sarma

The most astonishing thing about the wholly astonishing season of Martha Graham’s company is that the vibrant and intelligent dancing makes us understand Graham’s greatness all over again. In recent years, we had to try to peer into the essence of her work through a fog: most of the great dances out of the repertory; a few splendid performers miscast, undirected, and, in some cases, out of shape; Graham herself defeated by age, savagely determined to go on holding down the center of the arena.

Now, she has done what I imagine for her must be a very brave thing: she has directed the power of her ego away from her own dancing body toward the body of her work and toward the young dancers who perform them. She has finally become vain again about her choreography. Robert Powell is her new associate artistic director, but I doubt that anyone but Graham herself could have clarified the motives behind the action or the shapes of the movement and made the dances as lucid as they now appear.

For instance, we watch Janet Eilber as the Chorus in Cave of the Heart and see that she is often shrieking, sobbing, attempting to stop the murderous course of Medea’s jealousy. Was all that always there in the dance? Remember Matt Turney - who was lovely, but vague - drifting around looking upset? When Ross Parkes plays Oedipus in Night Journey, he emphasizes the childish arrogance that Graham planted in the role. When he knots an ingeniously designed cape about his body in a variety of ways, but is always able to thrust his fist through some hole you didn’t know was there, the force of his gestures is relentlessly phallic as well as kingly. You can understand why Jocasta sits there transfixed with fear and desire, and you say to yourself - and anyone else who’ll listen - so that’s what that scene was about. In Seraphic Dialogue, David Hatch Walker, as St. Michael, is a strong, fervent force that shapes the action. When Deaths and Entrances was revived briefly five years ago, without Graham’s aid, Mary Hinkson gave an extraordinary performance in the central role of Emily Brontë; the other sisters seemed barely visible. But now Janet Eilber as the older sister (Charlotte, I guess - Graham doesn’t want the Brontë analogy carried too far) and Diane Gray as the younger make you notice that they, too, are desperately ambitious and frustrated women. Eilber does a phrase across the back of the stage - spinning, curling her body in, and then slashing it out into a violent horizontal plane (leg kicking out in front of her, body pulled back); and Gray turns ceaselessly back and forth, wrapping her arms around her body, averting her head from everything.

Traditionally, Graham dancers have learned new roles from those who once performed them or from work films. (For this Mark Hellinger season, former company members Ethel Winter, Patricia Birch, Linda Hodes, and Carol Fried helped remember and teach.) I often thought that this was the reason for the lack of communication between performers: their minds were trapped inside their own bodies trying to reproduce the correct positions. They looked to be dancing in a passionate trance. Even as recently as last season - at the “new” company’s debut - William Carter was one of the few who appeared to be interested in the other characters on stage with him. This season, however, all the dancers look more intelligently focused; this makes the intensity of Graham’s style terrifying or beautiful, rather than self-indulgent.

Takako Asakawa made Medea in Cave of the Heart both terrifying and beautiful. The rapid, minute quivering of her rigid body when she first becomes envenomed by her own jealousy is almost unbearable in its unabashed violence. Yet, the core of this production is more than virtuosic dancing by Asakawa. It is the way she watches the lovely little princess and her own braggart husband, Jason (when Graham’s women are nastiest, the men often look as if they deserve what they get), and the way they watch each other. Yuriko Kimura, splendid this season in slightly softer, more questioning roles in the repertory, danced Errand into the Maze as if she never stopped sensing the dark, clumsy brute of a Minotaur behind her. Ross Parkes, whose performing has often struck me as slightly self-absorbed, has acquired a fine new liveliness by directing his attention toward the other dancers. So has the indisputably beautiful Pearl Lang, who often disappoints me by scattering her concentration onto slipped shoulder straps, loose boards, and God knows what. Lang’s Jocasta in Night Journey is pale, ripe, foredoomed and very moving, although she occasionally stalls the flow of the movement at worrisome transitions. But in one particular performance of Letter to the World, she danced with deeper radiance than I’ve ever seen her give. The role of Emily Dickinson suits her: no one can produce so vividly the illusion of maidenly charm, of virtue with a trace of impudence.

Another interesting thing about this season is that it offered works from several different periods of Graham’s choreographic career - from El Penitente and Letter to the World (both made in 1940) to the just completed Holy Jungle. In Graham works of the ‘40s, when she was a dancer of power, the movement is amazing - full of odd tensions and stresses, rich in dynamic shading. The dancing that goes with the leading roles - especially those which she herself used to perform - is mysteriously, compellingly private; it seems dragged from the characters by the pressure of events and other characters. A dancer could study at the Martha Graham School for years, I’ll bet, and never be taught certain of the gestures from Deaths and Entrances or Letter to the World. The phrasing of these middle period dances, even in the ceremonious scenes, seem quicker and more intense than that of later dances like, say, Clytemnestra (1958). The passions in Clytemnestra are there, all right, but they’re contained by ritual; they parade before you, they don’t burst out and scald you the way they do in Cave of the Heart. In her wittily divagating speech on the opening night program (a cleverly designed lecture demonstration and sampling of Great Graham Moments), Graham remarked that too much had been said and written about her theory of contraction and release; it was, she said, a simple matter of exhaling and inhaling. All I can say is, you could kill yourself breathing like that. In both Cave of the Heart and Errand into the Maze, the heroines stand there, contracting and releasing their rib cages so fiercely and so rapidly that you think their bodies have been taken over by a shuddering convulsive enough to be a fit.

