{"id":2422,"date":"2014-03-25T15:48:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T19:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=2422"},"modified":"2014-03-26T16:53:46","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T20:53:46","slug":"the-many-faces-of-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2014\/03\/the-many-faces-of-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Faces of Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Martha Graham Dance Company celebrates <\/em>Appalachian Spring‘s 70th with a new work by Nacho Duato.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Martha<\/a>

Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring<\/em>. Foreground: Abdiel Jacobsen and Blakely White-McGuire. At back (L to R): Katherine Crockett. Charlotte Landreau, Xiaochuan Xie, Tamisha Guy, Ying Xin. Photo: Costas<\/p><\/div>\n

Martha Graham\u2019s Appalachian Spring<\/i> was first performed in October of 1944 in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress on a not very large stage intended for chamber music concerts. Its back and side walls with working doors would have made it awkward for the eight dancers to make many exits and entrances. Maybe that\u2019s why, once they have walked onto the stage, none of them leaves until the piece is ending.<\/p>\n

It seems all the more miraculous then that this incomparably beautiful dance\u2014celebrating its 70th<\/sup> birthday this year\u2014should tell of the open, untamed spaces that governed life in the long, green, sparsely settled valleys of Appalachia at the end of the 19th<\/sup> century. \u00a0Seeing Appalachian Spring <\/i>during the Martha Graham Dance Company\u2019s recent City Center season, I\u2019m reminded yet again of certain sentences that Edwin Denby wrote after he saw the piece in 1944: \u201cThe separateness of the still figures from one another, which their poses emphasize, suggests that people who live in these hills are accustomed to spending much of their time alone. Their outlines don’t blend like those of townsmen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Denby was referring to the fact that when one of the characters performs a solo or two embark on a duet, the others remain motionless in specific places onstage. The Pioneering Woman may sit in her rocking chair, the Bride on the porch steps of her new home; the Husbandman surveys his land across a split-rail fence; the Preacher stands on a little slanted wooden platform that no one else uses; and his four female Followers sit demurely along a bench. Removed from the action, they \u00a0wait, frozen in time, staring into space, when one of them expresses feelings\u2014apprehensive or optimistic or tormenting\u2014best kept private. After which outbursts, the wedding celebration that has brought them together resumes.<\/p>\n

The dancers often seem to stare into the distance, and both the setting and the music emphasize great space. Isamu Noguchi\u2019s small house wall and slender beams make survival in the wilderness seem a fragile endeavor. Aaron Copland\u2019s magnificent music abounds in open intervals; you can almost hear the wind blow through it. To convey on a little concert stage human beings\u2019 sense of their own smallness and isolation in a surrounding wilderness, you have to be a genius.<\/p>\n

\"Another<\/a>

Another cast in Graham’s Appalachian Spring<\/em>: Lloyd Mayor and Mariya Dashkina Maddux as the Husbandman and the Bride. Photo: Costas<\/p><\/div>\n

At City Center, Appalachian Spring <\/i>opened a program that announced a theme: the spring that should be coming any day now. The other two works shown took a darker view of seasonal renewal: Nacho Duato\u2019s new Depak Ine, <\/i>created for the Graham company, and Graham\u2019s 1984 Rite of Spring. <\/i><\/p>\n

I know Appalachian Spring <\/i>too well and love it too much not to want to believe every moment of it. I wince when small, telling details or meaningful movements appear to have eroded. For instance, Graham, as seen in Nathan Kroll\u2019s 1958 film, skips fleetingly (perhaps in memory of the girlhood that she is leaving, perhaps in joy), while all the others, their backs to us, kneel in prayer, hands folded. She turns and moves toward them as if to join in, but once close to them she stops and quietly and decisively (with a great actor\u2019s perfect timing) clasps her hands behind her. No, she, Martha, will not be praying like that. I miss that clear statement in Blakely White-McGuire\u2019s performance. She is, however, a warm and lively Bride\u2014believable in her joy and her playfulness, but aware of the responsibilities that she must assume. She swishes her pink taffeta skirt as if she were sweeping away any too-dark thoughts that might cloud this day.<\/p>\n

