Martha contra mundum

In the 1954 movie White Christmas, an Irving Berlin no-people-like-show-people musical that should be a cult classic but is more often labeled kitsch (it’s that Santa Claus finale complete with pre-teens in tutus doing bourrées under the tree), there’s a send-up of Martha Graham that is one of the best send-ups in dance history. The number, choreographed by the Broadway eminence Robert Alton, is called “Choreography,” and it’s sung by Danny Kaye, hilarious in geeky-beatnik garb: black turtleneck, black floods, black beret—eyeliner!—he’s Cecil Beaton doing Sartre. Kaye doesn’t perform alone. He’s surrounded, swarmed, by a corps of barefoot girls in sackcloth shifts, their ponytails swinging like tribal rites. While he warbles, “Chicks/ Who did kicks/ Aren’t kicking anymore, they’re doin’ choreography,” the girls create tight little fire escapes around him, all knees and elbows, feet flexed and faces fraught. They move to a machine-age theme that’s as angular and percussive as they are, stampeding Kaye who’s doing his absurd, angular best to blend in yet looks like the silly grasshopper amid socialist-realist ants. Never mind that Graham didn’t call herself a choreographer, “a big, wonderful word,” she said in 1989, “that can cover up a lot of sins. I work. That’s what I call what I do when I make dances.” Alton’s point exactly: in Graham the serious stuff, sin for instance, was uncovered, up front.

Martha Graham always called herself “a dancer” because it was dancing that called her.

Graham always called herself “a dancer” because it was dancing that called her. In the notebooks of her twenties she wrote, “That driving force of God that plunges through me is what I live for.” Nevertheless, no dances, no plunges. Graham could not perform or teach what she had learned as a student, then company member, of Denishawn unless she paid a $500 fee to the Denishawn school. This forced her, beginning in 1926, to develop her own vocabulary of movement, her own syllabus, her own dances. Her breakthrough, Heretic, was premiered in 1929. A study of the one (Graham) set against the many (her company of young woman), it is as starkly structured as a crude village square, wood beams and whipping post in the wind. Graham had been looking at the abstract paintings of Kandinsky, Picasso, and in class had focused on breathing as the basis for a new technique—inhale, yes, but more profoundly, exhale. It all locked in with Heretic: the rough Breton song, so like the stubby piano scores of the era’s silent movies; the expressionist texture of Graham’s punched poses, a lividity between gesture and sculpture; the simple cloth costumes sheathing intense abdominal power; the geometries drenched in aggression. Speaking of its angles and geometries, and seconding Danny Kaye (or rather, Robert Alton), Agnes de Mille later wrote, “In this one aspect it resembled the mechanical dances in vogue at the time… . In Heretic, Martha was dealing with machinelike tradition—juiceless, mindless bureaucracy and formula.” In other words, the story of her life. Heretic stands as a choreographic miniature of Graham, portraying the outsider status from which she drew strength, and offering the first glimpses of a choreographic language that would speak of things unspoken because undanced.It was a language of implosion. Look again at that line from Graham’s notebooks, her choice of the words “driving,” “plunges,” so immediate, so active. Shudder, flush, grip, stab, spasm, drop, throb, knock, flutter, tremble, trill—these are verbs commonly used to describe the blood rushes of extreme emotion, both joy and pain, that flood and flare us all. These are the verbs of Graham dance, what the Graham technique embodied. It was about viscera, things that go bump in the heart and gut, and in at least two of her masterpieces—Cave of the Heart and Night Journey—dancers eat up or pull out their own entrails. All Graham dance is pulled from exhale, or as she once said, “from the pit of the stomach.”

“Martha wanted to know how the body responded when the breath was exhaled,” writes Graham dancer Gertrude Shurr in Martha Graham, The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training 1926–1991.

What happened to the bones? What happened to the muscles, and what was the quality of movement as a result? … When the breath is out of the torso, the back muscles stretch and the front muscles shorten… . The deep dramatic quality came on the exhalation of the breath or the contraction; the lyric and open quality on the inhalation of the breath or the release.

Contraction—the birth throe of Graham technique.

Where so much dance, ballet in particular, seemed to revel in release, the filling of the body with air—up, up, and away—Graham went in on herself, into the caves, chasms, labyrinths of the psyche. Hence her attraction to the steep interiors of epic women—Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Joan of Arc—to the fantastic fates and archetypal egos of Greek myth, stories of scale with terrific psychic plunges. Graham’s was an unabashedly female theater, face bare to the fierce, mercurial weather in the ribs (and lower) of women. Who else was doing as much in those years? Frida Kahlo, perhaps, who painted herself as the black-eyed center of a lush imaginative flora tinged with sexual hysteria. Virginia Woolf, who pooh-poohed the big masculine themes for bird’s-eye minutia, the sensory waves in woman’s brain and breast. Graham combined the two, the mystic and the intellect, and did so with an expressive might that could stare down male contemporaries of similar compositional values: Picasso, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi. “Carve a place for yourself in space,” she told her dancers. “Project through space as if space were opaque.” Space was mass, equal to emotion.

