Steps in the Streets (dance)

Steps in the Streets. Dance, originally choreographed 1936. Revived at the New York Segment of the Martha Graham Centennial Celebration, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1994.

From Lynn Garafola rev., "Martha Graham Centennial Celebration" in Dance section of The Nation 259.20 (12 Dec. 1994): 736-38. ". . . Graham's company . . . consisted entirely of women. Their bodies were big and immensely strong, with powerful thighs and hips that jutted through the long jersey dresses with the purposeful motion of a machine," appearing physically much like "the workers in murals of the period." Steps "is haunted by the specter of fear, by a menace that makes automatons of the social polity; strange, misshapen creatures scramble across the stage in legions at once terrifying and poignant. Steps was choreographed in 1936, and it is not hard to see in its vision of mechanized humanity a critique of fascism" (737).