How Long Can Martha Graham’s Dance Revolution Last?
At the heart of her method—then and now—is contraction and release. Imagine a breath is sharply expelled, hollowing out the core until the lower spine curves and is then released, returning the body to a straight posture. There is no collapse but, instead, an expansive carving out of the pelvic region—Graham called it a “vaginal cry,” which radiates up and down the body and expresses raw emotions like shock, fear, pain, and, above all in her lexicon, sexuality. The cry can throw the body into ecstasy or terror but—crucially—it is also an act of profound control. Add to this ways to fall to the floor and “recover” to the feet at lightning speed. Nothing was fixed: like ballet, the only other Western dance form I know with similar depth and range, Graham technique was developed and expanded by choreography.
Consider “Appalachian Spring.” Set to music by Aaron Copland, it is a taut study of an American frontier community, featuring a Preacher, four (Shaker-like) Followers, a Pioneering Woman, and a Husbandman and a Bride (originally danced by Graham herself), whose marital bliss is interrupted by an intimation of war. At City Center, the sets conceived by Isamu Noguchi, a Graham regular, consisted of a bare-bones home—indicated by planks, a hint of a fence, a few stairs, and a rocking chair—and the Preacher’s church, comprising a simple platform and an adjacent wall. The dance was similarly abstract, with clean lines and spare portraitlike images recalling Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” or John Ford’s Westerns. The inhabitants of this space walk onto the stage in profile, one by one, and take their positions—on a rocking chair, against a wall. The Followers have bent elbows and knees and prayerful cupped hands, and often move with little birdlike hops around the Preacher (Jai Perez), who presides with proud posture and reverential knee-hinges to the floor.
Members of this community dance together and separately, but they are always telling a collective story. The Bride (Anne Souder) and the Husbandman (Lloyd Knight), for example, do a dance of open gestures and joyful jumps to Copland’s variation on “Simple Gifts” as the Preacher watches from his platform and his Followers sit primly in a row.
At the very end of the ballet, the couple is alone onstage. She sits tall on the rocking chair, and he stands behind her, gently putting his hand on her shoulder. She places her hand on his and draws her free arm across the horizon; the couple’s eyes wistfully follow as the curtain falls. No sentiment, only restraint, but the emotion is powerful and enduring. Most dances dissolve as you watch them, but “Appalachian Spring” is so clear and architectural in its design that it seems almost like a solid object. I have been watching it on and off for fifty years and still find it a marvel.
“Night Journey,” with music by William Schuman, fared less well. These sets, too, are Noguchi abstractions—a stool, stepping stones, a “nonbed-bed”—but this time the dance is more narrative. It tells the story of Oedipus (drawn from the Sophocles play), who is fated to unknowingly kill his father, King Laius, and marry his mother, Queen Jocasta. Graham gives us the story from the point of view of Jocasta (a part she danced), a choice that, as the scholar Sally Banes has pointed out, shifts the emphasis away from Oedipus’ impossible dilemma to Jocasta’s sexual passion and repulsion for a man she instinctively knows is her son. Much has (rightly) been made of Graham’s intense relationship with the dancer Erick Hawkins, fifteen years her junior, whom she cast as Oedipus. (They married the following year.) But the life-into-art sheen of the original production cannot sustain the dance today.
The piece begins with Jocasta, danced here by Xin Ying, holding a rope above her head, about to strangle herself. At the behest of the blind seer Tiresias, she goes back in her mind to the events that drove her to this tragic end. This means that most of the ballet takes place in flashback and includes two scenes that Sophocles did not show: the moment of incest and Jocasta’s suicide. Just as Graham wanted to push deep inside the body to discover hidden regions of sexuality and emotion, she is obsessed by the idea of revealing these hidden acts—but the dance struggles to convey the intricacies of the rest of the story.
