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<\/a>Ben Schultz and PeiJu Chien-Pott of the Martha Graham Dance Company in Mats Ek’s Axe<\/em>. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n The last week of Jacob\u2019s Pillow\u2019s 83rd<\/sup> anniversary season corresponded with the Martha Graham Dance Company\u2019s upcoming 90th year, and MGDC appeared in the Ted Shawn Theater that August week. Anniversaries are meant as celebrations. I\u2019m only sorry Ella Baff couldn\u2019t wait until her 20th<\/sup> year as the executive and artistic director of the Pillow before leaving it. Over 17 years, she built its heath and fame through her commitment to broadening support, making smart choices of dance artists to perform in its two theaters and outside stage, and scheduling activities and exhibitions that educated audiences. Here\u2019s a small example of her staff\u2019s dedication to bringing spectators to dance (the one that makes me giggle). Inside more than one toilet stall in a Jacob\u2019s Pillow\u2019s restroom, you could read, taped inside the door, little hints about how to look at dance. That\u2019s really not wasting a minute.<\/p>\n I celebrate all that Baff accomplished over those years and wish her well in her challenging and influential new position as Senior Program Officer for Arts and Cultural Heritage at\u00a0the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She has made all who came in contact with her\u2014that includes the audiences who applaud her curtain speeches at every performance\u2014feel as if she were a friend of theirs; and, through her, they have become friends of dance.<\/p>\n The Martha Graham Dance Company profited from Baff\u2019s vision. Axe<\/em>, the world premiere by Mats Ek that MGDC presented in the Ted Shawn Theater, was commissioned by the Jacob\u2019s Pillow Dance Festival (with generous support from Hellsten Hotels Stockholm).<\/p>\n The Graham company\u2019s artistic director, Janet Eilber, made a bold choice in acquiring this duet that began life as a film (you can see a trailer for it at https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=k33z-sksBS4<\/a>). Programmed with a superb performance of Graham\u2019s 1958 Embattled<\/em> Garden<\/em> and two lesser works (Nacho Duato\u2019s Depak Ine<\/em> and Antonis Fodianakis\u2019s Echo<\/em>), the revised Axe<\/em>, in contrast, looked\u2014I don\u2019t know quite how to say this\u2014real. That is, for most of it, nothing exaggerated or elevated or mythologized or extraneous happened onstage.<\/p>\n Ben Schultz in Mats Ek’s Axe. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n For Axe<\/em>, the undisguised rear of the stage is revealed as the rough wooden barn wall that it is. A stump with an axe in it sits at the center of the space, and there\u2019s a stack of wood near the back. A man dressed in pants and a sweater (Ben Schultz) enters the stage with an unhurried, everyday walk. He\u2019s got a job to do and attacks it with dogged precision. His intent is to split wood, and it\u2019s amazing to watch him do it. He stands a log on the stump and places himself at a certain distance from it\u2014 in profile to us and in a wide stride, his left foot forward. He raises the axe, aims, and brings it down, whap! The log splits in two. Then he picks up the halves and splits each again.<\/p>\n He does this over and over and over, and only once on the night I attended the performance, did he fail to complete a cut. Virtuosity redefined.<\/p>\n Eventually, there is music aside from the fall of the axe. Very sweet, moderately repetitive music\u2014the kind that promotes nostalgia. It has its own history. The Adagio in G minor <\/em>that the program attributes to 18th<\/sup>-century composer Tomaso Albinoni is actually by Albinoni\u2019s 20th<\/sup>-century biographer, Remo Giazotto and supposedly based on a small fragment of manuscript. Ek\u2019s dance is performed to a version of Giazotto\u2019s score by the venturesome Swedish group Fleshquartet (four string players, a percussionist, and some electronic meddling).<\/p>\n PeiJu Chien-Pott and Ben Schultz in Axe<\/em>. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n A woman (PeiJu Chien-Pott) enters with her back to us, taking little crabbed side steps. She wearing a workaday sprigged dress and small boots. Is it because he heard her coming that the man miscalculates that one blow of the axe? The stage by now is littered with split wood.<\/p>\n What\u2019s interesting is that, for a long time, the man doesn\u2019t appear to see this other human being no matter how close she comes. When he\u2019s at the stack, she sits on the stump; he returns and pauses; she gets up and he splits another log. She takes and cradles a log that he intends to cut and, traveling with little steps, carries it away. At this point, you may wonder who this woman is, even wondering if she could be the spirit of the wood he is cutting.<\/p>\n But something is boiling up between these two. Once, when she has temporarily left the space, he lies back over the stump and, stiff as a board, walks on air. Mysteriously, a stagehand dumps a load of split wood, and once, the man stumbles his way up the pile. All this wood, you think. Winter is coming, you think. Days, weeks, years of it. But when the two people shake, it\u2019s not from the cold. You realizethat they form a couple, long locked into a taciturn, withered relationship.