By Guilherme Meletti Yazbek
The Greer Cabaret Theater was already in character before the performance began. Pop music drifted through the house, lavender and blue light bathed the audience, and the show’s title glowed on the projection screen in matching colors. The atmosphere was unmistakably that of a pop concert—which is precisely the point. The MetaMarthasis, conceived and performed by Jesse Factor, proposes an unlikely but irresistible triptych: Factor as Martha Graham as Madonna. Not two arbitrary figures, but perhaps the central figure of American modern dance and, without much dispute, the mother of pop music. What could these two worlds possibly share? Quite a lot, as it turns out. What we see, from the first moment, is Factor in drag as Graham: face powdered white, lips painted deep red, and most unmistakably, the long dark hair that became inseparable from her image, here worn loose as an icon rather than a faithful reproduction. What we hear is exclusively Madonna—classics including “Nothing Really Matters (opening act)”, “Open Your Heart”, “Vogue”, “Holiday”, and “Live to Tell”—woven together with archival audio of Graham’s own voice. The concept is simple and immediately legible: Graham’s image, Madonna’s music, Factor’s impersonation—and authorship.
Factor is not an outsider looking in. A former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company and Graham II, he teaches the technique at Point Park University’s Dance program. He knows this system from the inside—its philosophy, its pedagogy, its physicality, its mythology. That intimacy makes The MetaMarthasis more than drag performance or dance homage. It is deconstruction from within: someone who has inhabited Graham’s movement language using it to go somewhere Graham never went, and most probably never imagined.
The work operates through a logic that French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud would recognize immediately as postproduction aesthetics: Factor functions less as choreographer-creator than as DJ—though the distinction is less opposition than spectrum: the selection, juxtaposition, and timing of borrowed material is itself a form of authorship. The sonic dimension of this postproduction logic is handled by Andy Hasenpflug, whose sound editing and remix work weaves Graham’s spoken voice—excerpts from interviews and lectures—into the musical fabric of the evening, sometimes as a single pass, sometimes looped and layered until her words become rhythmic, almost choreographic material, lip-synced with precise theatrical timing by Factor. The tension with Graham’s own modernist project could not be more pointed. Graham was a demiurge: she invented a system, a pedagogy, a totalized aesthetic meant to express the innermost truths of human experience. Bourriaud’s postproduction sensibility says: everything already exists; the artist’s task is to mix. The MetaMarthasis stages that contradiction as spectacle—and the spectacle is fabulous.
The evening’s highest moments are many. Factor dancing in silhouette against an illuminated screen—body rendered pure shape, pure line—is quietly breathtaking, thanks in no small part to Scott Andrew’s media design, which alternates between geometric patterns and kaleidoscopic multiplications of Factor’s own face—lip-syncing, dancing, proliferating across the screen. Deconstruction here meets repetition: Factor is not merely channeling Graham and Madonna, but becoming the surface through which both figures endlessly recur. In an early section, Factor appears entirely covered in a purple voile before Claire Bryant and Brooke Thompson remove it to reveal a semi-nude look adorned with dazzling silver accessories—one of Tony Allgeier’s most striking designs of the evening. Later, a lycra section evokes Graham’s Lamentation (1930), her famous solo inside a tube of elastic fabric—and the purple of Lamentation reappears throughout the evening, a color so central to that work that its recurrence feels less like coincidence than quiet citation. The ballroom culture sequence is a particular delight: hands shaped into the cupped Graham hand—an icon of the technique—deployed in the vocabulary of voguing (“Strike a pose!”), as an all-female ensemble fills the stage in what feels like an homage to ballroom tradition. Watching the cupped Graham hand migrate into voguing felt less like quotation than like the two vocabularies always knew each other—the body recognizing something the history books kept separate. Elsewhere, a length of rope used as an extension of the body into space echoes Graham’s own use of a cord in Night Journey, her retelling of the Oedipus myth from Jocasta’s point of view, with the set designed by Isamu Noguchi. For those who recognize the references, The MetaMarthasis is a patchwork of exactly calibrated pleasures; for those who don’t, the spectacle sustains itself entirely on its own terms.
The evening’s one persistent weakness is structural. Multiple costume changes—and Factor’s looks are, without exception, extraordinary—require the curtain to close between sections. Robert Ramirez, director and host, fills the gaps and proves a genuinely charming presence, working the audience with trivia questions, name games, and, at one point, a voguing competition. The intermezzi are entertaining. But they accumulate over the course of the evening into a rhythm that occasionally feels overstayed. Factor does not have the production infrastructure of a pop arena tour, where costume changes happen in seconds behind the scenes; and that is fine. But the theatrical solution currently costs more in momentum than it gives back in anticipation.
The Greer Cabaret audience seemed to understand instinctively what kind of evening this was—and what it demanded of them. During the solos, particularly those danced against the glow of the projection screen, the house fell into a silence more typical of a modern dance concert than a cabaret night: the kind of silence that means something is happening. Then, just as quickly, a “yas, girl” from somewhere in the house, or collective whoops during the ballroom sequence, would restore the pop and queer registers of the evening. The intermezzi formalized that oscillation, but it was already alive in the room before Ramirez ever took the mic.
What Graham and Madonna share, placed side by side, is a particular kind of power: the expressivity of a body in the service of emotional truth, and Madonna’s decades-long alliance with queer audiences, who recognized in her something essential about surviving and transforming—an alliance that Graham’s own movement language, with its insistence on the body’s interior life, unexpectedly extends. Factor does not explain this convergence—he embodies it, with the authority of someone who has danced Graham’s repertoire, taught his technique, and loved Madonna long enough to know that the distance between them was never as great as it seemed.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Jesse Factor: The MetaMarthasis, presented by the Pittsburgh Dance Council and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust at the Greer Cabaret Theater, has performances September 10-12, 2026. Tickets available at: https://trustarts.org/production/105829/jesse-factor-the-metamarthasis
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose practice moves between criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
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