CHICAGO.- Drawn from the body’s core, resonating with primal instinct: witness the soundings of true American originators staged by the most venerated and influential contemporary dance company in the United States. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents the Martha Graham Dance Company from April 19-21, 2007. Showcasing superlative choreography and set design, the elegant program for these three evenings – joined by a special in-depth Saturday matinee program – marks the long-awaited return of three major modern ballets to Chicago.

The evening program, Focus on Martha Graham/Isamu Noguchi Collaborations, features three works created by Graham and the legendary American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who designed the sets: Appalachian Spring (1944), Embattled Garden (1958), and Errand into the Maze (1947). Graham and Noguchi made dance theatrical in a productive collaboration that lasted three decades, laying the ground for the interdisciplinary art we look for from the artists of today.

The Saturday matinee, American Original, shows the trajectory of Martha Graham’s artistic development through five solo dance performances, interwoven with rare archival films of early pieces choreographed by Graham. Selections from Appalachian Spring are then performed with a voice over by Artistic Director Janet Eilber, a protégé of Graham’s who began performing with the company in 1972. Graham’s Diversion of Angels finishes the program.

Born out of a rebellion against the decorative aspects of Euroballet and fueled by a thirst for self-expression, Martha Graham’s singular language and technique ushered in a new era of contemporary dance. Today, her method is known for masterfully externalizing human emotions by carefully isolating the center-torso movements of emotive states like sobbing and laughing. The spare, angular attack that defined her work in the 1920s and 30s broadened into a more expansive and lyrical style in the 1940s, before psychological and sexual references added complexity to her established method in the 1950s and 60s.

Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who spent much of his youth just outside Chicago in La Porte, Indiana, helped usher Graham through each of these changes with his progressive set design. Before the two collaborated, Graham’s work was always performed on a bare stage. Not just a celebrity sculptor, Noguchi was a quintessential collaborator whose expressions in furniture, interior design, gardens, playgrounds, and fountains relied on the company he kept. Along with Martha Graham, he counted other contemporary American savants like R. Buckminster Fuller amongst his close companions. Other dance innovators who worked with Noguchi include George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Chicago’s own Ruth Page.

As a principal dancer with the company, Janet Eilber soloed twice at the White House and was partnered with Rudolph Nureyev in The Scarlet Letter and Lucifer, two of several roles created for her by Graham. Her appointment as Artistic Director in 2005 put an ideal cap on the lengthy estate disputes, after Graham’s death in 1991, that forced company operations to cease for over two years. Having restored their ascendant tradition through the continued strength of their dancing and performing, the Martha Graham Dance Company remains supremely representative of the collaborative, cross-disciplinary programming that the MCA Department of Performance Programs is known for presenting.

The MCA presents Martha Graham Dance Company ThursdaySaturday, April 1921, 2007, in the MCA Theater, 220 East Chicago Avenue. Performance tickets ($1940) are available at the MCA Box Office at 312.397.4010 or www.mcachicago.org. Student tickets to MCA performance programs, subject to availability, are always just $10. For more information visit the MCA website at www.mcachicago.org or www.marthagraham.org.