{"id":616,"date":"2012-03-22T14:51:41","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T18:51:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=616"},"modified":"2012-03-26T22:27:54","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T02:27:54","slug":"re-entering-marthas-inner-landscapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/03\/re-entering-marthas-inner-landscapes\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-entering Martha’s Inner Landscapes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lloyd Knight and Xiaochuan Xie in Martha Graham's Every Soul Is a Circus<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The program that the Martha Graham Dance Company presented on the opening night of its Joyce Theater season (March 13 through 18) concluded with a gripping performance of Graham\u2019s 1947 masterwork Night Journey. <\/em>The audience clapped and cheered and rose to its feet. In my heart, I muttered, \u201cThat\u2019ll show them.\u201d\u00a0 Show whom what?\u00a0 Show the world? Show the directors of the company that audiences can take their Graham neat, that they don\u2019t need explanations and works by others that riff off Graham\u2019s themes?<\/p>\n

But is that last true? There are realities faced by the company\u2019s executive director, LaRue Allen, and its artistic director, Janet Eilber, that I don\u2019t pretend to understand and financial issues I\u2019m not privy to. God knows the survival of a company after the death of its founder and only choreographer grapples with problems of integrity, preservation, and innovation; marketing takes expert log-rolling.<\/p>\n

The Joyce season\u2014like the one last year\u2014 had a theme. This time it was \u201cInner Landscape.\u201d To set up that image, the programs opened with a short film, Beautiful Captives<\/em>, created by former Graham company member Peter Sparling. Black-and-white film clips of Graham dancing some of her beleaguered heroines swirl within a collage of images from various noir<\/em> films and thrillers, while raging music plays and the voices of movie shrinks counsel Bette Davis or Olivia De Havilland. In one effective moment Orson Welles, trapped in The Third Man<\/em>, stares in extreme close-up down to where tiny, distant Graham contracts and shudders in Deaths and Entrances.<\/em> The links are sometimes facile: Graham and Erick Hawkins grappling\u2014also in Deaths and Entrances\u2014<\/em>and Joseph Cotton trying to throw Teresa Wright from a moving train in Hitchcock\u2019s Shadow of a Doubt <\/em>have little in common but their 1943 date.<\/p>\n

Many of Graham\u2019s great dances of the 1940s, and some later ones, merit the heading \u201cInner Landscapes,\u201d powered as they were by Graham\u2019s interest in myth and Jungian psychology. Night Journey<\/em> (1947) and the somewhat abridged Deaths and Entrances <\/em>\u00a0(1943) were the two chosen for the Joyce season (appearing on separate programs). You can also interpret her powerful 1930 solo Lamentation<\/em> as revealing her inner landscape. And, stretching a bit, her 1939 comedy Every Soul is a Circus.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Blakeley White McGuire in Every Soul Is a Circus<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Graham took the title for Circus<\/em> from Vachel Lindsay\u2019s 1928 poem of that name, finding inspiration in the lines \u201cEvery Soul is a circus,\/ Every mind is a tent,\/ Every heart is a sawdust ring\/ Where the circling race is spent.\u201d In this charming, frolic-with-an-edge, Graham cast herself as Empress of the Arena\u2014one part a dithering choreographer like the one she later portrayed in Acrobats of God<\/em>, one part a woman enjoying the attentions of two men. \u00a0In 1939, she had just acquired a second male dancer, Merce Cunningham, whom she cast as a prancing acrobat in charge of a string of frisky pony-girls listed as Arenic Performers. Erick Hawkins strutted around, cracking his whip as the Ringmaster (perhaps a composite of himself as Graham\u2019s lover and Louis Horst, her longtime partner and musical director, who masterminded her into modernism). An alter ego, billed as the Ideal Spectator (played on opening night by Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch), watches the proceedings \u2014changing hats, or putting veils over her head in inscrutable responses to the goings-on.<\/p>\n

