"Martha contra mundum"

[kfw]

The current issue of The New Criterion has an article by Laura Jacobs about Martha Graham and the Martha Graham Dance Company's spring season at City Center.

In the 1954 movie White Christmas, an Irving Berlin no-people-like-show-people musical that should be a cult classic but is more often labeled kitsch (it’s that Santa Claus finale complete with pre-teens in tutus doing bourrées under the tree), there’s a send-up of Martha Graham that is one of the best send-ups in dance history. The number, choreographed by the Broadway eminence Robert Alton, is called “Choreography,” and it’s sung by Danny Kaye, hilarious in geeky-beatnik garb: black turtleneck, black floods, black beret— eyeliner!—he’s Cecil Beaton doing Sartre. Kaye doesn’t perform alone. He’s surrounded, swarmed, by a corps of barefoot girls in sackcloth shifts, their ponytails swinging like tribal rites. While he warbles, “Chicks/ Who did kicks/ Aren’t kicking anymore, they’re doin’ choreography,” the girls create tight little fire escapes around him, all knees and elbows, feet flexed and faces fraught. They move to a machine-age theme that’s as angular and percussive as they are, stampeding Kaye who’s doing his absurd, angular best to blend in yet looks like the silly grasshopper amid socialist-realist ants. Never mind that Graham didn’t call herself a choreographer, “a big, wonderful word,” she said in 1989, “that can cover up a lot of sins. I work. That’s what I call what I do when I make dances.” Alton’s point exactly: in Graham the serious stuff, sin for instance, was uncovered, up front.

[Amy Reusch]

Thanks for the heads-up! What an interesting article!

Graham could not perform or teach what she had learned as a student, then company member, of Denishawn unless she paid a $500 fee to the Denishawn school. This forced her, beginning in 1926, to develop her own vocabulary of movement, her own syllabus, her own dances.

I never realized this was why she had such a carefully worked out technique... I've always sort of wondered why early modern dancers were so concerned with coming up with a codified technique [since more recent modern choreographers don't seem to be] ... thought it was some sort of way of countering Ballet's tradition and validating their own... never would have guessed there were financial reasons for it.

[sandik]

Some very interesting thoughts on the repertory, but in light of the recent hullabaloo with the company and the board, I found this comment very sad:

"The current performance standard is superb. After the company’s troubles of the last decade, the fight to regain the rights to perform its own dances, and its legal victory in 2002, these dances feel more precious than ever. That the company has two Graham divas, Teresa Capucilli and Christine Dakin, sharing the title of artistic director is fascinating. And it seems to be working."

Not any more, apparently.

[dirac]

I always enjoy reading Laura Jacobs.

I don't think the "real" story of the recent company turmoil isn't out there yet. All we can do is hope for the best.