Lloyd Knight, a dancer I admire, plays the itinerant Preacher with a good sense of both the character\u2019s righteousness and his torment over the sins that he shares with his small flock. But sometimes he pushes these so hard that they blur or distort the movement. The brief passage when the dignified Preacher scuttles crabwise forward on his hands and feet, chest to the sky has become a clumsy token of itself. His bow to his girl followers is so deep that it loses the additional significance of \u201cyou will please sit now\u201d and the carefully time wit of the leader\u2019s last nod to the follower who hesitates.<\/p>\n

Abdiel Jacobsen imbues the Husbandman with warmth and strength, especially when dancing with his wife-to-be, although he often adopts a puffed-up stance, with his gaze slightly above the horizon line. I think that he, an excellent dancer, means to convey strength and masculinity, but that choice works against his character as a good, simple, happy man with a woman to marry and land to till.<\/p>\n

Katherine Crockett\u2019s Pioneering Woman is gentle, open, and refreshingly without affectation. This time, I found her a little under energy, which is surprising. When she has a turn meeting each of the four followers in a circle, they don\u2019t show us the lusty elbow swings that match the big swing of Copland\u2019s music at that point, but barely take hold, as if they\u2019re all too delicate for such carrying on. Knight and the women, in a similar festive circle, make their folk-dancey hand-claps in passing look more like high-fives. Graham\u2019s choreography for those four women is a marvel of wit. Tamisha Guy, Charlotte Landreau, Xiochuan Xie, and Ying Xin show us with conviction their angelic solidarity, their bounding energy, and their slightly sacrilegious devotion to their Preacher.<\/p>\n

\"(L<\/a>

(L to R): Lloyd Knight, Blakely White-McGuire, Natasha Diamond-Walker, Lorenzo Pagano, Ying Xin in Nacho Duato’s Depak Ine. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu.<\/p><\/div>\n

For members of the MGDC, keeping Graham\u2019s masterworks fresh is an ongoing challenge, but they rise with gusto to new dance that dare them in other ways. When the cast of Depak Ine<\/i> managed to get Nacho Duato onstage for a bow after the curtain came down on the work he made for them, they applauded him almost as enthusiastically as the audience applauded them.<\/p>\n

Depak Ine<\/i>, choreographed for the Graham company <\/i>by Nacho Duato, <\/i>is one of two premieres this season (I was unable to see Andonis Fondianakis\u2019s Echo<\/i>). Depak Ine <\/i>is named after a cut on John Talabot\u2019s album Fin. <\/i>I have no idea what the two words mean (Talabot is a Spanish dj, producer, and composer-musician). The other piece of music that accompanies the dance is Athos-Montana Sacra<\/i> by Serbian composer Arsenije Jvanovic. The dance too is as mysterious and as haunted as the music. Perhaps to get us thinking along evolutionary lines, the company\u2019s artistic director, Janet Eilber, mentioned in her introductory speech that Duato had been reading the work of Charles Darwin.<\/p>\n

As Depak Ine<\/i> begins in dim light (by Bradley Fields), a woman is lying prone in a downstage corner; slim and pale in a flesh-colored leotard, she could be very young. She looks discarded, dead. A man (Knight) scrabbles rapidly along on his back in her direction. When he stands, Natasha Diamond-Walker rushes, drops to the floor, reaches between his legs, and grabs his crotch. A distant knocking sound is heard and what could be a humming voice. By some extraordinary maneuvering Diamond-Walker and Knight tangle together until they look like a large ball with two cheek-to-cheek faces staring out of it toward the unmoving woman beside them.<\/p>\n

\"(L<\/a>

(L to R): Lloyd Knight, Lorenzo Pagano, and Ying Xin in Depak Ine<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

When people of this tribe or species appear, they do so out of blackness at the rear of the stage, and they leave as if sucked back there. Lorenzo Pagano appears in that way to hover over the initial pair. Jacobsen materializes commandingly; he\u2019s wearing a loose black robe of some kind that makes him appear priestly (costumes by Angelina Atlagic). White-McGuire and Xin also drift from the dark. As the music swells and deeper voices well up within it, the performers break from a brief cluster and begin to couple and combine in fascinating, repellent, extremely unusual ways. You see elbows and knees as crooks in which elbows and knees and necks belonging to others get caught. Often someone\u2019s neck is trapped by someone else\u2019s flexed ankle. Pagano, reptilian, humps his way across the stage on his belly. When he thrashes, Jacobsen grabs his head (to calm him?), and White-McGuire wraps herself around one of his legs. Xin pulls a hank of her long black hair across her face. People get dragged, lifted.\u00a0 The dancers appear both angular and boneless (how is this possible?). Legs are spread, crotches displayed.<\/p>\n

