As a young dancer who had just left the Denishawn Company in the early 1920's to strike out on her own, Martha Graham was once returning to her home in California after a trip to the East.

Stopping over in Chicago, she went to view a private art collection and saw, for the first time, a painting by Vassily Kandinsky (pictured above).

In its most abstract form - she recalled in telling the story at the American Dance Festival in 1981 - it struck her as a brilliant streak of red against a field of blue.

Looking at the canvas, she said to herself, “I will dance like that.'’ 

Over the course of half a century, Isamu Noguchi and Martha Graham closely collaborated on numerous set designs for her groundbreaking modern dances. They held each other in the highest regard—Isamu  once said, "I felt that I was an extension of Martha and that she was an extension of me," while Graham described sharing "an unspoken language" with the sculptor.

Graham's Cave of the Heart premiered in 1946 and retells the ancient Greek myth of Medea, a sorceress who is consumed by jealousy. The dance is a psychological study of the destructive powers of love, the dark passions that guard  the human heart, coiled like a serpent ready to strike when attacked.

The unequivocal star of the stage is Medea, the role originally played by Graham for whom Noguchi created Spider Dress that sits on his Serpent.

Artist Rauschenberg long time relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage began in 1954, and throughout the next decade, they contributed to over twenty performances, providing lighting, set, costume designs and music.

Heeding Cunningham’s unusual approach to collaboration, Rauschenberg often worked independently with little guidance. Cunningham believed that no medium should be subordinate—preferring music and decor to function as independent elements as opposed to complementing the choreography.

Frequently dance, music, and decor came together only at the time of final rehearsals. Rauschenberg recalled, “It was the most excruciating collaboration, but it was the most exciting, and most real, because nobody knew what anybody else was doing until it was too late.”

Degrau a Grau, meaning Step to Degree, is an experimental film from Portugal, that explores the sense of vision.

The audience enters the film, being submitted to games of shapes and perspectives. Spaces that simultaneously create a connection and a separation, a continuity and an interruption, the bridge between worlds. Real places that are transformed into parallel worlds, devoid of a narrative but filled with utopia, spontaneity and liberation.