Category Archives: Clytemnestra

Son of Clytemnestra: Return to the House of Martha - Week 3

By Jaki Levy | June 20, 2008

Peter Sparling in rehearsals

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.

June 19:
I find myself typing on my laptop, early morning sun warming my back, while sitting in my car outside the Dance Center at 6:40 a.m., on our last Thursday at Skidmore. I think of the Talking Heads lines, “Watching the days go by…”, and “How did I get here?” The pool opens in 20 minutes. Take me to the water. Perhaps my restlessness stems from the accumulation of evening showings, tonight’s student composition show, the anticipation of the final days, the big wind-up…with no time for a wind-down or celebratory resting on the collective laurels. Martha’s blessing and curse? Yesterday, we blocked out the entire Act 1 of Clytemnestra, as dancers aired their roles in the light of day for the first time. How amazing to witness these beautiful dancers! How well I remember that solitary, hermetic, process of learning a new role—hours in front of a TV monitor, picking up movement from low-resolution images of a past Orestes or Oedipus, re-composing in one’s own muscle memory the outlines of the moving form, then filling them in before the mirror, a step at a time.

I was reminded of the outrageous hubris of this endeavor–tempered by a reverence for the efforts of past performers and for Martha’s genius, the years of discipline and practice, and the limits of the human body to absorb only so much before exhaustion or injury temporarily overwhelm the effort. Company dancers rise and fall; injuries have plagued the cast for the past few weeks. Rehearsal directors negotiate a delicate balancing act of scheduling, casting, and protective ploys to preserve and maintain the ranks. I remember Linda Hodes in particular, watching over my generation of dancers, gently assuring us with her matter-of-fact, worldly-wise attitude. I recall the long tours, the classes in strange studios along the way, or preparations for a New York season, and visits to massage therapists, acupuncturists, suffering the tears, the terror of the prospect of missing a performance, of forfeiting a career.

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Tonight: 7:30pm - Open Rehearsals, LIVE Streaming

By Jaki Levy | June 16, 2008

This Tuesday, we will be streaming LIVE during our Open Rehearsals at Skidmore College. For those who cannot make it to Skidmore in Saratoga Spring, check back at 7:30pm for a live feed of our rehearsals.

Starting at 7:30pm, you’ll be able to watch the video Live on this website, or here

Clytemnestra Prologue

While you’re waiting for the stream to start, you can watch some of our other videos here.

UPDATE : The performances were fantastic, and we had a full house in the theater! We had a few audio issues, but resolved them for upcoming live streaming events. Thanks to all who came + watched!

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Son of “Clytemnestra”: Return to the House of Martha - Week 2

By Jaki Levy | June 15, 2008

Peter Sparling in rehearsals

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?

Jennifer DePalo in Prelude and Revolt

Last night’s open studio rehearsal of Friday’s program highlighting Martha’s early origins and entitled Prelude and Revolt, cast a look back to the beginnings of her high theatricality and bold, new choreographic signature. A pastiche of works curated by Janet Eilber demonstrated the sculpted exoticism deriving from Denishawn and morphing into the stripped-down, angular modernism of Lamentation and Chronicle. One senses the revelation brought about when Martha transposed her own, redesigned force field onto a mass of eager, fearless bodies. Momentum, percussive group impulses and a surging, rallying energy expressed in waves of repeated motifs rock the entire dancing ground. It is both exhilarating and visually engaging, merging kinesthetic directional thrust with the organic patterns of swarms, armies, and uprisings. This is early complex systems theory before it was a theory: behaviors of emboldened individuals and groups in crisis embodied and mapped out into the space like a satellite view of an approaching storm front.

The Women of Martha Graham Dance Company

Open Rehearsals at Skidmore

The women in Chronicle deserve particular praise for the immense concentration and commitment to their communal effort. How this work was recovered from its own sunken Atlantis of Martha’s lost dances I do not know. I can only marvel at the archeological wonder of it—as if its reconstruction from fragments was achieved by retrograding back in time from her last works to an essential formula of style, shape and force. And to recover vicariously that divine exhaustion of Graham dancers after multiple implosions against the abdominal wall—where the pelvis curls under and lifts like a bowl to hold the taut sinew stretched across its mouth like a drum—is a gift and a reward for my many years of allegiance to her cause.

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.”

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Son of “Clytemnestra”: Return to the House of Martha

By Jaki Levy | June 11, 2008

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?

Skidmore

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.