The cast I saw featured Blakeley White-McGuire as the Empress, Tadej Brdnik as the Ringmaster, Lloyd Knight as the Acrobat, and Xiaochuan Xie as the favored Arenic Performer. In a 1970 revival, when Patricia Birch appeared as a guest artist in Graham\u2019s role, I didn\u2019t notice how clever Graham\u2019s jokes were. The piece makes hay with elaborate build-ups to stunts that seem anticlimactic. Either that, or they fizzle without comment. Red drapes of various sizes conceal props as they\u2019re brought in and also function to veil and unveil acts. White-McGuire stands on one leg with the other stuck out to the side. Brdnik holds up a curtain to conceal her from view, then whips it aside. Whaddayaknow! She\u2019s still standing with her leg in the air. One of her solo turns (in an array of fetching costumes) involves figuring out how to dance with a red ribbon tied to one ankle \u2014pulling on the ends to make her leg go places (I am my own puppeteer).<\/p>\n

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Blakeley White-McGuire as Empress of the Arena, (background) Carrie Elmore-Tallitsch as the Ideal Spectator.<\/p><\/div>\n

Brdnik, hair slicked down, is appropriately self-satisfied as he swishes his phallic whip around and pulls White-McGuire into a sort of tango that also entails playing pattycake (the music is by Paul Nordhoff). Knight is a nifty jumper. The heroine finds him interesting. When he kneels, she pushes repeatedly on his chest; he leans obediently back, but bounces right up again like those inflatables you can punch over and over. Still, it\u2019s the Ringmaster whose goading she needs. In the end, she\u2019s alone\u2014back on the couch where she began, enthroned but beset by doubts. Graham was a matchless comedian; her timing, the subtle way she changed her gaze or made a small adjustment in her position told much, without exaggeration or clich\u00e9s. Blakely-White McGuire is marvelous at capturing those doubts and the flippancy; her body is alive with them (although she uses a few too many facial expressions for my taste).<\/p>\n

Under Janet Eilber\u2019s direction, the Martha Graham Dance Company has commissioned several choreographers to create short variations on Graham\u2019s 1930 solo Lamentation. <\/em>A 1941 film of Graham performing moments from the dance for a camera serves an introduction. There are seven variations to date (regrettably, I missed Yvonne Rainer\u2019s, a premiere). It\u2019s an interesting exercise. Richard Move\u2019s solo for Katherine Crockett has her slowly crossing the stage on a path of light, as if on the edge of an emotional precipice. She\u2019s not wrapped in a tube of fabric like Graham, but grief presses on her.<\/p>\n

Graham sat on a bench almost throughout Lamentation<\/em>. The two women in Aszure Barton\u2019s duet sit separately\u2014side by side, but not close to each other. They club a lifted foot or cup a hand the way Graham did, looking at each other only once, as I remember. Barton\u2019s choreography is spare\u2014enigmatic but moving. Orihara, as always, performs eloquently and without artifice, while the emotions of her partner, Mariya Daskina Maddux, seem more feigned. In the end, Orihara has moved to the back of the stage and is facing a new distance.<\/p>\n

Lar Lubovitch\u2019s expressive new variation employs two soloists and a chorus. On a bench at the back, Samuel Pott helps Xie mold herself into mournful images, yet himself becomes enmeshed in these sculptures of despair. Lying the floor in front of them, ten other company members, partially covered by abbreviated versions of the stretch-jersey tube Graham wore, push and twist against the fabric that shrouds them\u2014always in unison, a lake of grief.<\/p>\n

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PeiJu Chien-Pott in Mary Wigman's Witch Dance<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Another recent project of the company\u2019s has been to stage works by choreographers once associated with Graham as dancers (an excerpt from Anna Sokolow\u2019s Lyric Suite<\/em> appeared on the program I didn\u2019t see). This idea has been expanded to include Mary Wigman\u2019s 1926 Witch Dance<\/em>\u2014perhaps to show that another modern dance pioneer was getting in touch with her inner demons the same year that Graham was making her choreographic debut in New York with\u00a0 more genteel dances. The first part of the great German\u2019s hair-raising solo was preserved on film, but, other than that, written descriptions, and some photos, the dance has vanished. Scholar Mary Anne Santos Newhall is one of several who have attempted to reconstruct and flesh it out. The masked, seated figure with its clawing hands and greedy gaze certainly comes alive onstage; the brocade smock conceals a monster. I question one or two of Newhall\u2019s decisions\u2014not from a point of view of certain knowledge, more from a sense of what Wigman might or might not have done. The sound score by Jack Manno seems loud and harsh, and on opening night, Chien-Pott, powerful though she is, missed some of the rhythmic coordinations visible in the archival film.<\/p>\n

