Category: Culture

 

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.

 

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? 

 

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 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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