Martha—Alarms, Excursions, Hopes - Martha Graham dance company

Dance Magazine, April, 1999 by Clive Barnes

What are we going to do about Martha? Of course, in a very real sense, Martha Graham still lives. Few would dispute her ranking as the most innovative, conceivably the most influential of all the dancers and choreographers of this century. However, since her death in 1991 at the ripe but empowering age of ninety-six, her company has passed through some lean and difficult years. Ronald Protas, Graham's close associate and confidant, who was so vital to Graham herself during her last years in helping maintain both her and her image, has worked long and hard as the company's artistic director. But his role has hardly been devoid of controversy, and he seems to have alienated as many of the Graham stalwarts as he has gathered to his banner. But perhaps such was inevitable--Martha at the end reigned, Lear-like, over a fractious kingdom. Some form of conflict was probably preordained, given the seething currents of creativity locked up in the brew of Martha's carefully covered cauldron.

While there is good reason to hope that the worst is over, only the other month her old school building--surely one of dance's historic monuments--had to be sold to raise money and retire debts, and, let's face it, her company and school have been practically riven by dissension, particularly in that emotionally rocky period immediately following her death. Also, the company--which has just reappeared in New York City for the first time in four years--has of late hardly enjoyed an especially secure stage record of continuous visibility. Indeed, at times there must have been well-grounded fears that the performing tradition of Graham, essential to the preservation of her choreography, could erode and even, down the line, collapse.

Now the company has ushered in a new initiative. This new business structure and strategic plan involve strengthening and revitalizing the Graham school, extending the company tours, both at home and abroad, and, through a newly established Martha Graham Trust and Foundation, promoting and standardizing licensing agreements for Graham works outside the Graham company. The latter proposition--presumably based on something like the Balanchine Trust, which has become a model for such ventures--could become enormously important in preserving Graham's heritage, and might be something apart from the actual survival of the company or school.

The present company has a strong core of long-serving principals, including Joyce Herring, Kenneth Topping, Denise Vale, and associate artistic directors Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, and many lively newcomers--all in all a troupe of about thirty dancers. This New York City season very sensibly took place at the Joyce Theater, a far smaller auditorium than City Center, the company's most recent Manhattan home, but one with good sightlines, an intimate immediacy designed for dance, and a stage perfectly adequate for the repertory. But what the company danced, and at times the way it danced it, left something to be desired.

The programming could be divided into three parts. First were bits and pieces and examples of very early Graham, including such solos from the thirties as Frontier (1935); Deep Song (1937); and Satyric Festival Song (1932); Graham's first classic ensemble, the great ritualistic Primitive Mysteries (1931), in a somewhat listless performance; and the agitprop, poster-art choreography of Chronicle (1936) and Panorama (1935), both of which nowadays strikingly suggest the rarely considered influence on Graham of the German Mary Wigman and even Kurt Jooss. Then there were the novelties and, third and last, the major Graham masterworks.

How do you add new pieces to the existing Graham repertory that will not be either dwarfed or redundant--or both? It's a problem. Among the novelties, the Duets for Martha proved excessively expendable. Three were twice-used pieces by the motley crew of Robert Wilson, Maurice Bejart, and Twyla Tharp, while the new duet by Lucinda Childs seemed as inconsequential as the more familiar one. However, Susan Stroman's fascinating But Not For Me proved a really intelligent attempt to add to Graham without seriously diverging, or oversedulously copying, from it. Interestingly, Stroman put the normally barefoot Graham dancers into dance boots and invented a new language for them, Grahamesque perhaps in manner, but pure Stroman in accent.

All the same, the nub of the season remained in the selection of middle-period Graham. Without a doubt, Martha had a way with blood, a certain deliberate taste for tragedy, and those Greek bloodbaths proved catnip to a choreographer who could always see the skull beneath the skin. The season could not feature Graham's most memorable excursion into Greek myth, Clytemnestra, that formidable evening-length retelling of the fall of the house of Atreus. However, her equally famous and briefer account of Oedipus and Jocasta, Night Journey, has been restored with its power and passion unabated.

At the time of this writing, I had not seen the revival of Dark Meadow, although both the fiercely symbolic Errand into the Maze and the sumptuously mysterious Herodiade revived well. However, Appalachian Spring--that perfect lyric insight into frontier America--fared less happily. I had on the whole preferred Colorado Ballet's performance last year, its first complete presentation by a classic troupe.