Martha Graham, page 27
The circle of dancers narrows and kneels in “concluding obeisance,” and the fallen Disciple, gathering her energy, returns, reborn, to a standing position. Making a halo with her “spread and shining fingers,” she forms a tribute-crown behind the Virgin Mother, who lies on her back, arms up and extended, “hands meeting in a spired point.” Rising again, Mary assumes the Vitruvian stance, arms and legs outstretched across an imaginary squared circle, straining to find the limits of her kinesphere. Akin to the Magna Mater of Piero della Francesca, her scapular (the cloak, Graham’s “sacred garment”) spread in a final beneficent and protective gesture, the Virgin departs into the whirling “celestial dance of Heaven” escorted by her faithful “throng of exulting angels.”
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In addition to Primitive Mysteries, Martha Graham, accompanied by six dancers, premiered another group work for the Dance Repertory Theatre. Bacchanale, true to the name, was a “Dionysiac,” “wildly abandoned…and rhapsodic” piece, by Wallingford Riegger displaying “moments of such technical virtuosity that the audience gasped in its seats.” Born in Albany, Georgia, Riegger grew up in New York City, studying at the Institute of Musical Arts with Percy Goetschius, one of Louis Horst’s teachers, and in Berlin at the Hochschule für Musik with Robert Hausmann, Max Bruch, and Edgar Stillman-Kelley. Bacchanale was Riegger’s first foray into writing for Graham, who had asked him to collaborate with her after seeing him conduct his Caprice/Study in Sonority.
Riegger was subjected to Graham’s “dance first, music second” rite of passage. She balked at a composition that must “fit such design as this: five bars of four-quarter time, two bars of three-quarter time with the accent on the second beat of the measure, four bars of quarter time with a hold over the last note, ten bars of three-quarter time with an accelerando, etc.” Rather, Graham lectured him on the virtues of sparseness and leanness and, following Horst’s lead, Riegger pared down strings in deference to oboe, piccolo, and percussion. Their alliance deepened, and he went on to write Frenetic Rhythms in 1933 and the propulsive Chronicle in 1936.
After the spectacle of Primitive Mysteries, Graham presented three Rhapsodics—Song—Interlude—Dance, with music by Béla Bartók; and offered Two Primitive Canticles (Ave and Salve) and Dolorosa, written in the mid- and late 1920s in Paris by Heitor Villa-Lobos, the preeminent Brazilian modernist. Graham would later include these poemas indígenas as part of her “Primitive Cycle.”
Witnessing Dolorosa on November 1, 1932, at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, one of Graham’s most insightful critics, Stark Young of the New Republic, was moved to comment that her “first idea [for a dance] will be more like that of a designer of patterns, lines, angles, rugs, tiles, fabrics, what you will, or like the basic outlay of what will later be a painting. From this pattern or single form there will develop other forms; which in their turn may suggest an idea less visually abstract and more a subject, more a literary or psychological meaning.”
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Taking a retrospective view of Heretic through the lens of Primitive Mysteries—considering the earlier ensemble work as a prototype for the latter—does not do justice to Martha Graham’s choreographic ingenuity. Drawing a connection from one work to a subsequent one may help establish provenance in the visual and poetic arts; in dance, however, narrative progress is not dependably definitive. Primitive Mysteries is more open-formed, more up and out than the linear Heretic. In the earlier piece, the dancers were constrained to begin and end in the same space; now, they have their exits and their entrances from and to a limitless world. The foregrounded “Heretic” is constantly opposed to and struggling with her sisters; in Primitive Mysteries, rather than rebuff and detain the Virgin, the others welcome and protect her. The “Outsider” in Heretic who tested herself against the stolid uniformity of the group has become in Primitive Mysteries the Chosen One, empowering and sanctioning the group.
