The following entries are from a journal kept by former Graham dancer, Peter Sparling, while teaching and coaching for the Clytemnestra Project at Skidmore College. Sparling is presently Thurnau Professor of Dance at University of Michigan; he performed with the Graham Company from 1973-87 and was artistic director of the Graham Centenary Festival in 1994, hosted by U-M and University Musical Society. His last company performance was in “Appalachian Spring” at The Library of Congress in 1998. He has set Graham works on companies all over the world.
Prologue
June 1, 2008:
Skidmore College lies nestled at the north end of an outrageous display of ornate mansions lining Saratoga Springs’ Gold Coast. Majestic and ostentageous, solid yet somehow tasteless in their eccentric juxtapositions, these beached behemoths loom as a surreal reminder of old-style wealth and a pocket of American history that harbored some our country’s earliest dynasties. What dark family dramas and repressed intrigues were played out on their sprawling summer lawns or behind the brick-laced, columned facades?
My mind reeled as I took the slow crawl up Broadway towards the college’s entrance after the 10-hour drive from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I struggled to remain in my bone-weary, restless body… like sitting on the uncomfortably sloped Noguchi throne in Act II of Martha Graham’s “Clytemnestra”, hunched in contraction with palms pressed up into my eye sockets, awaiting Orestes’ cue to awaken from his deranged meditations and confront his violent destiny. Countless dancer’s lifetimes and 30 years later, I was returning to Martha’s house, to the domain of gnashing teeth and exquisite contortions.
I was reclaiming my password to her temple of visceral truth that had permitted me entry into its elite membership 35 years ago. In return, I was to impart the wisdom, perspectives and stories I’d carried with me and nurtured, like Ishmael surviving the Great American Whale, or the grateful kid from the Rustbelt who’d been dubbed worthy by the master and was miraculously still here, ready to give back to a generation of younger disciples.
The welcome later that night was significant. I’d found the apartment that housed the company and staff, and was greeted by my roommate, Jaki Levy, our young and brainy media guru for the workshop. After a long soak in the bathtub, I lay in my dorm-style bed re-wiring my brain circuitry with a volume of Proust. Suddenly the entire apartment complex and surrounding campus were wracked with the echoing crack of explosions. A child of the 50’s, my atom-bomb scenario immediately kicked in– and then I remembered it was Alumni Weekend at Skidmore. Fireworks! The Graham Company dancers in the adjoining unit had already gathered outside and were squealing with delight as the projectiles rocketed from the distant athletic field and cascaded in dazzling blossoms of light over the bank of trees to the south. It was a wonderful way to first meet and greet these young dancers, as we witnessed together this stroboscopic spectacle of a scale we all aspired towards in our own personal repertoires of pyrotechnics and drama. In their witty, fond repartee, they identified each burst of illumination with a particular dancer’s mode of dynamic display, casting their own stage personalities to fit the grand ballet of special effects. My kind of people… and a fitting prologue to the next three weeks in Martha’s House.
Issues I’m pondering in anticipation of the first day observing and coaching rehearsals:
Which version of a dance do we reference when coaching style, interpretation, phrasing? The words, images and movements in the memories of its last surviving members of its original cast? The earliest evidence on video? A composite of many versions to reflect and acknowledge the accumulated wisdom of a succession of interpretations and stagings? How do we remain true to the spirit and look of a work while making it legible to a contemporary audience? What does it mean for a dance make 50-60 years ago to “look dated” or “show its age”? Or do the rehearsal director and dancers not concern themselves with critics’ opinions or the accusation of providing museum pieces or reconstructed historical dioramas, but instead seek the power and authority of the achieved balance between intention, shape, impulse, shift of weight, dramatic portrayal, phrasing (in itself and as it relates to the musical frame)… and the absolute dominion of embodiment: a confidence, conviction, an elastic outer restraint—sometimes mask-like, other times utterly undone–always in dynamic relationship with inner force? Call it character? Artistry? Can we also ground ourselves in the assumption that the work has an enduring greatness—has already achieved such a balance and holds inherent in its structure and movement map the genetics to return it to life yet again? Yes, and can we also assume that the work offers new casts the opportunity to reveal greater revelations or wonders through sheer force of individual and collective spirit, will, talent, and outrageous, radically new interpretation?
