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Martha Hill Dance Fund: Awards Gala

The Martha Hill Dance Fund 2012 AWARDS.
November 26, 2012

The recipients of the MID CAREER AWARD: H.T. Chen and Dian Dong.
The recipients of the LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Gemze De Lappe and Yuriko Kikuchi.
The recipient of theYoung Professional Award: Lissa Nicole Smith

MARTHA HILL (1900-1995) – Educator, administrator, artistic director and visionary for dance as a performing art – Martha Hill established an unprecedented standard for excellence in the field.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Martha Hill started the Bennington School of Dance, a summer program at a new progressive college in the mountains of Vermont. She invited the young, ground breaking choreographers Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm, and together they established a major new art form, a totally new language of personal expression. This new movement of dance broke away from the ideas of European ballet drastically, it was not about effortlessness and airiness, it was about physical force and tension and the movements and expressions of the individual.

It was here at Bennington College, under the leadership of Martha Hill, that Modern Dance became a cohesive and legitimate American art form, and over the next 60 years of Hill’s career moved throughout the world forever changing the art of dance and establishing a legitimate form of Dance Education that spread to almost every major institution in the country.

Within every challenge of Martha Hill’s life, be it her childhood search for freedom of expression or her great battle to save the Juilliard School of Dance in a dramatic political struggle over the resources, real estate and control of Lincoln Center, her perseverance was always guided by her passion and belief in dance. “Miss Hill” seamlessly interweaves archival footage, voices, dances, and movement of the past with that of the present through interviews and performance footage of Hill’s former students, now internationally known choreographers, educators and dancers, to become a dance through time that tells a story that ultimately transcends dance itself. A story of a commitment to something larger than ourselves and how that type of selfless dedication can have a long lasting impact on the world.

A documentary of the unknown story of a courageous woman “Miss Hill”.who fought against insurmountable odds to solidify Modern Dance as a legitimate art form.

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