Heretic ended with prostration and exhaustion. Primitive Mysteries concluded with dignity and decorum, and then—as soon as the curtain came down—“the house burst into cheers…not just a scattering of ‘bravos,’ but the expression of a mass of people whose emotional tension found spontaneous release…paying memorable tribute to a native artist.” Gertrude Shurr was present at the creation when “the new formations, the subject-matter [of Primitive Mysteries], took New York by storm.” After all the tearful rehearsals and sleepless nights haunted by existential panic attacks, “Martha was just dumbfounded” at the repeated cries of “encore!” All the women of the group crowded around her “backstage…[and] there was much crying and hugging.”
Stark Young wrote, “Of this composition I can say that it is one of the few things I have ever seen in dancing where the idea, its origin, the source from which it grew, the development of its excitement and sanctity, gave me a sense of baffled awe and surprise…” Mary Watkins was also seized by the magic that evening. Primitive Mysteries “is, in our opinion, the most significant choreography which has yet come out of America,” she wrote. “It is not only a masterpiece of construction, but it achieves a mood which actually lifts both spectators and dancers to the rarified heights of spiritual ecstasy…Miss Graham [is] the leader of the moderns in our wide and varied field of plastic aestheticism.”
Elizabeth Selden, musing upon the aesthetic of “the dancer’s quest” singled out Martha Graham as the most advanced of her contemporaries through her mastery of “distortion.” There was distortion, Selden explained, when Graham excised the connective tissue from a story line; in the disconcerting “spatial order” of the arrangement and deployment of women’s bodies; and in the discordant “intensity” of her visual imagery, using idiosyncratic costuming and dramatic, angular lighting.
Following Martha Graham to the outermost frontier where “stark realism” bordered upon “expressionism,” Selden decided that “she is the modern dancer par excellence.”
Approached by the Shubert Organization with an offer to syndicate the collective repertory and take it on the road, the disparate members of the Dance Repertory Theatre could not find it within themselves to rise to the occasion. De Mille complained that the box office revenues were disproportionately allocated among the others, and blamed Graham and Humphrey for not abiding by Tamiris as titular leader. Humphrey, despite the fine reception for The Shakers, was resentful that she had been hemmed in by the constraints of the program and continued to harbor cool mistrust toward Graham, who did not stand in the way of the critics’ chorus singing that she had stolen the show. As for Louis Horst, he tried to take the moderate higher road and keep the peace, but to no avail. Synergy—coined by Isamu Noguchi’s friend Bucky Fuller, as a magnificent whole greater than the sum of its parts—was absent. On March 8, 1931, the Dance Repertory Theatre announced “that it has suspended its activities for the season.”
Nevertheless, the new American dance by these diverging practitioners had shown qualities “in common with modern painting and sculpture”…“and the public…could see [now] that there was something called ‘the modern dance,’ something strong and contemporary and determinedly independent of superficial beguilements.”
17
“We Will Never Understand One Another”
What was to come in the nineteen-thirties?
Only one thing could one be sure of.
It would not be repetition.
The stream of time often doubles on its course,
but it always makes for itself a new channel.
—Frederick Lewis Allen,
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s
Despite her pique in the discordant aftermath of the Dance Repertory Theatre, Agnes de Mille remained in awe of Martha Graham and ached to join her company. “Martha, let me work with you,” de Mille pleaded.
“Certainly not,” Graham replied. “Find your own way. I won’t let you lean on me.”
“Martha, you have genius,” was the rejoinder. “You know where you are going.”
To which Graham irritably snapped, “I don’t know where I’m going. None of us know that,” and, for good measure, “And someday I’m going to give you a good smack.”
Embittered by the difficulties of her artistic journey, de Mille published a long essay in Theatre Arts Monthly called “The New Ballerina,” a conflicted depiction of the noble art, beginning with her nostalgia for the faded era of “the great romantic solo dancer.” The beloved “Pavlowa” of the author’s rose-tinted childhood was no more; the graceful “Camargo, Taglioni…Genée…and Barbarini” were gone, and, with their passing, went the sophisticated balletomanes, audiences, and critics alike.
