Margaret Anglin as Medea, in her ca. 1917 production, to music by Walter Damrosch. Photograph by Underwood & Underwood, NY. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

New York, NY, September 29, 2004 -- Martha Graham, John Cage, The Living Theatre, Isadora Duncan, Margaret Webster, Theodora Skipitares, George Cram Cook, The Performance Group…. Looking back to move forward in every artistic discipline, the American avant-garde has returned again and again to the aesthetics, narratives, traditions, and ideals of classical Hellenic culture. Cutting-edge American artists have repeatedly broken new ground with the tools of ancient Greece -- in dance, theatre, music, architecture, and design -- discarding the rules of intervening eras and redefining their forms to forge new paths into the aesthetic frontier. The liberating influence of Greek conventions on countless 20th-century American choreographers, theater artists, composers, and visual artists is celebrated in Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America, a multimedia exhibition on view October 15, 2004 through January 8, 2005, in the Vincent Astor Gallery of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza. Admission is free.

Mirrors to the Past is organized around three central themes: the Greek revivalism that pervaded American culture for the first two decades of the twentieth century; the cyclical rediscovery and adaptation of classical Greek narratives by American performing artists, particularly during times of war and social upheaval; and the use of ancient Greek performance and compositional technique by experimental American artists. Each section is brought to life by a plethora of original artifacts culled from the Library's Billy Rose Theatre Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the Music Division, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.

Visitors are greeted by Greek-style silk drapes woven and hand decorated by Raymond Duncan; the same drapes seen in a photograph of Raymond visiting his father's staid San Francisco bank sporting the Greek style of dress he adopted as everyday fashion throughout his life. The Greco-mania of the rest of the Duncan clan is apparent in photographs (Isadora at the Parthenon, Irma's school in Moscow and Elizabeth's in Salzburg), one of a series of large pastel portraits of Duncan dancers, and Isadora's personal copies of the Gilbert Murray translations of Electra, The Trojan Women, and other plays. Sculptor/dancer Paul Swan, Provincetown Playhouse founder George Cram Cook, composer Louis Horst, and actress Margaret Anglin are among the American performing arts pioneers whose Greek-influenced lives and work are represented in photographs, prompt scripts, manuscript scores, programs, letters, and other ephemera. Magazines and books from the turn of the last century promoting Greek artistic traditions as the height of human expression, and vintage images and programs from America's two reproductions of Greek arenas -- the Greek Theatre, on the UC-Berkeley campus and the Lewisohn Stadium at New York's City University--are also on view.

Greek narrative as a vehicle for the anti-war avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s is evidenced in materials from several sources, among them the 1938 Federal Theatre Project/WPA production of The Trojan Incident (including choreographer Helen Tamiris's annotated script, Wallingford Riegger's score, window cards, and a flyer emphasizing conflicting critical response to the work); and the Experimental Theatre's Trojan Women of 1941, produced by Lehman Engel and Margaret Webster. Photographic documentation of modern dance works inspired by Hellenic women and gods feature Martha Graham's Greek cycle of 1946 through 1967. The communal theatre of the 1950s through the 1970s gravitated to Hellenic dramatic narratives again, as seen in Judith Malina's dynamic directorial drawings and notes for the Living Theatre's Antigone, and in items from Richard Schechner's Dionysus in '69 at the Performing Garage, and the Theatre of the Lost Continent's drag presentation of The Trojan Women. Three figures from the 2004 Theodora Skipitares production of Odyssey: The Homecoming -- in response to the war in Iraq -- are also included.

Maverick composers and jazz innovators jettisoned the harmonic 12-note scale in favor of Hellenic just intonation and archaic modes. Musical scores and audio samples are the focal point of the exhibition of Greek performance technique as adopted and adapted by 20th-century artists, featuring composers John Cage, Harry Partch, and others.

Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America is the inaugural event of The New York Public Library's Hellenic Festival, presented in collaboration with the Queens Library, offering a variety of exhibitions, workshops, films, lectures, dance, theater, and music performances, and a host of other events galvanized by Greek culture, at multiple locations throughout the city, through April 2005. (Complete schedule). The Hellenic Festival is made possible by a generous grant from the Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation.

Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America will be on view from October 15, 2004 through January 8, 2005 in the Vincent Astor Gallery, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. Exhibition hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 12 noon to 6 p.m.; Thursday, 12 noon to 8 p.m.; closed Sunday, Monday, and holidays. Admission is free. For further information, telephone 212.870.1630 or visit www.nypl.org.


Hellenic Festival Programs at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

As part of the Library-wide Hellenic Festival, the public program series will offer performances of Greek dance, classical, contemporary, and traditional Greek music, as well as Orpheus and His Lute, a fascinating series of lectures, readings, recitals, and screenings exploring the significance and reverberations of the Orpheus myth in artistic expression. All programs are held in the Library's Bruno Walter Auditorium, 111 Amsterdam Avenue (south of 65th Street). Admission is free and seats are available on a first-come basis unless otherwise noted. For further information, call 212.642.0142 or email lpaprog@nypl.org.

Saturday, October 16, 3 p.m.
Traditional Dances of Greece, performed by The Greek-American Folklore Society.


Thursday, October 28, 6 p.m.
An Evening with Nikos Astrinidis
The Greek composer will talk about his work and about Greek music in general. The program will feature a performance of songs by Astrinidis by Helen Fousteris, soprano, and Yannis Xylas, piano.


Saturday, October 30, 3 p.m.
Styliani Tartsinis, saxophone, and Yannis Xylas, piano, with guest artists Kathy Yiannoudes, soprano, Alexandra Skendrou, mezzo soprano, and Kostantinos Yiannoudes, baritone, perform works by Greek composers and works inspired by Greek themes. The program will feature music by Nikos Astrinidis, Benson, Brian Elias, Manolis Kalomoiris, Yiorgos Kazasoglou, Dimitris Michailidis, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.


Saturday, November 6, 3 p.m.
Dimitri Kavrakos, bass, Teresa Moore, soprano, and Tania Papayiannopoulou and Yannis Xylas, pianists, perform works by Greek composers and by composers inspired by Greek themes, including Nikos Astrinidis, Manolis Kaolomoiris, Yiannis Konstantinidis, Charles Spinks, and Richard Strauss.


Saturday, November 13, 3 p.m.
The Folk Music of Greece
Lecture-performance by Demetri Tashie and other artists.


Saturday, December 4, 3 p.m.
Anahid Sofian and Dancers
A performance of dances informed by Greek music and themes, including "Ode," a dance at twilight inspired by a Greek folk song, adapted by Vangelis; and "Greek Cabaret Dance," a spirited dance noted for its lively footwork and speedy cymbals.


Thursday, February 17, 2005, 6 p.m.
The Changing Sound of Monteverdi's Orfeo, a lecture by David Hamilton using audio materials from the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.


The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts houses the world's most extensive combination of circulating, reference, and rare archival collections in its field. Its divisions are the Circulating Collections, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Music Division, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. The materials in its collections are available free of charge, along with a wide range of special programs, including exhibitions, seminars, and performances. The Library is known particularly for it prodigious collections of non-book materials such as historic recordings, videotapes, autograph manuscripts, correspondence, sheet music, stage designs, press clippings, programs, posters and photographs.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts gratefully acknowledges the leadership support of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman. Additional support for exhibitions has been provided by Judy R. and Alfred A. Rosenberg and the Miriam and Harold Steinberg Foundation.

Contact: Lindy Regan or Herb Scher, 212.704.8600.

The exhibition and programs at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts are part of The New York Public Library's Hellenic Festival. For an overview, see the schedule of events.