Biographies: Martha Clarke
MacArthur Award winner Martha Clarke has maintained a career which spans dance, theater and opera. Trained at Juilliard under Antony Tudor and Anna Sokolow, she was a founding member of Pilobolus Dance Theatre and Crowsnest and has choreographed for the Nederlans 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, 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 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/theaterwork, Belle Epoque, based on the life of Toulouse Lautrec at Lincoln Center Theater.
She has collaborated withRichard Greenberg, Charles L. Mee, and Alfred Uhry, among many others. In addition to the MacArthur Award, Ms. Clarke has received twogrants from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as fifteen grants from the NEA. She has received the Drama Desk Award, two Obie Awards, and the L.A. Critics Award.
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. NEA gave a grant for the remounting of her Garden of Earthly Delights under a program dedicated to the remounting of American masterworks. It recently opened the 30th anniversary of the American Dance Festival. Kaos, based on theworks of Luigi Pirandello, received the first Tony Randall Foundation Award; and was presented at the New York Theater Workshop last season.
JRD 2009 guest choreographer, Martha Clarke, is included in
Charles Isherwood's Top Ten of 2008 in the
December 21, 2008 issue of the New York Times Art and Leasure section