In a fete of local, national and music history, the Majestic Theater will present a final centennial celebration performance on Feb. 3rd as “Martha Graham’s Dance Company: A Dual Centennial Event” orchestrates a singular moment in the Gettysburg arts scene.
A hundred years ago, fifteen hundred townspeople attended the opening of the newly built Majestic Theater — then a vaudeville and silent movie theater that would be frequented by Ike and Mamie Eisenhower in the 1950s — today a beautifully renovated historic landmark owned by Gettysburg College and endowed with a great deal of history bringing film, theater, music, and dance to the town.
In September, the Majestic Theater began its exciting centennial celebration with a screening of “little tramp” Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, “The Gold Rush,” accompanied by the authentic Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. Tony award-winner John Rubenstein (known for his title role in the Broadway musical, “Pippin”) portrayed Dwight Eisenhower in a one-man play — “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” (set at Eisenhower’s Pennsylvania farm) — the following month.
Exactly a century from the day the theater opened on Nov. 14, 1925, the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber Orchestra performed there with Celtic music superstar Natalie MacMaster. And on Tuesday evening, Majestic patrons can experience the wonder of a unique American art form performed by a world-class company that’s danced at the foot of the Great Pyramids.
The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform in Gettysburg as part of its GRAHAM100 season — an international tour celebrating its 2026 centennial that has already dazzled audiences in multiple cities in the U.S., as well as in London, Paris, and Athens.
Tuesday evening’s “Dual Centennial Event” at the Majestic Theater celebrates both milestones, and the Martha Graham Dance Company has commissioned a work entitled “We The People” to include AMERICA250 (the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) in the celebration.
Majestic Theater Executive Director Brett W. Messenger has said the “Dual Centennial Event” is “an uncommon opportunity for art lovers and history lovers alike.”
The Martha Graham Dance Company
Founder Martha Graham (1894-1991) is recognized across the globe for defining contemporary dance as an American art form. She started the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1926. In her own unique style, Graham developed a “contraction and release” technique that emphasizes core strength, in contrast to ballet’s light, ethereal movements.
Her first dancers were female; men did not join the company until 1938. Rejecting submissive female roles in ballet, Graham focused artistically on human struggles and psychological and mythological themes.
Based in New York City, she taught, choreographed and danced in collaboration with prolific famed multidisciplinary artists for over 70 years.
Eleanor Roosevelt invited Graham (who was born in Pennsylvania) to perform for President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937; Graham was the first dancer to perform at the White House.
Honored by President Gerald Ford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and President Ronald Reagan with a U.S. National Medal of Arts in 1985, Graham was named “Dancer of the Century” by TIME magazine seven years after her death. In the early 1980s, the Washington Post dubbed the Martha Graham Dance Company “one of the seven wonders of the artistic universe.”
Messenger said the company’s Artistic Director Janet Eilber (who will be present Tuesday evening) is a force in the dance world who was one of Graham’s star dancers and has shepherded Martha Graham’s legacy faithfully and masterfully kept the company current.
“Always commissioning new choreographers is as true to the spirit of Martha Graham as you can get,” he said.
Tuesday evening’s program
On Tuesday evening, the company will perform two of Graham’s most famous pieces alongside new and reimagined works.
Widely recognized as Graham’s most famous piece, “Appalachian Spring” (1944) is a story about a young frontier couple that celebrates American resilience and optimism. Set in a 19th-century Pennsylvania settlement, the ballet touches on themes from American Folk culture. Its score won composer Aron Coplan a Pulitzer prize; 20th-century sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed the set for its premiere at the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium.
Special guest John Rubenstein will return to Gettysburg to narrate “Appalachian Spring” after his performance in “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” at the Majestic in October.
Rubenstein will also perform “Simple Song” in public (and only in Gettysburg) for the first time since the first Kennedy Center Honors gala in 1978, when his father (pianist Arthur Rubenstein) was an honoree and John sang the hymn that Leonard Bernstein conducted.
Another famous piece, “Lamentation” (1930) premiered in NYC to music by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. Performed seated by a cloaked, genderless figure that is neither human nor animal, the dance has been likened to a moving sculpture that translates raw grief into physical language.
“We the People” (2024) — choreographed by Jamar Roberts to songs by Grammy award-winning and Pulitzer prize winner folk musician, Rhiannon Giddens — is a piece that protests social injustice and laments the failed promises of the American Ideal.
“Immediate Tragedy” (1937) was performed only once by Graham in reaction to the atrocities being committed in the Spanish Civil War. It was considered lost art until recently, when Eilber discovered photos of Graham’s solo performance in company archives. She reimagined “Immediate Tragedy” in 2020 to music performed by Grammy-nominated Richard Valitutto.
“En Mass” (2025), with music by Leonard Bernstein and Christopher Rountree, finishes a collaboration on a piece that Martha Graham and Leonard Bernstein started in 1988 and never finished. (Bernstein passed the year before Graham in 1990.) Created for the company’s 100th anniversary celebration and choreographed by Hope Boykin with additional music by Rountree, “En Mass” embodies Graham’s legacy of presenting new works by contemporary artists alongside her own.
An ensemble featuring students from Gettysburg College’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music led by Dr. César Leal will also appear Tuesday evening to perform “Suite for Dance from Mass” (a new arrangement of excerpts from Bernstein’s MASS composed by Rountree).
And Messenger said he is delighted that young students choreographed by local instructor Dawn Glass from Adams County’s The Edge Dance Complex will perform the reimagined Gettysburg Address portion of “American Document,” a 1937 dance Graham composed as a political response to rising fascism in Europe.
“It’s all about really the pinnacles of American arts and achievement,” he said. “In that way, whether you’re a dance lover or not, this is really a program that everyone should experience.”
Attendees from seven states from the West Coast to NYC have purchased tickets from the Majestic Theater Box Office. For tickets and more information, visit The Majestic Theater or The Martha Graham Dance Company.
“A Dual Centennial Event” at the Majestic Theater, planned to honor Majestic Theater’s Founding Executive Director Jeffrey Gabel’s legacy of presenting premiere dance artists in Gettysburg, is dedicated to beloved Gettysburg native and late impresario Karl Held (who passed unexpectedly this summer). There will be a moment of silence as the marque dims in his honor after the show.
The Feb. 3 evening has been made possible, in part, by the J. William Warehime Fund of the Majestic Theater Centennial Endowment, a special gift from the J. William Warehime Foundation, and the Lydia Ziegler Clare Fund.
Photo courtesy of Martha Graham Dance Company.
