Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra premiered at the Adelphi Theater in New York City on April 1, 1958. Critic John Martin called it “an epic full evening work by a modern master.” With sets by her long-time collaborator Isamu Noguchi and a commissioned score by the Egyptian composer Halim el-Dabh, the dance is based upon Sophocles’ trilogy, The Oresteia, and is the culminating work in Graham’s Greek cycle. Told from the perspective of Clytemnestra, the Queen of Mycenae, it unfolds like the rivers of blood that flowed from generation to generation in the doomed House of Atreus.
For Graham the action took place in the theater of the mind. Moving back and forth across time and space, Clytemnestra relives scenes of betrayal, revenge, murder, and finally reconciliation, in a dance that ends as it begins in the Underworld . “Why, dishonored among the dead,” cries the vengeful Queen. She remembers the events that have brought her to this moment in time; the seduction of her sister Helen, by Paris of Troy; the armies of her husband Agamemnon and Menelaus, husband of Helen, that gathered at Aulis to set sail but were stalled; the brutal sacrifice of her beloved daughter Iphigenia, by Agamemnon, exacted as the price the Gods demanded for changing the winds and allowing the army to set forth. She imagines the rape of the women of Troy and sees Helen, walking the battlements, watching it from above. The dance then shifts to the present where Clytemnestra, left alone at Mycenae, rules “like a man,” taking a lover and plotting her revenge against Agamemnon. When he returns victorious from Troy, she seduces him, then leads him into the royal palace where she murders him. Cassandra, the mistress he has brought back with him from Troy, shrieks the prophecy of his death and of her own. Having the gift of infallible prophecy, Cassandra is cursed because no one who hears her believes her.
Although it relives this bloody path, Clytemnestra is about rebirth and redemption. The Queen and the theater work as a whole demand answers from the Gods themselves – answers to questions that loom today: how can the bloodshed, the generational offenses, the cycle of revenge be ended? How can the past be forgiven, redeemed and reborn in future generations who can build anew?
