Martha Graham, page 28
The diminutive, balding man in a business suit—Fokine looked to Martha Graham like a banker—was compelled to speak up, and raised his hand. “It seems, sir, that you have a question?” she said.
“Yes,” he replied. “In working with your girls, do you have in mind the development of natural movement, or do you disregard naturalness in your art?” Silence shrouded the room. Graham stood still as a statue. Fokine repeated the question, pantomiming the movements: “In order to lift the arms, your girls lift first their shoulders, then their elbows, and only after that, the entire arm. In life it happens differently,” he said. “If I want to take my hat off the hanger…I simply lift my entire arm and take the object desired.”
“But still, you lift your shoulder to lift your arm,” Graham said. “Your movement should come from here.” She touched the center of her body, between her chest and her stomach. Mimicking her gesture, Fokine shook his head and countered that “nothing unusual happens ‘here.’ ” After another palpable pause, Graham scoffed, “You know nothing about the movement of the body!”
How dare this “young dancer” address him thus, Fokine thought—he, who had spent “over forty years” blending Duncanesque movement into the “old ballet” to dissolve inhibitions and fixity of form, and inculcate ebullience, freedom, and comedic irreverence. “Why is the ballet terrible?” he pressed on, returning to Graham’s earlier statement.
She took the fifth position in defiance. “How can one dance a Grecian dance from this position?”
To which Fokine invoked his adaptations from antiquity. “I myself have choreographed Daphnis and Chloe, and Narcisse, and Echo,” he said, “the kinds of ballets composed of natural movements and on the lines of the purest Grecian art. You criticize the ballet without knowing anything about it.” The uneasy moderator, John Martin, looking at his watch, intervened. “Mr. Fokine,” he said, “you cannot continue this argument. The ballet has its own field, and modern dancing its own, also. Ballet has had its chance to express itself during three centuries, so the modern dancing has a right to express itself in three weeks.”
Hearing her interlocutor’s name invoked, “I did not know that I was speaking with Mr. Fokine,” Martha Graham said. “How she would have spoken with me if I had disclosed my identity, I do not know,” Fokine mused. As far as Graham was concerned, the discussion was over. “We will never understand one another,” she said, insofar as what “ballet” meant or should mean.
Based upon the beliefs Fokine laid out in his Five Principles (1914), the two dancers should not have been arguing that night. In the book, he “admits [into what he called the New Ballet] the conventional use of gesture,” advancing “from the expressiveness of the individual body to the expressiveness of a group of bodies,” and “refusing [that ballet should] be a slave either of music or of scenic decoration.” With twenty-twenty hindsight, during the coincidence of a spring 1977 weeklong Fokine Festival at the Metropolitan Opera House with a new season of the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Clive Barnes pointed out the irony of that 1931 confrontation. The New School sparring match was “a triumph of misunderstanding”; rather, he wrote, “Miss Graham, more than any other contemporary choreographer, is [Massine’s] spiritual godchild.”
Blanche Yurka, 1931.
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Actor-producer Robert Henderson joined forces with actress Blanche Yurka in Sophocles’s Electra, and Yurka turned to Martha Graham and Louis Horst to create three solo interludes for the play. Graham leaped at the opportunity to participate because the tragedy held familial meaning. A childless, unmarried woman (alektra is Greek for “unbedded”), one of three sisters, yearns for the return of her adored brother, Orestes, sent abroad for his safety since infancy, and “refuses to put [her] father’s death to rest,” vowing “never / will I leave off lamenting, / never.” In Electra’s unrequited grief for Agamemnon, she identifies with the nightingale, a bird that was once a woman, and she no longer gives birth to children, but “to wars in [her] melancholy soul,” stubborn mourning songs—aien—with breast-beating refrains.
Coming off an extended run in Gilbert Seldes’s adaptation of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, to take on Electra, Blanche Yurka had earned a reputation as “one of the foremost artistes of the American stage” with a talent for playing “iron-willed women.” Born of Czech parents in 1887, and growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Blanche moved with her family to New York City to study voice and ballet, and, at sixteen, debuted as a flower girl and “Grail Bearer” in the American premiere of Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera. Under the aegis of David Belasco, she shifted to stage acting, starting as an understudy in William C. (Agnes’s father) de Mille’s play, The Warrens of Virginia in 1907. She appeared in numerous shows on Broadway, creating a sensation at the age of thirty-five in 1922 as Queen Gertrude opposite John Barrymore’s forty-two-year-old Hamlet, directed by Arthur Hopkins. Yurka also tackled demanding Ibsen roles, directing and starring as Hedda in Hedda Gabler; Gina Ekdahl in The Wild Duck, which she also directed; and Ellida Wangel in The Lady from the Sea.