<\/p>\n The woman does dance\u2014not just with those jerky little hops, but with big, despairing gestures of her whole body. The two connect, sometimes in odd ways. He handles one of her legs as if it were another piece of wood, twists her foot until she\u2019s lying on the floor. He lies down too, but both of them look as stiff as the logs themselves. In the end, he stands numbly while she loads his arms with firewood\u2014almost more than you think he can carry. He walks off the stage, and she follows, holding the axe.<\/p>\n The performers in the film are mature dancers: Ana Laguna and Yvan Auzely. Their tragedy, whatever it was, had grown with the years. But Chien-Pott and Schultz inhabited their roles with a simplicity and a stoicism that could break your heart.<\/p>\n Another cast at Jacob’s Pillow in Martha Graham’s Embattled Garden<\/em>. (L to R): Lorenzo Pagano, Marya Dashkina Maddux, and Lloyd Mayor. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n I wrote about the revival of Graham\u2019s Embattled Garden <\/em>last February, and it always interests me to see a dance that I\u2019ve thought about before. Each time, something has changed\u2014either in the performance of the piece or in my perception of it. At Jacob\u2019s Pillow, the cast\u2014all but one of whom I\u2019d seen before\u2014 was a strong one: Marya Dashkina Maddux (Eve), Abdiel Jacobsen (Adam), Carrie Ellmore Tallitsch (Lilith), and Lloyd Knight (The Stranger). The characters they play evoke the biblical Genesis, but also ancient Jewish folk tales and at least one text dating from between the 8th<\/sup> and 10th<\/sup> centuries C.E. To Adam and Eve and the Serpent, Graham added Lilith, said to be Adam\u2019s first wife, molded from the same clay as he was (I\u2019m not sure why God thought Adam needed a second wife and extracted that rib).<\/p>\n In the process of creating the work, with its vividly colored, sculptural set pieces by Isamu Noguchi and its stormy, Latin-inflected score by Carlos Surinach, Graham moved from the tale of a tempter with an apple and the expulsion from Eden to something resembling the 18th<\/sup>-century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dang\u00e9reuses <\/em>(and the four plays and six films based on it). True, Noguchi created a highly stylized \u201ctree,\u201d and one of the work\u2019s most striking images is The Stranger coiled around it and hanging upside down. However, although the other set piece could represents a reed-edged pool, it\u2019s more like a 1950s conversation pit. Adam and Eve are the innocents, and Lilith and the Stranger are the more experienced couple, interested in a bit of mate-swapping. When all four form a circle, bodies bent forward, arms spread like eagle wings, eyes darting at one another, you can almost imagine them agreeing to keep on with the game. Very watchfully.<\/p>\n Lloyd Mayor and Marya Dashkina Maddux as Adam and Eve in Embattled Garden<\/em>. Photo: Christopher Duggan<\/p><\/div>\n Jean Rosenthal\u2019s lighting, recreated by Beverly Emmons, adds to the heat of the encounters. In this vivid atmosphere, Graham manipulated erotic tension, jealousy, and desire. The Stranger nuzzles Eve; Adam kisses Lilith behind the red fan she holds up. Eve slaps Adam. Lilith soothes Eve. The two men fight. All may leap convulsively or plunge to the floor or slide their hands down someone else\u2019s body. When Lilith crosses the stage, kicking one leg high in front of her, her ribcage contracting at every step, pain and yearning seem to pull her in opposite directions. Both women swing their hips so forcefully that the action looks more like a threat than an invitation to dalliance. The level of intensity never flags; these people are on fire.<\/p>\n As in many of the dances that Graham made beginning in the late 1940s, no performer leaves the stage. Instead, for instance, Knight and Ellmore-Tallitsch recline under the \u201ctree\u201d and whisper together while Jacobsen and Dashkina Maddux dance. Any one of them may wait in a kind of suspended animation while others move.<\/p>\n Watching Embattled Garden<\/em> this time, I started wondering about Eve\u2019s hair. Graham designed the role on Yuriko (Kikuchi), who had a very long mane of straight black hair, and it became a symbol of I\u2019m not sure what. Eve is combing her hair dreamily when the curtain goes up. Adam strokes it and pulls her by it. In a complex action underneath the \u201ctree,\u201d Lilith bends Eve back over Knight\u2019s upraised knees (He\u2019s lying on his back) and with a red ribbon binds her hair into a ponytail. In the end, Adam stands on the rim of the pit with Eve sitting below him; slowly he strokes the long swatch of hair up along his body as the other two watch from a distance. The curtain falls. What on earth was Graham thinking? I\u2019d give a lot to know.<\/p>\n Embattled Garden <\/em>is not one of her masterpieces, but it\u2019s a vibrantly theatrical work, and these four dancers animate it to the hilt\u2014firing up its passions without over-luxuriating in its sexy arguments. Graham turned 65 a month after its premiere. Senior citizenhood be damned!<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>