In the dances you see Graham carving out her language step by step. Her bold use of the flexed foot, that heel jutting like a hoe or a knotty vegetable the hoe digs up, has the concrete weight of an ancient bas relief, the rude life of a foot in Van Gogh. The catch-step walk, ponderously slow (a portrait window for that flexed foot), the sound of it suggests the approach of a wounded animal, or a monster, or someone dragging something—and you do feel this in Graham, the dance invoking a monster truth, dragging it out of hiding, or history. The Graham backfall, unlike anything on any other stage, sends the dancer backward to earth in a blind wind-sheer horizontal from knee to neck, down in one sharp count or in dream-time feather-slow motion. “All falls are into the body,” Graham said, “into yourself.” And the Graham hand, fingers tight together as in prayer, but angled down at the knuckles, the thumb braced under the index finger to form a shallow pyramid. “It’s like a contraction of the hand,” notes the writer Elizabeth Kendall, a cupped position that has the effect of a mute on a trumpet, quieting the image and simultaneously quoting it. That hand was never better used than in the four girls, The Followers, of yet another Graham masterpiece, Appalachian Spring, where like tuning forks the girls’ hands quiver with love for the sexy Revivalist.

How good to see Appalachian Spring at New York’s City Center this last April, when the Martha Graham Dance Company returned for its spring season. No education in American performing arts of the twentieth century, or American popular culture for that matter, is complete without it. Premiered in 1944, this collaboration with the composer Aaron Copland and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (set design) is a luminous convergence of time, space, and Graham’s virgin eye for American archetypes. You can see its influence on another American masterpiece, Charles Laughton’s 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, with its open horizon line, A-frames like matchstick cathedrals, and a bedroom scene which is itself a Graham dance of killing stillness and dark possession. Appalachian Spring is the positive from with Laughton drew a negative (he did his film in black and white). Shot with all kinds of light—young, old, fiery, serene—Graham’s dance is bridal, a hymn to possession, the having and holding of a spouse, a land, a life.

The collaboration between Graham and Copland was done by mail, and perhaps this too has something to do with the work’s sensation of vast air. Early on, Graham planned the dance as an episode from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then as a dream of Pocahontas, a remembrance of the tribe’s stolen land. Copland tempered these complicated scenarios, suggesting Graham look to the play Our Town as a structural model. When she received the score a year after their last communication, there was another piece of advice, encoded: Copland had worked a Shaker theme, “The Gift to Be Simple,” into the score. Graham understood. Her dance would tell of a simple frontier marriage, an Our Town without the town, just five characters in one place for a day: Bride, Husbandman, matriarchal Pioneering Woman, patriarchal fire-and-brimstone Revivalist, and four Followers who are one. Appalachian Spring is “straightforward,” de Mille wrote in her definitive 1991 biography Martha, “well, as straightforward as Graham can be.” Invisible lines seem to string the characters heart to heart in a cat’s cradle much like Noguchi’s skeletal set, connections that are the only real security in a land without a ceiling.

The current performance standard is superb. After the company’s troubles of the last decade, the fight to regain the rights to perform its own dances, and its legal victory in 2002, these dances feel more precious than ever. That the company has two Graham divas, Teresa Capucilli and Christine Dakin, sharing the title of artistic director is fascinating. And it seems to be working. At the Appalachian Spring I saw, performances looked lived-in. Katherine Crockett as The Pioneering Woman was magisterial, the immovable object and the irresistible force, the mountain and the stream. Christophe Jeannot was a riveting Revivalist, legs taut as tongs, his heat steely, a red-ember authoritarian (in El Penitente he was pure charm). The delicate Miki Orihara was The Bride, a role that fit her like a buttoned glove, its mix of present happiness and elegiac foreboding well served by her tight focus, her listening softness (these same qualities did not work for Orihara in Deaths and Entrances, a role that requires formidable depths, and the heft to show them). And the Followers: De Mille complained of how they’d become comic foils over the years, “cute” when they’d originally been “rhapsodic.” They are rhapsodic once more, their ecstatic little circles and squares like spangles of heavenly feeling.

The season was studded with distinctive performances: Elizabeth Auclair mothy, ethereal, in the Graham role in Primitive Mysteries, a 1931 blue-period Rubik’s cube that places the Virgin in a series of makeshift grottos, its studied, weighty naïveté like the backyard ceremonies of children (the difference being this is genius); Fang-Yi Sheu, the ascendant company star, showstopping in Graham’s facing-the-minotaur dance, Errand into the Maze (I love that “errand,” as if facing fear is something done daily, like a trip to the grocery store, and in fact, it is). Sheu has taken possession of the role, walks that rattled tightrope with a ric-rac step of blasting concentration. She guts herself with a slice (“carve a place for yourself in space”), has the Graham spiral in her DNA, its momentous O’Keeffe-ian whorls. Taking curtain calls, she glows like a candle melting. And Capucilli, still dancing Medea in Cave of the Heart, still savage, a tsunami of bitterness, sinew, and skin.

