dance people—were relating to this character and persona as a kind of quintessential modernist, feminist, twentieth-century iconic diva in the way of Coco Chanel in fashion, or Maria Callas in opera, or Betty Davis in film.

Rail: You did that as a one-time show, right? But it led to Martha@Mother for which you won a Bessie Award in 1997.

Move: The premise of Martha@Mother was basically: Martha had never died; she decided to take on a new task of hosting a dance-based variety show. And so we would curate brand new emerging artists and dance legends. Over time, we had Merce Cunningham, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Morris, and emerging artists on the same bill. And Martha would welcome everyone.

Rail: So these artists showed their own work—this was not like the original legends evening.

Move: Almost immediately, early generations of Graham dancers started coming. Bertram Ross, who was Graham’s dance partner in the fifties and sixties, gave me little notes. He thought my lipstick should be more of a blood red, which was fascinating because I was mainly studying Martha in black and white. He would have looked at that face for years.

Yuriko, who came to Graham after her release from a World War II Japanese internment camp, ended up coaching us: me as Graham, and then a small group of dancers I’d assembled as her company. Linda Hodes, who later became rehearsal director for The 1963 Interview—she passed in August at ninety-four—we were all looking forward to seeing her back in rehearsal. Stuart Hodes, rest his soul, who also was Graham’s dance partner, performed with us several times. So it was just a beautiful mix of people, from those who knew everything about her to those who knew nothing about her.

Rail: Do you have any rituals for getting into character? Or, perhaps you’ve been doing it so long that she’s right there, immediately available.

Move: I have a vocal warm-up, a physical warm-up. I am in hair and makeup for quite some time. So through that process, about two and a half hours, she starts to take over. I really need to be completely alone for the few minutes before. I feel like a caged animal chomping at the bit for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Graham describes what she experienced as characters coming out of the atmosphere and taking hold of her. She equates it with having seizures. So maybe that’s what I go through, in my own way.

Rail: What made you think of Lisa for the Walter Terry role?

Move: Originally back in 2009 when the 92nd Street Y first contacted me about this reel-to-reel recording they’d found, a wonderful writer and raconteur David Rakoff did the part of Walter Terry. We did an excerpt and we fell in love with it. But by 2010 his cancer was too serious for him to perform (for the premiere in 2011 at Dance Theater Workshop). So I immediately turned to Lisa. We had been working on a play about Graham and she had become a real expert.

Rail: Lisa, as a playwright and actor, I imagine you are quite attuned to dialogue. How did you approach Walter Terry?

Kron: In my work on this piece I mark where Walter Terry breathes. Breath is where a new idea comes out. You take a breath before the series of words that’s going to express something. It’s also the difference between expressing something and striving to express something. I think the action of striving to express is really fun to portray in this kind of verbatim reconstruction.

Rail: What about hand gestures and facial expressions? It’s an audio-only recording so you’re working without a visual reference. How did you develop the physicality?

Kron: I don’t move very much. I really follow the voice. But the costume that Pilar Limosner made is really a key to the character. There’s a suit—the colors are very subtle and beautiful. There’s an ascot—not a tie, but an ascot. And then these shoes. There’s a dapperness to these shoes that is perfect. And then, the absolute key was Walter Terry’s pinky ring. I sit with my legs crossed, and the pinky ring is between me and the audience the whole time.

Rail: What do you two find so compelling about the interview itself?

Move: So many things! First of all, we have to think of what was happening to Graham at this time. It’s 1963, she’ll be seventy in six weeks. Her body is starting to be crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. That even disfigured her hands and feet. Remember, she thought of herself as a dancer first and a choreographer second. As per people close to her, the drinking was starting. Also changes were happening in art. People were very excited by Merce Cunningham. Think of Jackson Pollock and all these amazing changes happening. I think it was probably a very difficult time for her. Simultaneously, she would have had official living legend status by now. Her three-act Clytemnestra (1958) was considered a triumph on all levels.

Also, there were very few opportunities to spend that much time with her in an interview setting. We’ve got a bunch of rather staged documentary moments with her. Think of A Dancer’s World from 1957. This is live. The audience, it’s packed. You can hear it in the recording.

Kron: As Terry talks about in the interview, he’s very close to Graham. They’re very good friends. He says over the years, “We have laughed and talked and argued and agreed. I’ve made dinner for her. She has made scrambled eggs for me.”

Rail: You’ve already slipped into his intonation.

Kron: He says, “When I’ve had personal problems, she’s listened and been both patient and kind, and I think, I hope, I have occasionally done the same for her.” He’s funny and they make each other laugh. As they’re talking, it’s very clear that they hang out. He’s one of Martha Graham’s gay boyfriends.

Move: He’s asking her about signature movements in certain roles, about the development of her technique, about the vocabulary, about how it’s taught. And she’s articulate, poetically articulate, let’s say. She’s also very funny at certain moments. She would have been glamorous. Probably dressed by Bethsabée de Rothschild in elegant Dior, probably a low heel. Still, all this going on, she gets up and dances several times.

Rail: She can’t help herself.

Move: She is really that quintessential stage animal. So that’s very compelling. To me, what I’m hearing and feeling is a real desire to be understood. She goes to great length to describe what she was doing in certain ballets. She wants him, and she wants that live audience to understand, which I also think is very beautiful. Here she is, the Picasso of dance, and she still really wants you to appreciate her process. For instance, she talks about how she prepared for Joan of Arc in Seraphic Dialogue (1955). She read the entire transcript of the trial. She visited the church in France where St. Joan first heard the voices. And she expects the same from any dancer who will perform Joan.

Rail: You’ve invited two former Graham company members, Catherine Cabeen and PeiJu Chien-Pott, to perform in the show.

Kron: One of the thrilling experiences we have had with this run is having Katherine Crockett, who was in the original Martha, come in and talk to the dancers about the choreography. Listening to this image-laden description from one dancer to another in a kind of Graham-ian point of view of just how to interpret those dances was incredible to watch. Crockett was physically expressing herself as she was talking.

Move: This show is very different than the Martha@Mother variety show, because in those instances, I would come on, deliver monologues of a few minutes, then I’d have these very short, synoptic, deconstructed versions of her dances, like a Clytemnestra-in-ten-minutes, eliminating all the minor characters, going right for the love triangles, the murders, the suicides, the beheadings, the blindings.

Rail: This show definitely seems more earnest in tone.

Kron: My sense is Richard’s relationship to Graham has always been earnest. The mode of expression has had camp and irony in it, but that has been a vehicle for bringing a reverence for this artistry to audiences who wouldn’t necessarily have been in its path. It’s really the epitome of high-low at its best. Just having me and Richard, this six foot-whatever tall Martha Graham, just towering over me—we look like Boris and Natasha in a certain way.

Move: Since 2009, with The 1963 Interview, my relationship with Martha has gotten deeper. This show is more sustained, longer, more vulnerable. There’s a fragility. It’s a wonderful gift to visit and revisit a character for this long.

Kron: Even though there’s something a little bit funny about what Richard and I are doing, we’re both depicting people who speak in absolutely musical ways. So the sound of it and the look of it are transportingly beautiful.

Rail: You make it sound very compelling.

Kron: I don’t say that about everything I do. What has been reflected back to me—which I just want to say, I don’t take with a grain of salt—is that it’s a very unusual and special show. It’s a little bewitching—that’s the word I would use.