Martha Graham Dance Company CURRENT Takeover

When The New York Times, in an article on the residency that informs the Martha Graham Dance Company’s CURRENT takeover, mentioned that “Google—through Google Arts and Culture—is on a mission to find new ways of braiding technology with culture,” it couldn’t help but to have a faintly sinister ring, like the opening page of a twenty-first-century Kafka novel. (At least the phrase “Google Arts and Culture” is merely dispiriting, as opposed to the mad screaming horror of “Facebook Dating.”) But the results of the iconic modern dance company’s two weeks spent playing around in virtual reality and motion-capture technology sound pretty freaking cool. In the company’s immersive CURRENT experience, you’ll see Graham’s 1930 classic Lamentation with projected archival imagery mapped onto living dancers, among other new ways to encounter well-worn standards. Graham broke aesthetic ground in dance almost a century ago, but since technology has replaced aesthetics as the driving force of artistic progress, it’s only right that Graham’s company is probing that frontier now.