The one wrong note of the season was its premiere. Martha Clarke, who was named for Martha Graham, did a work for the company based on imagery from Francisco Goya. I don’t doubt the idea had a compelling synchronicity—it was placed on a program with Sketches from Chronicle, a Graham dance choreographed during and evoking the Spanish Civil War. All dance companies that forge on without their founders must commission new work. The Graham company, however, presents special challenges. Choreographers can’t imitate Graham, as so many in ballet have imitated Balanchine, because it would be ridiculous, like stealing in plain sight. The technique is hers alone. At the same time, most choreographers haven’t developed a vocabulary as deeply rooted and hewn as Graham’s, so their work sits thin on the company and the dancers look under-engaged. Clarke has no vocabulary at all, never did. But then, she’s not exactly a choreographer (her chicks really aren’t kicking).

A founding member of Pilobolus, Clarke’s imagination is a grab bag of tumbling tableaux, one image morphing into another, every segue a metaphor or a pun. After Pilobolus she functioned as an auteur, a darling of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and a maker of dreamscapes swirled out of potent historical moments and poetic conceits; works included Vienna: Lusthaus, Miracolo d’amore, The Hunger Artist. It was a theater akin to Pina Bausch’s, but faster, shorter, less German, and to Robert Wilson’s, but faster, shorter, more acrobatic. Despite Graham’s claim that “dancers are the acrobats of God,” it’s not about somersaults.

Choreographers can’t imitate Graham, as so many in ballet have imitated Balanchine, because it would be ridiculous, like stealing in plain sight.

Clarke’s piece was called Sueno. A page in the program explained that it was inspired by Goya’s “penetrating characterizations of human folly.” Okay, but there were no characterizations onstage, and given that Graham’s repertory is brimming with characters, we know one when we see one. What was onstage was a tired piece of performance art. The stage was very dark. The dancers, I mean characters, were very louche. Mad laughter pierced the emptiness. Three men attacked a woman. A black man was a bull (a stunning bit of racism, I must say). Another man was hung from a noose with bells in his hands that rang. Rhythm, pulse, kinetic intelligence, compositional momentum—nada. There was a section when women in long dresses were swung from their shoulders by the men: a visual rhyme with the hanged man’s bells. It only heightened the perversity of the piece. Rag dolls? Rape victims? Bells? The Graham repertory was built on the ambitions, the anxieties, of vivid women. Graham females are unmatched in strength through the middle. And yet that abdominal vitality, virtuosity, all of it from knee to neck was left unused, unplumbed, by Clarke. And while Graham’s oldest works look utterly fresh, Sueno is dated, not just stuck in theatrical clichés of the Eighties, that tsk-tsk misogyny, but reaching way back to the absurdist Sixties, good old laughter-in-the-void nihilism.

Clarke’s piece was dispelled by the dance that followed. Sketches from Chronicle is a reconstruction of a longer dance, Chronicle, from 1936. It too takes place on a dark stage, but it is the darkness of war, the cover of night. It is performed by women. The first section, “Spectre—1914,” is a solo. Wearing yards of crimson, a lone woman keens between stillnesses, levers her torso to the floor in plangent seeing, a posture that appeared almost verbatim a year later in the painting Guernica, Picasso’s 1937 protest of the same war. She wings that skirt up around her, inflamed, then stretches it vertically into a crimson shroud, disappearing in a fold as if back into history, a witness without a name. The second section, “Steps in the Street,” is for the corps. And what a corps! Ballet dancers have beautiful bodies, but not like Graham dancers, who have the lean, round, fighting muscle of marlins, spines that curl and cut, and a flashing speed that always surprises. In this dance of stealth, a woman sheathed in black backs onto the stage, step by step, in silence. Then one by one, each backing in, young women fill the stage, a forest of them. Their bare feet, smooth as jade, shhhsh the floor. Wallingford Riegger’s music begins, his score, à la Graham, driving, plunging. Graham brings compression down from above, moving the women in burnished C-curve crouches, dashing them across the stage in those mouse-step scurries, quick pinwheel contractions thrown over the hips, spasms of alarm. Soloist and corps join in section three, “Prelude to Action,” and the momentum is martial, the rush overwhelming, the sheer dance spectacle of Graham’s girls girls girls like Busby Berkeley crossed with Camus, a thrilling kinetics. You want to jump out of your seat—to achieve something. Had enough of the dubious paeans to Girl Power that pass as inspiration in our culture—the Britneys, the boob-jobs, the Blahniks? Look again at Graham. She who carved courage out of air.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 Number 10, on page 31
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