After a 45-year absence from Mexican stages, the Martha Graham Dance Company will return to the Palacio de Bellas Artes with a one-night centennial program set for Oct. 20.
The performance will bring back a body of work shaped in part by Martha Graham’s own encounters with Mexico and its ritual traditions.
Martha Graham’s choreography told stories in new ways and her collaborations with costume and stage designers changed the aesthetic of the art. Now, her dance company marks its first century. https://t.co/7gSbfo7Tg1
— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) March 2, 2026
Though the company was founded in 1926 in New York City, a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Mexico in 1932 fundamentally shifted the then-38-year-old Graham’s artistic direction toward what she called “dances of necessity” and human need.
Presented by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), the event is billed as “Martha Graham 100 Years: The Dance That Transformed the 20th Century.”
The company — often described as the longest-running modern dance troupe in the U.S. — will include “Dark Meadow Suite” (2016), “Lamentation” (1930), “We the People” (2024) and “Chronicle” (1936) in its repertoire.
Graham, who lived from 1894 to 1991, is widely regarded as the mother of modern dance and the creator of a technique often compared to ballet in scope and influence. She established her school and company in a tiny studio in midtown Manhattan, working with a small group of women.
During Graham’s travels to Mexico, her study of Indigenous ritual dances — after years of interest in ceremonies of the American Southwest — changed the choreographer’s conception of art, said Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director since 2005.
What she observed, Eilber said, were “expressions born from human need, fertility, climate, food, and religion” — which “totally revolutionized her conception of dance” and led her away from decorative, spectacle work.
“For the rest of her career, Martha Graham sought to create works that reflected that kind of basic human need,” Eilber said.
The Mexico connection runs through “Dark Meadow Suite,” adapted from Graham’s 1946 “Dark Meadow” and set to music by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez.
The program will also underscore Graham’s humanist and political force, said Eilber, who has called “Chronicle” “an anti-war statement, a protest dance against war and oppression.” The piece was created the year Graham rejected an invitation to dance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Nazi rule.
“Lamentation” is a radical, four-minute solo in which a dancer, enveloped in purple fabric, sways on a bench in “a universal portrait of loss.” It’s included as the emblem of Graham’s modernist break, when she “announced to the world [in 1930] that modernism had arrived in American dance.”
The company, which has been led exclusively by women, last appeared in Mexico in 1981, after an earlier visit in 1968.
The company is in the middle of its 2024-26 international centennial tour, which will include the Oct. 20 performance at 8 p.m. No other stops in Latin America have been announced.
Tickets for the Mexico City show are available at the Palacio de Bellas Artes box office and through Ticketmaster. Prices range from 420 pesos (about US $24) to 1,350 pesos (US $78).
With reports from El Sur de Guerrero, El Regional Coatepec and Vogue