The sad fact that “there are no endowed dancing schools in America” exacerbates the dilemma for the young woman trying to make her way as a concert dancer. “In the struggle for bread,” de Mille writes, she must take odd jobs, posing for painters and photographers, waiting tables, clerking in a dismal Midtown office, or selling hosiery behind a department store counter, in order to pay for after-hours classes that distract her loyalty away from the gracious formalism of ballet in subservience to the ascetic discipline of “a new kind of dancing.” And, in the end, all she will have to show might be “to appear three or four times a year on the stage.”
De Mille adds a personal caveat borne of her own experience that “[a] knowledge of various techniques does not always enrich the student.” On the contrary, “[i]t frequently renders her uncertain, hesitant, without defined style or reliable craftsmanship.” For example, she continues, Martha Graham is “an…artist on the New York stage danc[ing] the problems and hungers and convictions of the people among whom she lives.” Pulling the tradition of her art away from the refined prettiness of the ballerina and toward that of “the unconscious folk dancer…in the public square,” in Graham, “[t]he dance and not the dancer predominates,” de Mille writes. The “abstract beauty” of ballets de Mille grew up with, The Dying Swan, The Dragonfly, Carneval, has been supplanted by the earthy primacy of “social forces” in Steerage, Heretic, and Primitive Mysteries.
In search of that beauty, de Mille, accompanied by her mother, and endorsed with a loan from her brother-in-law, left New York for Paris, Brussels, and London, where she found shelter and support at the Mercury Theatre and Ballet Club in Notting Hill Gate, under the nurturing wings of Marie Rambert and her husband, producer Ashley Dukes.
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On January 4, 1931, the League of Composers introduced a concert at the Art Center on East Fifty-Sixth Street with a talk on “some aspects of modern music” by Eugene Goossens, formerly of Eastman, now conductor and music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. “In addition to the technical problems confronting the present-day composer,” he said, “the preconceived prejudices of many hearers make the lot of the writer of new music a difficult one.” The program included the first American appearance of the Budapest String Quartet, offering convoluted works by Hindemith (op. 16) and Kodály (op. 10).
The centerpiece, between Goossens’s talk and the quartet, was Piano Variations by Aaron Copland, dedicated to his lover, the Canadian writer Gerald Sykes. Copland’s severe solo showed he was disinclined to accommodate to his “auditors,” who gave the bespectacled young man with spindly flying fingers “courteous attention and some applause.” An underwhelmed critic observed that “more than one ‘stream of consciousness’ passage recalled similar essays in words by Gertrude Stein.”
There was one empathic pair of ears in the room that day; Martha Graham, present to support her friend, was attracted to the “strange, hard beauty” of Copland’s eleven-measure theme followed by twenty of his Variations and a coda. The “bare, brutal motif…[was] hammered out” on the keyboard, “steely colors and incisive attacks” twisting and turning, “assaultive, whimsical, ironic, frenzied and more.” Calling upon Copland at his apartment the next day, suspending her “choreography before music” rule, Graham told him she wanted to make a dance to the piece. Copland was “utterly astonished that anyone would consider this kind of music suitable for dance.” He told Graham she was free to proceed, with the stipulation that the thirteen-minute length not be cut. She agreed, and the two spent the afternoon chatting about how delightful it would be to collaborate on a full-length ballet. It would take another year before Graham was ready to perform her dance to Copland’s Variations, and a dozen more years for Appalachian Spring to flower.