\"(L<\/a>

(L to R): Ben Schultz, Tadej Brdnik, and Lloyd Mayor hoist PeiJu Chien-Pott. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

What have we been expecting to come of this?\u00a0 Me, not exactly what ensues. After some of the creatures peer one last time at the prone figure and disappear, she begins to twitch and kick and undulate. She wraps her legs around themselves in strange, hobbled ways. Now we can see her face; it is PeiJu Chien-Pott. \u00a0The music changes; bird song is heard; a martial beat thuds up underneath. Three men stroll in\u2014just serious ordinary-looking men; they could be traffic cops arriving on the job. These men (Tadej Brdnik, Lloyd Mayor, and Ben Schultz) lift and twist and drag the woman-creature (all in a day\u2019s work).\u00a0 In one startling image, all three hoist her huddled form by one of her slim arms. She\u2019s awkward then not. She lashes them with her hair and becomes beastly. When the men drop into a pile, she climbs onto them and stares at the sky.. What is happening?\u00a0 After what seems like a very long time of gibbering dementedly with her body (Chien-Pott is terrifying), this creature makes her way back to her spot and lies down in her original position. The birds\u2019 chirping starts up again. Jacobsen, near her, puts a gray cloth over his face and staggers backward into darkness.<\/p>\n

\"PeiJu<\/a>

PeiJu Chien-Pott and her three captors in Depak Ine<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n

Did spring just come? I don\u2019t think so. Darwinian evolution?\u00a0 Not so much. Chien-Pott might have been resurrected to take on all the evil in the community. If so, you want to wish its citizens good luck. Poor saps. That is, poor saps, but extraordinary dancers. With immense skill and ferocious concentration, they hurl themselves into the punishing, eye-catching contortions and relationships that Duato has devised. I\u2019m guessing Martha would have been amazed, appalled, and very proud of them.<\/p>\n

The program ended with Graham\u2019s Rite of Spring<\/i>, set to the magisterial and controversial 1913 score by Igor Stravinsky. Graham was 90 when she choreographed it. The cast I saw at City Center was the same one I wrote about when the company performed at Jacob\u2019s Pillow last summer: (https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2013\/08\/another-rite\/<\/a>). Watching Xie convey terror, exhaustion, resignation, and despair most eloquently, I thought again how interesting it was that Graham did not have the maiden dance<\/i> herself to death, as Nijinsky\u2019s victim-heroine did in 1913 and Massine\u2019s did in 1921. Graham herself appeared in the role when Massine revived his version in New York in 1930, and those who took part in it remember the many, many jumps she did in a row (\u201clike knives,\u201d Bessie Sch\u00f6nberg said). Graham taking to the air was unusual at that point. But in her Rite<\/i>, the woman to be sacrificed doesn\u2019t die dancing; she\u2019s just a poor frightened thing. That\u2019s something to ponder.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Martha Graham Dance Company celebrates Appalachian Spring‘s 70th with a new work by Nacho Duato. Martha Graham\u2019s Appalachian Spring was first performed in October of 1944 in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress on a not very large stage intended for chamber music concerts. Its back and side walls with working doors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[275,109],"tags":[451,1112,1114,652,659,1111,915,922,1113,918],"class_list":{"0":"post-2422","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-classic-modern-dance","7":"category-contemporary-dance","8":"tag-aaron-copland","9":"tag-abdiel-jacobsen","10":"tag-appalachian-spring","11":"tag-blakely-white-mcguire","12":"tag-katherine-crockett","13":"tag-lloyd-knight","14":"tag-martha-graham-dance-company","15":"tag-nacho-duato","16":"tag-peiju-chien-pott","17":"tag-xiaochuan-xie","18":"entry","19":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}