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Video Viewing of Clytemnestra

By LindaH | June 10, 2008

Rehearsing Clytemnestra

The viewing of Clytemnestra was surprising for me in more ways than one. I have always been told by teachers that the camera can never truly capture the essence of movement or that it has a tendency to diminish the power of movement. This was not the case at all with the PBS performance of Clytemnestra.

Even if the camera did decrease the intensity of the dancing, it does not change the fact that the VHS version remained captivating, that it did maintain the spirit of the choreography, and that it was able to carry the emotions of each character/dancer across the screen to the audience.

The success of the film in its telling of Graham’s Clytemnestra resulted from two main factors—the high caliber of the dancers’ performance and the skillful manipulation of cinematic techniques. The dancers’ honesty and physicality not only in their bodies but in their faces as well made the characters on-screen three-dimensional and alive for the viewers. The brilliance of their performance did not come as a surprise to me; what did come as a surprise was the cinematographer’s ability to render depth in a two-dimensional medium. The sizes, the transitions, and the angles of the shots used were largely responsible for the story-telling.

And yet, despite the camera’s triumph, the film is not perfect. In the uses of the different angles and sizes in the shots, the audience receives details, depth, etc. However, what the viewers do not receive is the bigger picture- literally and possibly figuratively. In the VHS version, we often did not have the panoramic view of the ballet, as we would if the ballet was performed live on a proscenium stage. While we get the little details, such as a little twitch of an eye, we miss the much of the action between the characters. Since there is often more than one character onstage, a constant dialogue exists throughout the ballet, whether it is character-to-character or even character-to-set.

In a narrative where the relationship is so important in propelling the plot, I wonder how much of the whole story we are missing while focusing on the details. During the close-ups of individual characters, we don’t see the progression of the plot in one whole moving tableau but rather in fragments. Furthermore, we see fragments that have been chosen for us. While our eyes can travel wherever they wish to during a live performance, they have their limits with a film. Every shot that plays before a film audience has been pre-selected to evoke particular emotions and to essentially shape our interpretation of the film.

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Past and Present in Clytemnestra

By e_roesse | June 9, 2008

Seeing the company rehearse Clytemnestra and seeing it on DVD have really brought Graham technique and repertoire alive for me. I’ve seen many Graham works on video throughout college, but had never seen any performed live. In my first week here, I watched the company rehearse Night Journey, and I was in awe.

First of all, I never realized the costumes were green from the black and white videos I had seen of the piece. Second, the work study students and I got to help assemble the sets. But, lastly the intensity of the dancers was amazing. Seeing the company rehearse Diversions of Angels, I had the same reaction, I was almost in tears watching the dancers. And watching the company rehearse Clytemnestra, I really felt that it came alive for me. I was surprised seeing the dvd later that evening that the same intensity came across the screen.

What I’ve learned in the past weeks is that dancers have to be amazing movers and performers and have great technique, but they also have to be extremely intelligent in approaching their role. Learning Iphigenia’s name-calling from Miki and hearing the other company members talk about their roles, I am amazed by how much they think about their character–their backstory, their emotions, their movement, and how their emotions inform their movement. We are working on this in Panorama, and I think that watching the company rehearse can greatly inform our own performance.

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Clytemnestra Outdated?

By Chebond25 | June 8, 2008

The subject of the datedness of Martha Graham’s TV production of Clytemnestra was brought up by an audience member during the Q&A session held by a few of the original cast members from the televised performance. In our composition class, we were asked about how we saw Graham and her pieces that were made so long ago. Were they outdated, out of style, or old news? After thinking about it for some time, I would say that Martha Graham’s revolutionary work was so far ahead of its time that we are still grasping at understanding the depth of the work even today. It has impacted so many dancers’ lives that maybe do not appreciate or understand it because they don’t connect her technique with anything they have ever learned. But the fact is that it is legendary work, still valid and still full of life.

When I finally took the time to really look at the scope of Graham technique, its meaning, and its repertoire, I too became an obsessive advocate for everything the Company stands for. It’s like when you hear a song that you think is so amazing but later on hear the original and are disappointed but intrigued. It’s refreshing and humbling to see the real creators of that music and what you take from it is pure appreciation for the artists who set the foundation of something so groundbreaking. You learn that originality and substance will always be timeless.