The dances Graham made during the ‘60s tend to be slower and rounder. The male characters lose most of their phallic stiffness; their percussiveness turns into a strong, slow stretching and flexing. Curves blossom where there were once only angles. All the dancers indulge themselves in the movement; it looks as if it feels good. Circe (1963) offers a perfect theme on which to hang this kind of dancing, and the best thing about the piece is the sinuously evil movements of the men Circe has turned into animals (Mario Delamo, Dan Maloney, David Chase, and Eric Newton do these parts wonderfully; Maloney’s performance is the best I’ve ever seen him give). The piece is unsatisfying because Ulysses and his Helmsman are almost as sinuous as the men-animals and the Enchantress. At times it’s hard to tell when the two heroes who are trying so hard to row home are caught by Circe’s spells and when they’re not. And Circe herself, a role Graham created for Mary Hinkson, not for herself, is not very powerful, just a bewitching and lusty little creature, flashing her hips around and caressing everything in sight. The dance seems made to have a powerful figure at its center, but no one is there. Graham was obviously unwilling to abdicate in 1963.

Much of the movement in Graham’s later dances has a patented look. Perhaps because she was unable to draw new movement from her own body, she used a vocabulary that she had built up. Whatever the other dancers may have contributed, it deferred to established “Graham technique” (the animals in Circe are an exception). Her dances of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s have an impersonal look - although they can thrill you with their impressive ritual drama. But her earlier pieces can make you cry because, although you’ve never in your life seen movement like that, you feel that something in your blood and your bones performs at times inside you with the same reckless force.

The very latest Graham dances are soft, opulent parades of dream images. Everything is diffuse; even when the stage seethes with motion, nothing appears very active or focused. The movement unwinds as evenly as thread from a spool; it’s hard to find any sharp edges. Chronique (the new version of last year’s Mendicants of Evening) and Holy Jungl remind me of the last paintings of Renoir and Degas, in which everything disappears in blaze of color. The meditative Chronique, with its celebrations of farewells and new beginnings, its impersonal parades of “humanity” and personal encounters of lovers, has been strengthened, although not really clarified, by structural changes and a new score by Carlos Surinach with a lot of quiet guitar sounds. But Holy Jungle is cluttered with ornate symbolic props (by Dani Karavan) that range from a huge flame (or fish or banana leaf) made out of silver wire to an absurd little umbrella of what look like ping-pong balls (decidedly tacky as forbidden fruit). Graham says she was inspired by some of Hieronymous Bosch’s fantasies of visions and temptations, but in this great tangle of dancers, it’s hard to tell who’s tempting whom. Peter Sparling plays the seeker, the pilgrim, and he’s taunted by Diane Cray (mysteriously billed as Follower), a sex kitten in black harem pants. There’s a Lady of the Labyrinth (Janet Eilber) and men who enjoy her favors. Sparling pursues a dream bride (Judith Hogan) back to Eden. Lucifer is there in red (William Carter), and so is a heroic angel (David Hatch Walker). The most interesting character is called the Hell Eve, and she’s a huge woman (Armgard Von Bardeleben) with a mirthless laugh and a big skirt from under which pop mean little demons of women to add to the perils of pilgrimages. The stage seems full of people most of the time, but you seldom see clear intentions or know when an action has been completed. Nothing, and no one, rests. In a way, the stage is like a big Bosch painting, alive and wiggling, but not in a purposeful way.

Another fine thing about this Graham season was all the multiple casting of roles. I wanted to go every night; some people did. Even those dancers not quite ready for the roles they played revealed some new angle of the choreography you hadn’t noticed before. I didn’t get to see enough of David Hatch Walker or Diane Cray or Mario Delamo or Peggy Lyman. (What puzzles me is, with all these performers working so beautifully to make these dances communicate, why does Graham still cast the same man as Paris-Hades-dead Agamemnon in Clytemnestra? As if role were the important thing and not who played it?) Some of the dancers force things a bit; many of them have developed a mouth mannerism that makes them look as they were angrily snapping up flies out of the air. Never mind; what they and Graham have accomplished could be likened to what a restorer does to a painting. The dust has gone, and the shapes and colors glow again.