June 2, 2008
Today’s rehearsals ran like a series of Blakean visions—stunning, monstrous and fierce. The young dancers in today’s Graham Company manifest the primal hunger inherent in the repertory with an extraordinary physicality and courage. Often characterized by a gnawing pain or dread–interrupted with bursts of revelation, recognition, and momentary stillness– this hunger takes on a nobility in the dancers’ ruthless pursuit for the truth at the core of their roles. As I sit in the place of privilege as rehearsal director, (the sole witness of this masque of scenes), and frantically scribble notes on my pad while trying not to miss a move, I feel my emotions rise in me and threaten to break. But I steel myself, and move back from them to let them subside. I do not allow them to interrupt my assigned task, which is to be as ruthless in my observations as they are in their dancing. Jocasta, Oedipus, Tiresius, Adam, Eve, the Stranger/Serpent, Lilith, Medea, Jason, Electra, Orestes. The procession of eternal ancestors moves through my first day as if to remind me of the wonders of my inheritance. I humbly acknowledge the wisdom they have printed onto my own marrow by welcoming them into my life once again.
Lessons from today: As a rehearsal director, my approach must be direct and sure in order to give back to the dancers what they deserve and what they have earned. Questions of how it was done back when or what I remember being taught 35 years ago become secondary to the matter at hand: Is the performance complete and stylistically accurate and appropriate? Is it shockingly honest? Is it flat or multi-dimensional? Does it trace a line of inevitability, laced with near deviations, abrupt obstacles, and choices to be made that temporarily threaten to derail or alter its course but fall invariably back like the certainly of gravity towards doom, fate, resolution, discovery, freedom? I must trust myself to be able to respond with useful and/or necessary information, tempering suggestion with insistence.
June 4, 2008
Last night, we screened the 1979 PBS Dance in America version of “Clytemnestra” for 35 students and a small group from of local community. Janet Eilber, the company’s present artistic director (and Cassandra in this production), introduced the work with a brief summary of the history of the House of Atreus and placed Martha’s 1958 danced distillation/interpretation in context of her repertory. I spoke about the process of translating the work from stage to screen, and of our experiences on the immense soundstage at Opryland in Nashville during the videotaping. As the lights dimmed and the Prologue reared up on the theater’s large projection screen, I was struck by the audacity of Martha’s choreographic vision and the colossal risk of both the original production and this made-for-TV extravaganza.
In livid color, this translation has an element of Fellini meet Martha in 80’s Disco Hell, compliments of Halston, Exxon and the NEA. Dated? Not the question, really… nor is it about authenticity. Rather, are the modifications justified for this high-art Rocky Horror Show, this Kabuki fusion ballet? Has the work been made newly legible and dynamic, taking full advantage of the video medium and televised format? We must remember, as well, that the Dance in America production team’s mission was not only to preserve masterworks of living American choreographers but to scale them down for the home TV screen in order to promote accessibility and visibility for the sorely underrated and underexposed art form. I would propose, then, the following question: Has Martha successfully re-created the essential nightmare of the stage version via 80’s television camera and editing technology? Does the production retain its epic sweep, its stark grandeur in this newly storyboarded format of multiple cuts on action, cross-dissolves, and superimpositions?
Perhaps the most radical departure from the stage version is the use of close-ups, which, of all the camera or editing effects, casts the director as master of ceremonies. He becomes the puppeteer whose will we viewers must yield to if we are to follow the narrative and fully submit to the action. I’m certain Martha was aware of all of this as she sat behind the glass wall in the control room surveying the sound stage while eyeing the various cameras’ framings on a bank of monitors. With director Merrill Brockway and editor, Girish Bhargava, she was compelled to make quick decisions regarding point of view and narrative cohesion, often at the exclusion of parts of the overall action. She must have reveled in placing the viewer at the center of the Furies circle, figures rearing up like images in flames, and then suspending us high over the throne, looking down into the maelstrom.
Sitting in Skidmore’s Dance Theater, I was totally taken in by the production’s unabashed hyperdrama, the sharp, incisive performances, and the total commitment of our cast of dancers. Yuriko Kimura’s performance in the title role was mind-boggling. Her perfect technique was matched by the daring of her transitions from one death-defying shape to the next, and her upper torso, neck and head performed their own narrative while her lower body and hips cut with low, razor-sharp precision through the dense gravitational mire of her own inferno. Watching myself dance the role of Orestes, I experienced a visceral “sock of recognition”—one that was thrilling and unexpected. My body memory of those long, trying days under the lights, riddled with insecurities about my own performance, were being usurped by what I was witnessing on the screen: a sure command of character, technique and ruthless attack. Those hours at the studio on 316 E. 63rd Street–of classes, rehearsals, replaying the old, brittle films until they literally melted or fell apart on the reel—had paid off after all. We’d met the camera on its own terms and conquered, avoiding Martha’s curse of the Original Sin, which, in her terms, was to take aim and miss the mark. I realized I had not seen myself dance this role since the production’s initial airing in 1979!