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With fanfare, the New School for Social Research, founded in 1919 and led since 1922 by economist Alvin Johnson, opened its “gleaming, streamlined” new seven-story headquarters at 66 West Twelfth Street in Manhattan on New Year’s Day 1931. The building, designed in the international style by Viennese architect Joseph Urban, rose head and shoulders above the neighboring brick row houses, “its severely blocked façade alternating bands of patterned brick and infenestrated glass…standing for…something wide-awake and freshly-minted.” A ground-floor art gallery featured avant-garde works from Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme; the third-floor boardroom was the setting for Thomas Hart Benton’s monumental, ten-panel melting-pot mural, America Today, populated with a lively hinterlands-to-metropolis “panoply of pre-Depression American types, from flappers to farmers, steel workers to stock market tycoons”; and the walls of the seventh-floor cafeteria were graced with Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco’s dynamic earth-toned frescoes, Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood.
Weekday evenings, in sessions at 5:20 and 8:20 p.m., for the convenience of students arriving after work, New School classrooms were abuzz with intellectual éminences grises. Horace M. Kallen lectured on Western civilization and contemporary politics; Sidney Hook and Roswell Barnes tackled sociopolitical issues; Freda Kirchwey, Robert Frost, Waldo Frank, Gorham B. Munson, and Francis Fergusson took up poetic and literary banners; Meyer Levin, twenty years before Anne Frank, taught marionette design; Julian Huxley expounded on heredity and the environment; and Frank Lloyd Wright “preached” (his word) the virtues of “a truly organic American architecture that grows out of the inherent characteristics of materials and ‘unfolds’ from within its own cultural and natural conditions.”
The performing arts enjoyed two different forums. On the first floor, drawing upon his background in theatre and set design, Joseph Urban created an oval auditorium with a lofty, arched proscenium; and in the basement was a hexagonal room, each wall painted a different color, fitted at the center with a circular, sunken dance stage surrounded by a raised seating area. For this underground haven, Henry Cowell, who taught twentieth-century music at the New School, and Louis Horst, serving on the dance committee, asked critic John Martin to create and moderate a course: “Dance Forms and Their Development…from folk and ritual dances” through “contemporary American modernism.” Doris Humphrey presided as lecture-demonstrator for the first class in the series.
On Tuesday evening, February 20, it was Martha Graham’s turn to be guest speaker. After directing the Dance Group to “move on a breath” as an example of her technique, Graham introduced three dances, Heretic, Bacchanale, and Primitive Mysteries, in which she did not perform, deeming Urban’s round platform not “a proper stage.” The twelve dancers “clad in sweaters,” arranged themselves in two rows on the floor behind her, and, with no effort to conceal her reluctance, Graham, “wearing a long tunic, and her hair…tied back from her forehead,” asked if there were any questions.
Unbeknownst to Graham, choreographer Michel Fokine, the émigré former Mariinsky Theatre and Ballets Russes dancer, was in the audience. Living in New York City for the past decade, in 1921 he had opened a ballet school on Riverside Drive, and three years later founded his American Ballet Company, a successful enterprise with performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, Carnegie Hall, Lewisohn Stadium, and tours around the country, recently at the Hollywood Bowl.
Michel Fokine, ca. 1930s.
To Fokine, Martha Graham’s body language that night—posture stiff, wrists tight, fists clenched—resembled “a fanatical prophetess,” and her “girls [sic]…flying and walking on flat feet…arms either hanging limply or raised with elbows turned outward…chest[s]…extended forward in a decided manner or caved inward…expressions sad, and even cross, all the time” were “ugly in form and hateful in spirit…[expressing] a somewhat ‘barking’ movement of the torso and the head.”
As the talk-back proceeded, Fokine sat quietly, keeping sentiments about “those barking girls!” to himself, until “one of the ladies [in the audience] asked Miss Graham, ‘What is your opinion of ballet?’ ”
She answered flatly, “I accept the ballet as one form of dancing. I like, for instance, Pavlowa; especially where Pavlowa bows after her dances. She bows very well.” At this shocking stab of condescension to the beloved woman who had been his first partner, and for whom he choreographed The Dying Swan to the music of Saint-Saëns in 1907, Michel Fokine’s heart was seized with the anguished memory of “the greatest dancer of this age, who had just died [three weeks prior, on January 31], so dear to all of us.”
