Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter

Apparently, there is another Martha who has helped define American dance. Martha Hill was the first director of dance at Juilliard (a school that has a dance ensemble good enough to get booked for the Edinburgh International Festival), and was part of the other Martha's company in the late 1920s and 1930s. 

At Julliard, between 1952 and 1985, when she retired, she had plenty of impressive students - check this list that I just ripped off from Wikipedia.

Paul Taylor, Muriel Topaz, Pina Bausch, Daniel Lewis, Lar Lubovitch, Dennis Nahat, Linda Kent, Bruce Marks, Mercedes Ellington, H.T. Chen, Martha Clarke, Susan Marshall, Jenny Coogan, Robert Garland, Mark Haim, Henning Rübsam.

Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter is a documentary that might bring Hill back into the limelight: she is pretty unknown outside of dance circles, but had a tremendous influence. And it is showing at the GFT this week...

Press release begins...

Martha Hill emerges as dance’s secret weapon, someone who fought against great odds to establish dance

as a legitimate artistic movement in America.

Through lively interviews with friends and intimates, plus rare footage of the spirited subject, the film explores Hills’s arduous path from her Bible Belt childhood in rural Ohio through the halls of NYU to her position of power and influence as Juilliard’s founding director of dance in the 1950s.

Peppered with anecdotal material delivered by dance notables who knew her, this revelatory story depicts her struggles and successes, including the battle royale that accompanied her move to the Lincoln Centre campus.
Director: Greg Vander Veer

USA 2014, 1h24m, N/C 12+