An article by Assistant Professor of Dance Kim Jones is the cover article of the December 2015 issue of Dance Research Journal, published three times a year by the Congress on Research in Dance. The article, “American Modernism: Reimagining Martha Graham’s Lost Imperial Gesture (1935),” chronicles the research process that Jones undertook in 2012 to reconstruct a solo by Graham that had not been seen in more than 70 years.
Along with a team of creative artists and UNC Charlotte Assistant Professor of Theatre Jeanmarie Higgins, who served as dramaturg, Jones used photographs, oral histories, journalistic accounts, and archival notes to bring to life Graham’s work, which was inspired by the spread of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. The reimagined Imperial Gesture premiered in Charlotte in January 2013 in a performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company presented by the College of Arts + Architecture. It received its New York City premiere the following month and has since been added to the Graham repertory.
Jones danced with the Martha Graham Dance Company from 2001-2006 and continues to serve as a régisseur for the company. In the summer of 2015, she began a new dance reconstruction project – Paul Taylor’s Tracer (1962). That work will be completed in September 2016 with a residency at UNC Charlotte of the Taylor 2 Company and a premiere of Jones’s research.