sarma

As a choreographer, Martha Graham is also a brilliant archeologist. Or is it psychologist? At any rate, during her long career, she has been adept at exposing famous old scars of the Western world and making them bleed significantly.

Paradoxically, although we consider her one of the creators of “American Modern Dance," she has made comparatively few dances with specifically American subject matter. Or themes; and her extraordinary movement vocabulary developed, it seems to me, not only from her own motor impulses, but from shrewd borrowings from the dance styles of other, more ancient cultures. Her work provides an object lesson in the uses of the past, for her style has never looked eclectic, has never looked anything but authentic and wildly original.

This isn't the serious article that ought to be written on the evolution of Graham's style. I think I'm in the business of throwing out teasers. Martha Graham began to work with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in 1916 and stayed with the Denishawn Company until 1923. (In 1919 she got her first big part-as the fierce heroine of Shawn's Aztec ballet, Xochitl.) Seven years of Denishawn. The influence had to be profound; Graham utilized it profoundly.

St. Denis and Shawn were interested in exotic genre pieces-evocations of various oriental, archaic and primitive styles, or what they imagined these styles to be. (in spite of their earnest research, I suspect that they viewed even the American Indian exotically or, at any rate, romantically.) Many of Graham's own early dances - which she has since denounced in print - seem to have been little antique studies. But as early as the late twenties, she began her important process of exploration, assimilation and transformation.

For one series of works, among which is the 1931 masterpiece, Primitive Mysteries, she created a "primitive" style based in part on the straight, narrow look of American Indian dancing. This early Graham style had the purity of an earth-sky rite, with its rooted look, pounding feet, stiffly vertical posture, arms that branched occasionally into angular gestures. Austere, hopeful, unambiguous dancing that reflected her ruthless asceticism and her desire to purge dance of all trivialities of movement. Graham has returned occasionally to elements of this style-especially for male figures like the Christ in El Penitente, the Creature of Fear in Errand into the Maze, the Revivalist in Appalachian Spring. Among other things, it conveniently turns men into living phallic pillars.

Graham also utilized - beginning I'm not sure when - features of the so-called "archaic" style derived from Egyptian friezes. Perhaps she liked this style originally for the simple strength of its designs. But, as performed by a living human body, the artificial stance-feet walking in one direction while the upper body twists open against that base-can easily become, and eventually did for Graham, a metaphor for a kind of ardent ambivalence. She kept the twist, increased it, bent the body in several places, tipped it slightly off center, until in her famous fall sequences, she arrived at a position in which the arms opened in one direction, while the knees remained pressed together, hips averted from the focus of the reaching arms. An agonized and somehow reticent posture and one ideally suited for the dire predicaments of those Greek heroines she dealt with from the late forties on, when she began to become the unhappy high priestess of our collective unconscious.

Elements of various Far Eastern styles have also enriched Graham's vocabulary, but these, too, she restructured. Frantic, beating arm gestures or a bowed head made decorative Cambodian knee-walks look anything but decorative. She added a twist to a flex-footed attitude (also Cambodian or Siamese), so that her head could look backward-away from where her feet were going. A position reminiscent of Lord Shiva drawing his bow (Indian Bharata Natyam) looks entirely different when the dancer's spine pulls away from the direction of the gesture. Tiny, smooth Japanese steps; arm gestures like oppositely curving half moons; hands bent stiffly at the knuckle: Graham pressed all these oriental movements and poses into violence and ended up with something startlingly expressive of all of our illustrious Western dilemmas, like the polarity of spirit and flesh.

Just as some Eastern styles do, Graham made us aware of the shape of the dancing body in still positions, but she linked those poses together not with flowing transitional steps, but with tense little runs, or by a process which involved unmaking the pose for a second and then abruptly reforming it one step further on in space. Although the long, breathing stillnesses that punctuate Graham dancing are very Eastern, little else about the dynamics of her style relates to the controlled fluidity of much oriental dancing. Graham, until very recently anyhow, wanted her movement performed with tremendous tension. One set of muscles inhibited or restricted another. in many of her important works of the forties and fifties, you felt the dancing shuddering along in huge jerks, propelled by the violently contracting and expanding bodies. When I first saw Graham in 1955, I was stunned by the whiplash of her spine; by the way, as Medea in Cave of the Heart, she writhed sideways on her knees-simultaneously devouring and vomiting a length of red yarn; by the elegantly neurotic quivers that went through her Emily Brontë in Deaths and Entrances." What she did wasn't like any dancing that I knew; it was more like a body language consisting solely of epithets.

Conventions of Eastern theater have merged with gleanings from Jung, Einstein and cinema in Graham's art. In the course of one dance sequence, characters can jump back and forth in time-acting, meditating on the results of that action, expressing their feelings in relation to it. They can be both narrators and protagonists. Two people can portray one or one portray two. Everyone can be her own grandma. In Seraphic Dialogue, three aspects of Joan of Arc wait, immobile as decor, for an agonized fourth Joan-who-remembers to call them to life. Symbolic props not only create devastating images-think of the vast red cloak in Clytemnestra which spreads like blood over everything-but also free Graham from the anathema (to her) of impressionism. In Dark Meadow, for example, a little branch pops out from a pillar, and we know it's spring and don't need anyone being a flower, or even smelling the air. The dancers can get on with the business of peopling that spring.

Recent Graham works have often approached a kind of exoticism, almost as if the style were reflecting a morbid nostalgia for Graham's own lost dance-power, or else as if the physical weakness that comes with age had imparted a flabbiness to her dances that she was too overwrought to notice. I don't know how else to explain the voluptuous profusion of movement, the beautiful, limber, half-naked dancers sinking into the movement phrases as into a warm bath, the absence of the old percussive force. Sometimes things looked pretty, dreamlike, absentminded; sometimes wilfully decadent. And she herself remained on stage at the heart of many of her compositions, portraying any number of unhappy ladies remembering their flaming pasts. The works had to be shaped around this almost immobile central figure, whose brave attitudes had no muscle power behind them, who seemed driven by a blaze of nerves.

Now in her 70's, Martha Graham has finally retired as a dancer. She Will not dance in her two-week season which starts Tuesday at the Alvin. But other dancers have taken her roles successfully before and will again. (Mary Hinkson and Pearl Lang will alternate in the title role in the revival of Clytemnestra.) Let's hope, selfishly, that she reconstructs some of her great works for us. Perhaps too, through the act of retiring as a dancer, of reaffirming herself as a choreographer, she can again make works for the company that will have the vitality of Diversion of Angels or Canticle for Innocent Comedians.

I hope she outlasts her imitators.

Goodbye Martha. And welcome back.

This article is really style analysis disguised as a pre-season publicprodder. I had wanted to call it Martha Graham and the Mysterious East.