Martha Clarke (born June 3, 1944) is an American theater director and choreographer noted for her multidisciplinary approach to theatre, dance, and opera productions. She is the creator of plotless, dreamlike works that are perhaps described by the term "moving paintings.[1] Her work frequently emphasizes striking visual tableaux, often directly inspired by visual art, especially painting. Though dance is the primary basis of Ms. Clarke's training, she has maintained a career which spans and melds dance, theater, the visual arts, and opera. Probably her best-known original work is "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1984), an exploration in theatre, dance, music and flying of the famous painting of the same name by Hieronymus Bosch. In June 2007, a new version of the show opened the 30th anniversary of the American Dance Festival. On November 19, 2008, the re-imagined Garden of Earthly Delights opened Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theater in New York City; two extensions and five months later - it ran until April 5, 2009. A world tour will follow.
Ms. Clarke's latest production, "Angel Reapers" (with text by Alfred Uhry - Pulitzer Prize for "Driving Miss Daisy") will have it's New York premiere at the Joyce Theater November 29 - December 11, 2011.
This Spring, (2012) she will premiere a full-evening work at La Scala Opera in Milan, Italy.
In 1990, she received a MacArthur Award, popularly known as the "genius grant". In June 2010, Ms. Clarke received the 2010 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement. The award is considered the most important lifetime award for choreographers.
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Born into a family of musicians in suburban Baltimore, she studied dance with Carolyn Lynn [1] in the preparatory program of the Peabody Conservatory, then going on to study at the dance program of the Juilliard School under Antony Tudor and Anna Sokolow. She then spent three years performing with the modern dance choreographer Anna Sokolow and the Dance Theater Workshop. She later became a founding member of Pilobolus Dance Theatre and Crowsnest before going on to a highly original career as a director/choreographer.
Martha Clarke is renowned not only as a choreographer and avant garde creator of whole new theatre works, but also as a director of operas and plays in the classic repertoire, such as the stage works of Mozart and Shakespeare. But even when serving as director in productions of well-known classics, her approach is frequently unconventional and ambitious.
She has choreographed for the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Rambert Dance Company, and The Martha Graham Company, among others.
As a director, Ms. Clarke’s many original productions include The Garden of Earthly Delights (with musical score by Richard Peaslee), Stanley Kauffman wrote in The New Republic, "Garden transformed 'our whole notion of theater'. It epitomized everything that is unique and imitable about the theater".[2] Vienna: Lusthaus, Miracolo d’Amore, Endangered Species, An Uncertain Hour, The Hunger Artist, and Vers la Flamme. She directed the premiere of Christopher Hampton’s Alice’s Adventures Underground at the Royal National Theatre in London.
In opera, Ms. Clarke has directed Mozart's The Magic Flute for the Glimmerglass Opera and the Canadian Opera Company, Cosi fan tutte for Glimmerglass, Tan Dun’s Marco Polo for the Munich Biennale, the Hong-Kong Festival, and the New York City Opera, and Gluck’s Orfeo and Euridice for the English National Opera and the New York City Opera.
She directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the American Repertory Theater and a music/theater work, Belle Epoque, based on the life of Toulouse Lautrec at Lincoln Center Theater. She has collaborated with Richard Greenberg, Charles L. Mee, and Alfred Uhry, among many others.
While Ms. Clarke does not compose the musical scores or texts (when present) for her original works, her creative undertaking goes far beyond choreography to include and shape all aspects of production and direction, from conception and structure to details of music, text, lighting, and costumes. Britannica Online summarizes her wide-ranging choreographic approach in saying that her "emotionally evocative work draws extensively on theatrical elements." [2]
Of all the many disciplines beyond dance from which Clarke's work draws inspiration, perhaps the most prominent influence comes from the visual arts, especially painting. In this preoccupation, Clarke is part of a general sensibility that connects such disparate artists as Peter Sellars, Pina Bausch, and Robert Wilson. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote of her Miracolo d'Amore in 1988 that it "... can be counted among the recent opera productions, films and theatrical presentations that in one way or another emulate painting. Franco Zeffirelli, George Lucas, Pina Bausch, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars share with Ms. Clarke this striking characteristic: They view the performing arts as a pretext for staging visual spectaculars." [3]
In addition to the MacArthur Award, Ms. Clarke has received two grants from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as fifteen grants from the NEA. She has received the Drama Desk Award, two Obie Awards, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award. In 2009 Ms. Clarke won the SDC's Joe A. Callaway award for choreography of "Garden of Earthly Delights". The award honors excellence in direction and choreography in non-Broadway productions in New York. In June 2010, Ms. Clarke received the 2010 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement. The award is considered the most important lifetime award for choreographers.
She has been the subject of a film for PBS, Martha Clarke, Light and Dark, and her Garden of Earthly Delights has been filmed by the BBC.
Kaos, adapted from stories by Luigi Pirandello, received the first Tony Randall Foundation Award; and was presented at the New York Theater Workshop (2006).
In 2007, the NEA gave a grant for the remounting of The Garden of Earthly Delights under a program dedicated to the remounting of American masterworks.