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Martha Graham: Choreographer as Consummate Individualist
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13915 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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2 / 1988 |
2,149 Words |
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Don McDonagh
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Martha Graham became a professional dancer the year before the October 1917 revolution that brought the Soviets to power in Russia. Seventy years later, three artistic children of that revolution, Maya Plisetskaya, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Rudolf Nureyev, performed works from her company's repertory to celebrate the gala opening of her most recent New York season. Their historic presence on stage honored Graham's seven decades of creative exploration and laid to rest any lingering traces of the "war" between ballet and modern dance.
At ninety-four Graham no longer performs--she gave that up at seventy-five--but her artistic vision still dominates her company and she regularly adds new works to its repertory. In recent years she has also begun a program of revivals of her early dances that glowingly displays the development of her esthetic concerns.
For her newest work, Persephone, she chose Stravinsky's Symphony in C to accompany her retelling of the myth of Demeter's search for her daughter, Persephone, in the underworld. The first of three movements shows the barren earth after Persephone's abduction. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, laments and seeks her so the earth may once again be fruitful. Her celebratory return in the last movement closes the cycle on an affirmative note.
Underworld Inhabitants
Halston's costumes for the grotesque inhabitants of the underworld make extensive use of stretch fabric to enclose groups of dancers moving in deformed clusters. Their menace arises from the unusual configuration the material assumes--depersonalizing dancers while at the same time allowing disembodied but recognizably human limbs to project clearly. The use of the fabric, which is so common today, was initiated for serious theatrical employment by Graham in the thirties. At one time, stretch jersey was dirt cheap and she was dirt poor. More importantly, Graham saw the expressive potential of the material and proceeded to demonstrate it in an eye-opening manner.
Last year, in her company's sixtieth, anniversary season, she assembled "Denishawn/Graham Solos," a retrospective collection of five short dances that showed the inspiration for and the development of her own creative talent. Among the works selected was Lamentation. A seated woman is seen on a small bench. Her face, hands, and feet are visible; head and body are covered by a tube of stretch fabric. But while the woman's face remains gravely impassive, the tension lines produced in the cloth by her movements become startlingly expressive of her grief. The normally inert fabric displays the emotions usually portrayed by the features. To add to the revolutionary aspect of the work, the woman remains seated throughout the dance as if weighted to one spot by suffering.
The opening solo, danced lyrically by Plisetskaya on the gala evening program, was originally choreographed by Ruth St. Denis, whom Graham has acknowledged as her inspiration when she chose dancing as a career. Eight decades after its creation, the work retains its power to enchant. Tossing pinches of aromatic powder on glowing braziers, the dancer reflects with her movements the spiraling smoke that arises. "She is the smoke," Graham observed of St. Denis, and no less could be said about Plisetskaya, whose arms and torso rippled and strikingly echoed its surges and
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