At the premiere of Night Journey<\/em> in 1947, Graham, as Jocasta, danced with her considerably younger lover, Hawkins, as Oedipus. The stupendous piece hinges, though, not only on Oedipal lust, but on the fragility of memory and fateful decisions. As the dance begins, the heroine is about to commit suicide when the seer Tiresias interrupts the act\u2014urging her to look back on the events that led her to wed a man who (unbeknownst to her or him) was her son. Throughout Oedipus\u2019s aggressive wooing (he conquered the kingdom, he gets the queen), you see her having warning flashbacks she can\u2019t quite understand. Graham\u2019s choreography brilliantly shifts the images in their duet so that she seems now bride, now conquest, now mother. The processes of memory are doubled; in recollecting her past, Jocasta rediscovers the moments when she might have guessed Oedipus\u2019s identity. Finally she tightens the rope around her neck and falls.<\/p>\n

The opening-night performances were, at times, electrifying. Crockett\u2014tall, lean, and gorgeous\u2014doesn\u2019t have the whip-lash fervor of a smaller, sturdier woman like Graham, but she imbued Jocasta with passion and nuanced misgivings. Brdnik wonderfully conveyed the combined innocence and insolence of a boy conqueror. Their coupling was heated (if rather too messy in terms of Graham style). Pott, hunched over his staff, seemed to be playing Tiresias as infirm, rather than simply blind, which took attention off his role as a messenger and made you wonder about his<\/em>inner life. The chorus of women, led by White-McGuire, jumped like eagles and contracted their rib cages until you feared for them.<\/p>\n

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Miki Orihara in Graham's Satyric Festival Song<\/em>. Photo: John Deane<\/p><\/div>\n

Two events need mentioning\u2014one a cause for celebration, the other for mourning. I regret that I was unable to see Orihara\u2019s Jocasta on March 18th. That night, the company honored her 25-year career as a Graham dancer. Chosen by Graham in 1987, she\u2019s the only current performer to have worked with company prior to the choreographer\u2019s death in 1991. I wonder if Graham saw in her the flame-like power she eventually brought to Graham\u2019s roles in Appalachian Spring<\/em>, Deaths and Entrances<\/em>, Cave of the Heart<\/em>, and others in the repertory. Occasionally dancers performing Graham works assume a kind of mannered grandeur; Orihara never does. Like Graham in her glory days, she probes the interior life of the characters she plays, intent on the reality of each instant as it occurs.<\/p>\n

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Ethel Winter as Joan of Arc in Graham's Seraphic Dialogue<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Years earlier, Ethel Winter, who died on March 10th at 87, also inherited Graham\u2019s roles in such works as Appalachian Spring<\/em> and Night Journey<\/em>.\u00a0 She joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1944 and was only 21 when she appeared as one of the young lovers in Graham\u2019s enigmatic Jungian Dark Meadow<\/em> (1946). At the premiere of Night Journey <\/em>the following year, she raged among the Daughters of the Night. Winter was \u00a0luminous as the Bride in Appalachian Spring<\/em>, the Girl in Red in Diversion of Angels<\/em>, and the central Joan of Arc in Seraphic Dialogue<\/em>, but she also had the depth and versatility to portray a flirtatious Cleopatra to Paul Taylor\u2019s Antony in One More Gaudy Night <\/em>in 1961 and a very naughty, scheming Aphrodite in Phaedra <\/em>the following year. <\/em>Students at the Graham school, where Winter taught on and off until 2006, and at the Juilliard School, whose faculty she graced between 1953 and 2003, knew her for both her sweetness and her strength. Hail, Ethel, and farewell.<\/p>\n

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The program that the Martha Graham Dance Company presented on the opening night of its Joyce Theater season (March 13 through 18) concluded with a gripping performance of Graham\u2019s 1947 masterwork Night Journey. The audience clapped and cheered and rose to its feet. In my heart, I muttered, \u201cThat\u2019ll show them.\u201d\u00a0 Show whom what?\u00a0 Show […]<\/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],"tags":[283,282,284],"class_list":{"0":"post-616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-classic-modern-dance","7":"tag-janet-eilber","8":"tag-martha-graham","9":"tag-richard-move","10":"entry","11":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","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=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}