How Long Can Martha Graham’s Dance Revolution Last?
The Martha Graham Dance Company recently celebrated its hundredth anniversary, a remarkable feat, considering how much it has been through since Graham’s death, in 1991—a flood, financial crises, repeated closures, and an ugly, years-long legal battle over the rights to her dances which was resolved in the company’s favor only in 2005. All this had left a doomed feeling that the work of Martha Graham, one of the most outstanding dance artists of the twentieth century, might vanish. The anniversary seemed an almost too sunny effort to banish those dark days, with a star-studded gala, a PBS documentary, a quick tour, and the launch of comprehensive video documentation of the Graham technique, culminating in five nights of performances at New York’s City Center.
The programming featured some of Graham’s earliest and finest dances—including “Appalachian Spring” (1944) and “Night Journey” (1947)—but, oddly, there was only one all-Graham evening, and it was billed, a bit ambivalently, as a “preview” (for whom?). Both the opening night and the rest of the run offered classic Graham works along with dances by contemporary choreographers. This “old with the new” model is by now standard legacy framing—we see it with Balanchine at New York City Ballet, for example—but it comes with a deep anxiety: Does the old work hold up nearly a century later? And what is Graham’s legacy, anyway?
Graham saw herself primarily as a dancer—she made dances, she said, so that she would have something to dance. It could be said that she invented a people and a place. The people were dancers, all women when she founded her own company, in 1926. The place was the floor, which became a whole world. Drawing on the work of her peers, such as Ruth St. Denis and Doris Humphrey, she soon created a dance technique that was shockingly radical. Today we hardly notice it, because, like the idea of the Freudian unconscious—which was theorized in 1899 and became one of Graham’s influences—we take it for granted.
What was this technique? One way to think of it is as anti-ballet. Ballet strives for symmetry and harmony, for spinal alignment, turnout, balance, and flow—its goal is lightness and flight. Graham bodies were rooted, with a strong center of gravity while being flexible through the spine, and she excavated areas of the body that (in the Western tradition) had been locked or hidden through convention or denial. Her goal was to mine intense emotion and hardship, to live on the earth rather than aim for the heavens.
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.
The core of the ballet is a long scene in which the bare-chested Oedipus, Lloyd Knight, clad in bikini briefs with decorative golden squiggles, courts Jocasta, who is wearing a chaste and queenly gown. Today, his Tarzan-like posturing and phallically extended legs and arms come off as cringey masculine preening. Meanwhile, she contracts her torso like a thumping heart to show her inner passion, while also covering herself demurely with ritual branches. Finally, he falls flat on top of her, and after a brief struggle—Jocasta’s unconscious repulsion—the incestuous deed is done, and they both roll over, exhausted. This open depiction of a woman’s agonizing desire may have been striking in 1947, but today it feels silly and quaint, and why shouldn’t it? Graham herself noted that dances quickly become dated.
“Night Journey” left me troubled, too, because it seemed suffused with reverence for Graham, whose mystique and iconic performances are baked into the choreography. This makes it difficult for subsequent dancers, however accomplished, to bring to her roles their own styles and bodies. At moments, Xin seemed trapped in a dance that had no give. The music, which Schuman composed for Graham, is full of the brash rhythmic sounds she seemed to favor. Graham once admitted that she did not like strings—they were too lush and romantic, too balletic—and preferred (even for dance class) drumlike chords that better matched her movement.
The contemporary dances interspersed between these Graham epics were disappointing. Hope Boykin’s “En Masse,” to music by Leonard Bernstein, meant well but lacked structure and style; Baye and Asa’s “Cortege,” a riff on Graham’s “Cortege of Eagles,” was a predictable technocratic work built around bland images of social violence. Hofesh Shechter’s “Cave,” to music by Âme and Shechter himself, is a “rave” for the stage in which the dancers twitch and let loose (I guess), falling into vibrating trance states with the help of lighting effects and loud music. The only exceptional dance was Jamar Roberts’s short solo for Lloyd Knight, “To the Brink and Back,” with percussive music by Stahv Danker, who performed his moving score onstage. Here were slow, cushioned movements, valleys and peaks, and contractions so deeply sunk into the body that you hardly noticed them. It allowed us to see Knight, who has been with the company for twenty-one years, in ways that Graham’s exigencies do not always allow.
The anniversary performances were a reminder that the Graham company is caught between preservation, which is inherently conservative, and the radical tradition it wishes to sustain. Nowhere was this more apparent than in “Chronicle,” a reconstruction (largely from old films and photographs) of three fragments from a lost antiwar ballet that Graham made in 1936. It had gorgeous moments—the dancers seemed deeply engaged—but its martial music and vehement images of blood and suffering shaded into propaganda.
In Graham’s life, technique and choreography were the same thing. But if we think of them as separate, the technique becomes anyone’s tool. And if Graham technique is anything like ballet, it could remain a neutral staple of training—that thing we hardly notice—until another generation of artists transforms its use and meaning into something new. Graham but not Graham—or, as she herself put it, “the only thing we have is the now.” ♦