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Movement Never L(eye)s

By katinkamac | June 8, 2008

Martha Graham said that “Movement never lies”, well, neither do a dancer’s eyes. Watching Janet Eilber’s portrayal of the all-seeing, but cursed Cassandra on the PBS version of Clytemnestra, confirmed the importance of the facial muscles, especially the eyes, in revealing one’s inner psyche onstage. Peter Sparling commented after the showing that the facial muscles are an important part of the whole neuromuscular moving self. As an example he mentioned that Martha noticed that the movement of the jaw directly correlates to the movement of the pelvis. Sometimes Graham dancers will even clench the jaw to give a certain line to the face–one aspect of the physical expression of the character.

As an audience member though, I find myself particularly drawn to the eyes, which can reveal so much. In watching “Clytemnestra” rehearsal it was obvious that company members were using their eyes in specific ways to create their different characters: Blakely’s ‘Electra’, Sadira’s ‘Cassandra’, and Katherine’s ‘Helen’ were all entrancing in different ways.

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The Chicken or the Egg of Learning Repertory

By carly | June 7, 2008

During the first week of classes, students were split into groups to learn sections of Clytemnestra as taught to them by members from the company. I had the fortunate experience to learn Electra’s name-calling, taught by principal dancer Blakeley White-McGuire. We learned about the character and how she was short-changed by her mother, instigating her to collaborate with her brother to seek revenge. The choreography is full of sharp angles, thrashing percussive movements, and tension. Surely, no one could watch it (or dance it) without needing to take a few calming breaths afterwards.

After my peers and I presented the variation to artistic director of the company Janet Eilber, she asked us questions about themes within the characters and how the storyline manifests itself in the types of movements each character makes. We realized that we spent a significant portion of time learning the individual steps, but also concentrating on the motivation and the emotions we were attempting to portray. We concluded that once we had a rough understanding of the steps and the storyline, the emotion came naturally.

But what about these physiological reactions? What about the tense muscles, the deep breaths, and the angry faces that we made without Blakeley’s prompting? The James-Lang theory states that physiological reactions produce emotions - a physiological reaction is the cause of emotion. Since the choreography is full of claw-like gestures, deep lunges that are animalistic and savage, and even an exit that includes spitting on Clytemnestra’s throne, are those actions causing us to feel angry, deceived, and cheated? Then again, there’s the Cannon-Bard theory, which states that emotions occur independent of physiological reactions (at the same time). Physiological reactions are not necessary for emotion to occur. So, could one dance Diversion of Angelsbut feel furious, lonely, and depressed? According to Cannon-Bard, it’s possible. Perhaps the most settling idea is Schachter and Singer’s Two-Factor Theory of Emotion, which explains that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and cognition.

I think these theories present an interesting question to our teachers: Do you rely on the steps to cause physiological reactions within your students, or do you fuel them with back-story so that they dance the parts with the appropriate emotional counterpoint? In technique class, senior artistic associate Denise Vale demands that technique is not void of emotion. As we learn Panorama, it seems that both must go hand in hand. We spent the first few days learning steps, patterns and counts, but it was clear after today’s rehearsal that we make the most progress after we understand the emotional component of a dance. Simple walking steps morph into powerful strides toward activism and awareness. Jumps go higher and contractions get stronger. It is amazing to feel the complicated patterns we are tracing on the stage and to know that we successfully counting in time signatures (like 9-8, which is nine beats per measure and an eighth note gets the beat, which is just as awful to dance to as it is to count) that even the most seasoned musicians dread playing. As seen by the rapid progress in today’s rehearsal, the emotion MUST fuel the dance and dance MUST fuel emotion. Sorry James, Lang, Cannon, and Bard, I’m with Schachter and Singer on this one.

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Clytemnestra Response

By mross | June 6, 2008

As everyone has said, watching Clytemnestra was an unreal experience to say the least. The piece itself seemed to me to break up quite perfectly, giving us a lens through which to look at each character and then throwing us into the depths of drama. The signature movements that we have discussed and explored both in repertory class and composition shined throughout the entire performance, each character having a gesture or piece of choreography that so clearly defined their character and what he or she was all about.

Furthermore, I was particularly struck by the use of the sets. The pieces themselves are simple and yet so perfectly frame the story and actions that occur on and around them. Whether it was Clytemnestra glaring from her throne or the bodies strewn across the platform in the nightmare sequence, each set piece played a role in emphasizing the flow of the story and the message of Graham’s work.

Finally, I loved the universality of this piece. While, as we have discussed in class, the story is very timely, the greater message seems to transcend time and really affect all audiences.

I have loved learning, watching, and exploring the repertory of the Graham Company; it helps leaps and bounds in understanding the method to Martha’s madness, or shall we say brilliance…

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