Week 2:
June 11: The dancers have settled in, and the rhythm of classes and rehearsals has been established. Three weeks is a good timeline for such an endeavor—with the second Wednesday a clear mid-point and goals scaled to fit the accumulated momentum towards the final events scheduled for the end of the third week. A company performance—including Panorama danced by all 34 students—finishes off the second week, leaving the last week for rehearsals of company repertory for upcoming tours to American Dance Festival and Berlin. The new production of Clytemnestra looks further ahead to performances in Greece in late October and The Kennedy Center in December. I’m determined to find a way of being in the audience for either Athens or D.C. –or both! Frequent flyer miles?
My exhaustion tonight is not like that of the company members or students; theirs comes from grueling repetition of demanding physical feats. I look on, summoning the descriptive powers to enliven and enlighten issues of style, intention, and timing. Occasionally, I will recall words from Martha or original cast members spoken in rehearsal. I suppose my attendance at run-throughs serves as a kind of catalyzing agent for the dancers’ efforts and focus, since they imagine me as closer to those precious sources and thus able to direct them towards more fully realized embodiments of their roles. As I attend to the works I’ve been assigned to direct during this short visit, I begin to keep a mental account of the essentials necessary to shape and sustain them.
Some day, I’ll write my own “A Dancer’s Guide to Graham Repertory”, including notes on Embattled Garden, Clytemnestra, Diversion of Angels, Errand Into the Maze, Cave of the Heart, Night Journey, El Penitente, Acts of Light, and many more. Contributions from the many different generations and casts would allow for certain constants to assert themselves while also revealing the range of interpretations.
June 12:
Thoughts on the art and craft of a Graham performer:
Watching Martha “mark” the title role in the black-and-white early 60’s rehearsal film of Clytemnestra, (involving halting indications of stumbling and staggering, leg lifts and falls to floor, but all the while exhibiting an indomitable force at the center of her nightmarish vision), I am struck by the instinct and intelligence in her solo presence that go beyond intellectual plotting of character or choreographic ingenuity. I’m reminded of something Darrell Wilkins mentions in a recent article in Ballet Review about Lincoln Kirstein concerning Martha’s “synthesis of diverse sources in a new dance language”, “…culled from the motley sources of her private readings and life experience. It was nonetheless rich for all that (and nonetheless indebted to outside sources), but it was, by nature, a potpourri, not pure, singular, and consanguineous essence.” He identifies “her tremendous discipline and restraint that went into (her) technique, and the wealth of traditions (East Indian, Greek, Japanese, American Indian, and otherwise) upon which her work in fact drew.”
She seized the NEA’s Dance Touring Program and numerous USIS/State Department-sponsored tours to provide us an unprecedented number of performances. Riding this extraordinary dance wave, she had the opportunity to provide us the necessary experience and show us off to the world. Certain critics were willing to assist her in this endeavor. Ah, the nights during New York seasons anxiously waiting for the next day’s Times to hit the stands! Will I get a good mention? Do I have a career? Am I a star yet?
Years later–and with a tenured position at a major research university earned partly via that star power and credential–I can begin to remove my own performance persona from the picture to ponder the matter of Martha’s artistry as an actor/interpreter. Granted, that artistry was indivisibly linked to the roles that she herself originated. (Regretfully, I never saw her perform on stage, although she could light up the studio at E. 63rd Street when she occasionally stepped onto the floor to demonstrate a pivotal dramatic moment for we “wretched beasts” if we were not giving her what she wanted.) The women who assume her roles today have an unusual challenge and, like stage actors, must find their own unique fusion of technique, instinct, and intelligence through which to make the movement “speak” with eloquence and power.
Presently on a Proust kick, I am tempted to draw parallels to his hypersensitive young narrator’s theories of artistry. Upon seeing the actress La Berma for the second time on stage and acknowledging of her talents apart from his pre-conceived notions of what those talents should consist of, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time finds a new admiration for her genius. From “The Guermantes Way”, Volume Three, In Search of Lost Time (Mark Treharne, translator):
“Her stage presence: “…(based upon) motivations that had lost their initial self-consciousness, melted into a kind of radiance, and set throbbing around the character of Phedre rich and complex elements which the fascinated spectator took not for accomplished acting but for real life.”