As I watched the progression of my fellow company members on the screen, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the realization that, of the 10 or so men in the cast, only a few of us had been spared from the plague of AIDS that decimated the population of male dancers a decade later. This was our generation’s own curse, both biblical and Homeric in its unforgiving scale and magnitude. It marked the evening’s experience with a deeply sad poignancy. I left the theater shaken, ennobled and strangely humbled by the impact of so many memories.
June 5
As the coffee works its way into my brain circuitry and I consider the tasks of my fourth day here, I am mindful of the opportunity before me to practice a bit of pop self-help: Why not use the carefully proscribed schedule as a means ceding control and falling forward into a kind of inevitability—not really a freefall but rather a willingness to yield to the demands of my assignments? That said, teaching a 9 a.m. class is a particular kind of challenge for a middle-aged body. We folk in our 50’s feel compelled to pull out all the stops and demonstrate what we want the students to emulate if we can still summon most of the old tricks. But alas, the recovery is significantly longer due to limited resilience and the cumulative effects of wear-and-tear. Having taught once earlier this week, I can assume the class has seen me perform the movement once and will forgive me if I sit on my behind and dictate this morning’s sequences! I remember Martha, Linda Hodes, Helen McGehee, Bert Ross, Mary Hinkson, Jose Limon, Antony Tudor, and so many more who, in their 50’s, 60’s, 70s, or 80’s, were still formidable presences in the studio, urging us on gently, insistently or with great, cutting wit.
June 7, 2008
It’s the end of a long, densely packed week, and Orestes does his laundry.
As the coffee brews, I think what a rare, precious thing it is for a dance company to spend three weeks of concentrated rehearsal and performance in a setting that provides room, board, studio space and administrative staff! The legacy of Jacob’s Pillow, Steamboat Springs, of Martha Hill and the various American Dance Festival summer homes at Bennington, Connecticut College, Duke University—and now Skidmore College, Bates… Far from the world’s woes and the usual everyday multi-tasking, our typical survival instincts and coping mechanisms shift to the background as we immerse ourselves in the work. Not that it is always easy: sore muscles and exhaustion, a miserable rehearsal when nothing you do seems to please the rehearsal director, the body memory’s struggle to retain new steps and make sense of them before exposing them to the scrutiny of peers and artistic director… But the satisfaction of consistent work without interruption somehow compensates for such discomforts or the moments of loneliness, away from partners, family, and the familiar creature comforts of home.
We ran the Prologue from “Clytemnestra” yesterday for the first time: a rough, cut-and-paste job of segments rehearsed in isolation over the week. Watching it, I am acutely aware of the composition of the central figures to Clytemnestra to the chorus, and am reminded of the ingenious use of transitions that Martha employed—like a film editor crafting cross-dissolves, superimpositions and cuts on action. More than ever before in her choreographic process, Martha was dealing with an attenuated sense of theatrical time. Confronted with the challenge of presenting a panoramic sweep of characters, a compression of a complex set of relationships and her own sustained portrayal of a protagonist in agony, she must have spent many sleepless nights plotting and re-calibrating her map of action—seaming together the results of the day’s rehearsals and stretching her vision further along her story’s time line.
This is the tilting point that will challenge this company of younger disciples to prove their weight in gold Noguchi dagger, sinew and guts. The weight is different in this work, and portrayals must remain in high relief among so many narrative threads and over such a long, operatic trajectory. In microcosm, each thrashing torso must trace the full arc of its circular path then finish with a deep contracted spasm, like bile rising from the gut and timed with a gesture that spews venom…. all while traversing the stage and plumbing the depths with each pummeling of the ground as the feet land from their scissors-sharp side step in fifth position on the high arch, inner thighs gripped to cushion the shock of the contraction. Movements cannot look rushed; bodies must feel lived-in, ancient, and primeval. No place for lightweights.
Orestes saves the document describing his first week at Skidmore, then stands to remove his hot clothes from the dryer. Curtain. End of Week One.
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- Son of Clytemnestra: Return to the House of Martha - Week 3
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