┬PARA ║PAR@ ` ╥TEXT ` ─Clarke, Martha1944╨ choreographer and dancer Born on June 3, 1944, in Baltimore, Maryland, Martha Clarke grew up in a musical family in the suburb of Pikesville and attended progressive private schools. She demonstrated a keen interest in dance in her early teens as a student at the exclusive Perry-Mansfield School of Theater and Dance in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. There she was cast as a child in Dance for Walt Whitman by choreographer Helen Tamiris.Her teachers noticed her talent, and with their encouragement she attended summer sessions at the Connecticut College School of Dance, where she worked with such luminaries as JosÄ LÆmon and Alvin Ailey. She skipped her senior year in high school, enrolling instead at the Juilliard School in New York City. She studied the Martha Graham technique and became enamored of the work of Anthony Tudor, whose explorations of the human psyche through ballet-style movements would have a lasting effect on her. After leaving Juilliard, she joined the modern dance company of Anna Sokolow, under whose direction she discovered an emotional expressionism she later said was at the root of all her subsequent work.Clarke╒s marriage to sculptor Philip Grausman, whom she later divorced, took her to Rome. After the birth of their son, the couple returned to the U.S.; Clarke took a five-year hiatus from dance, which ended when Grausman became an artist in residence at Dartmouth College. There the Pilobolus Dance Theater, an acrobatic troupe, was beginning to attract notice. She began working with the group╒s teacher, Alison Chase, and the two joined the previously all-male ensemble in 1973. Although Pilobolus╒s process was primarily a collaborative one, Clarke created six solos that were incorporated into the group╒s performances. She later described her time with Pilobolus as a contentious period characterized by much competition and discord in the group. Tired of the demands of the collaboration, she left Pilobolus in 1979, eager to pursue her own vision as a choreographer.Her next dance venture was Crowsnest, a chamber group she formed with another Pilobolus member, Robert Morgan Barnett, and French dancer and choreographer, FÄlix Blaska. Her work with the trio attracted critical admiration, particularly for dramatic and imaginative solos such as Fallen Angel, in which she danced to a Gregorian chant clad in an evening gown and bird mask, and Nachturn, in which she parodied Romantic ballet by hobbling and leaping across the stage bare-breasted and clad in swathes of white tulle.Clarke╒s work with Crowsnest reflected her evolution from dance to performance art, a change that began in 1977 when she worked with actress Linda Hunt on a show called Portraits, based on Hunt╒s dramatic monologues and Clarke╒s dance solos. The two continued their collaboration in 1982 with A Metamorphosis in Miniature, a musical adaptation of Kafka╒s Metamorphosis. Two years later, Clarke created a phantasmagorical series of sketches called The Garden of Earthly Delights, based on the work of the fifteenth century surrealist painter Hieronymus Bosch. The off-off-Broadway opening in November 1984 received rave reviews from critics, and the piece has since been performed in several cities in the U.S. and abroad. Her next performance piece╤on which she collaborated with composer Richard Peaslee╤was Vienna: Lusthaus. Also inspired by visual art, the piece evokes the decadence of fin de siÅcle Europe as it slides toward world war. Later pieces included The Hunger Artist, about the life of Kafka, and Miracolo d╒Amore, an exploration of erotic love that debuted in the spring of 1988 at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charlestown, N.C. Clarke was the subject of a 1981 documentary by Joyce Chopra, Martha Clarke, Light and Dark: A Dancer╒s Journey, which was broadcast on PBS. She received grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. ªstyl ` . ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ 4 !I ₧ !I ┤ !I ╞ !I ▐ ╙ !I ╒ 5¬ ╓ !I !I ▐ ) !I Ü 5¬ ¢ !I é 5¬ â !I 5¬ !I ( !I 4 !I è !I Æ !I
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