The Graham dancer must strive to disguise, submerge or completely lose the technique in the heat of a performance. Her task is to suspend the audience member’s belief in anything approaching datedness or artifice, historical portrayal or mere illustration of a concept or dramatic role. Proust’s “real life” becomes that moment on stage, more real than mere real life. Clytemnestra’s pyrotechnics risk defeating her if not entirely “melded into a kind of radiance”, or, in her case, into a kind of absolute terror, gnawing sickness, then plea for redemption that radiate from the core of her emotion-ravaged body.
Back to Proust:
“The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of “beauty”, “breadth of style”, “pathos”, which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”
My greatest satisfaction as teacher and witness is to have my expectations constantly subverted by a student, choreographer or performer until a pattern or unified imagination emerges that has claimed its own inner logic, defied my tired ego’s assumptions and dragged me kicking and screaming to acknowledge it and see it anew. One might call it the “shock of recognition”. Even if that person might be loathsome and unbearably obnoxious to me as a personality off stage, I must be grateful for his or her gift to me.
Is there such thing a dancer’s diction, or verses and metrical structure of her choreography? Is there an equivalency between words, sentences and whole speeches of an actor’s performance and Clytemnestra’s steps, phrases, solo movement passages? A significant element of a dance artist’s performance is in her ability to create a complete portrayal in the transitions from one step or unit of movement (pitch turn, dart, knee crawl, leg lifted on a contraction, knee vibration) to the next—without blurring a step. It would be fascinating to hear Proust’s narrator carry on about Martha, had she been of that earlier era. One might simply replace Graham for La Berma in the following passage to imagine a Proustian critique of the essense of Martha’s personal masterpieces as both performer– AND her own modern playwright.
“…La Berma spread great sheets of terror or tenderness over the words, which were equally blended, all smoothed down or heightened, and which a mediocre performer would have painstakingly detached from one another. Of course, each line had its own inflection, and La Berma’s diction did not blur the distinction between the lines of verse. Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of beauty, to hear a rhyme—that is to say, something that is at once similar to and distinct from the preceding rhyme-word, something that is prompted by it, yet which introduces the variation of a new idea—and to have the sense of two systems superimposed, one intellectual, the other metrical? But La Berma also integrated the words, the lines, and even whole speeches into ensembles that were vast than themselves, at the margins of which it was magical to see them obliged to stop, to break off; in the same way, a poet will delight in momentarily delaying at a rhyme break the next word to come, and a composer in merging the various words of the libretto into a single rhythm which both runs counter to them and carries them along. Thus, into the prose of the modern playwright as into the verse of Racine, La Berma had the ability to introduce those vast images of suffering, nobility, and passion that were her personal masterpieces, and which bore her hallmark in the same way as the portraits a painter has made of different sitters.”
June 13:
Tonight’s performances promise their share of fulfilled expectations and hopefully, shocking revelations. Until then, I float on a cloud of sheer exhilaration from the experience of having taught company class today. I cannot remember the last time I gave a Graham (or any style, for that matter) class when my requests for classroom sequences were immediately executed by the entire class to my exact specifications—including the proper inflections, rhythms, diction, and relationship to the music. What a shock, a gift, a long-awaited return from self-imposed exile to the house of Martha! It’s all possible after all…not just something I hold deeply in my bones or recall from the glory days as I annually introduce the Graham Technique to class after class of university freshmen.
Highlights of tonight’s performance:
A Chronicle every bit as powerful as the rehearsal run the other night, with Miki Orihara as the knowing witness and aide de camp to Jennifer DePalo’s palpating, muscular leader/revolutionary. The chorus was a wonder of coordinated passions. I wonder what makes this work different from a rallying cry for fascism, socialism, or any movement, for that matter? Without knowing its context or Martha’s intention, how would one know that the work specifically suggested revolt against tyranny and a cry for freedom or democracy? Where are human values or specific political or ethical beliefs embodied beyond a marvelous display of collective behaviors? As moved as the work left me, I was puzzled by these thoughts.
