Moments - impact of Martha Graham Dance Company's performance of 'Appalachian Spring' in Coolidge Theater, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, where it premiered Oct. 30, 1944 - Editorial

Dance Magazine, August, 1998 by Richard Philip

As with so many dance journeys, it was a bumpy trip from concept to completion. But the premiere finally happened on October 30, 1944. The producer was the largest library in the world, Washington's Library of Congress, and it took place in a 500-seat theater named after Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the patron-pianist who commissioned the music. The ballet, Appalachian Spring, was created by Martha Graham during the darkest days of the Second World War, when American mythologies desperately needed confirmation. Who are we? Where do we come from? What drives us forward? We needed to know.

Graham selected the American composer Aaron Copland, who a decade earlier had provided her with a dissonant, modernist score for her solo Dithyramb. But since those days, Copland had made a conscious effort to change his composition style to a more accessible, tuneful, "American" sound. He wrote his Ballet for Martha, as he called it, to Graham's detailed scenario, but he knew nothing of Appalachia and never gave spring a thought, so Martha attached the now-famous title just days before the premiere. Copland's music, with its open intervals, folk tunes (the Shaker "Simple Gifts" and others), and sonorous suggestions of cool, open space, has become one of the most beloved dance scores of our century. The ballet's Shaker-clean set is a sparse evocation by the American Isamu Noguchi of a fragile frontier shelter erected with great trust against the powerful natural world that threatens to engulf us all. Noguchi's Graham collaborations over thirty years came to define the bare-and-spare emotions framing many of her mythic dance works. Appalachian Spring also marks the first government-commissioned dance work, fueling generations of heated debate over government arts subsidy. It established dance as a major art form, as worthy of mainstream support as the symphony, opera, or theater. For a little one-act modem ballet, Spring had an impact way beyond anything imagined.

So. Here we are. Gathered this May in Washington for performances by the Graham company of Appalachian Spring at the Library of Congress, the first revival on Mrs. Coolidge's famous stage---originally designed for chamber music concerts--where it was premiered fifty-four years ago. An event. The ballet is a powerful affirmation of love as the sustaining ingredient in human relations. It is filled with primal force, the exuberance of hope, the dark twistings of Puritanism, and a sweet sense of earth's mystery. A young pioneer couple is able to face the future because the new love they share provides a glowing--and we hope a lasting--shield against the unknown. That Graham created the central role of the Bride for herself and that of the Husbandman for Erick Hawkins, whom she would later marry, adds another poignant dimension. The ballet's final moments of stillness, when he stands behind her and she makes an exquisite, inclusive gesture toward the horizon that embraces not just place but their entire future in it, is one of the great luminous moments of dance--of world theater. It defines us all.

Right down the middle of Washington, for those of you who have not been there, is a vast rectangular mall with such familiar sights on it as the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the National Gallery, a vast collection of art treasures well worth visiting. While wandering among the galleries, we came upon a painting by Johannes Vermeer, a remarkable 17th-century Dutch master whose themes of daily life somehow transcend color, composition, and content and transform simple domestic subjects--moments from everyday life--into profoundly moving meditations on the human condition. The particular painting that drew us back repeatedly on this afternoon was of a young woman holding a balance, a small scale, in which there is--nothing! Or nothing visible. Jewels, nearby, do not concern her. Although there are dark currents present (a painting on the wall behind her is of the mythical Last Judgment), the soft source of light from a high window and her quiet concentration suggest an affirmation to her mysterious measuring; she is absorbed in one of those moments when peacefulness and musings reign to a deep and feeling degree. We feel the moment, its weight; we have been there.

The tingling began at the base of my spine, worked up through my neck, prickled over my scalp, and then my eyes began to bum; there is no explanation for my strong physical reaction to this painting, other than the ability great art has to stir recognition of those moments when we come face to face most intensely with who we are, our being.

That same evening, during Appalachian Spring, it happened again--the tingling spine, the scalp, the tears. Why? What makes great art? What power do artists such as Graham or Vermeer possess? What witchcraft does genius use? There are imitators, always, but few originals. That artists like these exist at all, however, and can speak with such immediacy and authority, although separated by centuries, techniques, and cultures, is one of the great mysteries of this life. But there is Graham. And there, Vermeer. Observe.