The enemy is very present in Errand Into the Maze, embodied as the Minotaur and danced by a predatory hunk of a man in briefs with a crescent of horns strapped to his brow and a bone across his shoulders like a yoke. Errand has the spare elegance of the very best of 50’s design, and of Miro, Klee, even de Chirico. Noguchi’s set is an absolute knockout, creating strong vertical vectors and a surreal constellation of objects for the dancer to navigate within. The curtain opens with the solo figure placed upstage center at the base of a tautly strung rope disappearing upwards, a white Miro bird or moon with tongue pulled off to its right, or to stage left. Noguchi and Graham immediately define the scale of the dancer to the void and to her endeavor, with the string to her destination (and destiny) laid on a winding path to the portal or pelvic bone planted downstage right. Elizabeth Auclair has her antennae tuned on high, probing a moonscape of fear with skin-prickling precision and a pelvis swiveling and pulsating like a highly activated satellite dish. This is the stuff of deja-vu, having seen so many performances over a period of 34 years. The dance is a perfect narrative/archetype—one that every poet, storyteller and choreographer of solos emulates and strives to access, even if through its denial and deconstruction. Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A soloist is an Ariadne seeking a path to her true self, battling her fear by saying “No” to theatricality with every simple task (errand) and pedestrian move.
I love working with smart dancers. Coaching Elizabeth and her beast, David Martinez, in rehearsal and contrasting those rehearsals with tonight’s performance, I am reminded of the never-ending process of formula vs. calculated risk that drives performers to never be satisfied, or to only be satisfied with risking the utterly new, as if stepping into that universe for the first time ever. These dancers took great risks, and they all paid off. Elizabeth’s “formula”, i.e. her own understanding of her sheer strength relative to the forms and sustained tension required for the role, become her default for forays into uncharted territories.
But how can I really, if at all, separate these dancers from their dance, now that I’ve been allowed into their sacred process and been granted a certain power to suggest slight changes or clarifications? Or does my vantage point grant me a particular advantage were I to pursue dance criticism? I think of Deborah Jowitt, Jill Johnson, and other dancer-turned-writers who have somehow struck a balance between their own experience-based empathies as ex-dancers and the rigors of descriptive evaluation and yes, of passing judgment. The Society of Dance History Scholars has invaded Skidmore’s campus this weekend for their annual conference. Many attendees were at tonight’s performance. I would be curious to hear their readings of these works and of the performances, and of Janet’s generous and well-plotted contextual narrative introducing each of the works as part of a century-long chronology of Martha’s creative genius.
The time will arrive soon when dance scholars will be compelled to compare and contrast the late works of choreographers who, when nearly immobile and no longer able to evolve the movement themselves or demonstrate it, are dependent upon their assistants, on computer programs, on their own codified technique or vocabulary of moves, and, most of all, on their stable of young and able dancers to suggest and embody their visions.
End of Week 2. Major accomplishments: Re-staging of Clytemnestra Prologue and end of Act 2, the skeleton of a very exciting student composition show for the last week, and my second round of laundry.
P.S. I just attended the most inspiring SDHS lecture-demonstration entitled Jane Dudley: Time is Money, with re-constructions of a 1930’s solo by Jane movingly performed by three former Graham Company dancers. A truly cross-generational transmission of “meaning in motion”, the process, as described by Martin Lofsnes and given cultural and personal context by Henrietta Brannerman and Jane’s son, Tom Hurwitz, was a shocking (that word again) wake-up call for the value and necessity of rescuing and maintaining these precious gems of dance. It also confirmed my belief in the power of performance in such scholarly presentations not merely to illustrate points made by a scholar but to initiate and ground the dialogue in muscle, sinew and the immediacy of the dancing body. These dancers brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to protect them, keep them warm in the overly chilled lecture hall; I was reminded that the vulnerability of these dances is in direct relationship to the vulnerability of the dancer’s instrument and his or her limited life span—both as dancer/choreographer and as living carrier of history long after the last performance.
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