“Blanche Yurka plunges this correspondent into adjectival poverty by the richness and surety of her performances,” wrote John Anderson in the New York Post. “She renders me further destitute with the slow tension of building a character before your eyes.”
For the text of her Electra, Yurka chose the 1927 translation by the King’s College Classics lecturer and scholar, John Tressider Sheppard, premiered at Cambridge University. At the top of the title page of her typescript, Yurka wrote, “All Chorus speeches spoken by ‘Woman,’ ” reattributing every passage throughout the fifty-six pages calling for the Chorus—either speaking in unison, or its five members declaiming singly—into a dominant female voice. Sophocles’s Electra, unlike her counterparts in Aeschylus’s and Euripides’s versions, calls her female companions “citizenesses”—a community of women—“employing politides, the surprising feminine form of the noun, in Greek, so rare, so improbable in fifth-century texts.”
As “the Dancer” in Electra, Martha Graham set three solos on herself. The first, “Prelude [or Invocation],” signaled the appearance at Mycenae of Orestes, accompanied by his silent friend Pylades of Phocis, and Paedagogus (the old man) onto the plaza before the palace of stepfather-usurper Aegisthus; the second, “Entrance [of Clytemnestra],” Graham’s “fury dance,” heralded the imperious “Queen,” with a warning from the “Chorus” that “Vengeance is coming—her hands like an army / her feet like a host”; and the third was a “Lamentation for Electra [Over the Urn]” “supposedly containing the ashes of Orestes,” his ploy, feigning death, to return for revenge.
Virginia Woolf might as well have been referring to Martha Graham when she wrote, in her tribute to “the Greek tongue” that “[Sophocles’s] Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that…Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm…spare and bare as it is…dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled.” When the play began a three-city college tour on May 18, 1931, at Jordan Hall in Boston sponsored by the Harvard Dramatic Club, H. T. Parker of the Evening Transcript noticed Martha Graham’s “extra-illustration [through] taut stylization of movement [in] trying contrast to the rest of the play.”
At the McCarter Theatre in Princeton the following night, an unbylined writer for Theatre Guild Magazine also observed “the peculiar stylizations of Miss Graham,” her disjunctive movements reminiscent of Primitive Mysteries. “Her clear percussion seemed a world apart” from the measured verbal pace of the play. The dance interludes came across, to this critic, like “separate thing[s] entirely. Set like an alien in the midst of naturalism,” Graham, “with her devastatingly obvious attempt at counterpoint,” distracted the audience from “the poetic choral passages.”
Perhaps, the writer speculated, Graham identified so strongly with the heroine that she “chose the clear path and herself became Electra,” raising the possibility that in a coming season she would mount her own production of the play, with herself in the starring role.
Electra completed its out-of-town run with a weeklong engagement at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. When Yurka and Henderson arrived at the Selwyn Theatre on Broadway for four matinees of Electra over ten days in January 1932, Graham had long since quit the show, replaced by a former “Isadorable,” Anna Duncan.
Twenty-six years later, presenting the evening-length epic ballet Clytemnestra, Martha Graham insisted to Agnes de Mille that “she didn’t know where [it] came from. ‘It has no antecedents, no roots,’ ” the choreographer said bluntly. “ ‘It is like an orchid blooming in the air, a parasite on my own life.’ ”
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Composer and harpist Carlos Salzedo encouraged Martha Graham to apply for a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, established in 1925 by Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their elder son, who had died at seventeen. The mission of the foundation was to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding.” True to this stipulation, Fellows were required to spend their terms outside of the United States.
Salzedo had been drawn to the dance through his friendship with Vaslav Nijinsky, whose physicality inspired the composer to develop ways to liberate the dynamic potential of his demanding instrument—“which part of the fingertip to use, how to attack the note, what speed should the finger close into the palm after sounding.” A founding member of Claire Reis’s League of Composers, Salzedo first met Graham there, and also knew her through their mutual patron, Irene Lewisohn of the Neighborhood Playhouse. During the twenties and thirties—accompanied by his wife, Lucile Lawrence, also a harpist—Salzedo was often present at Graham’s recitals.
Sympathetic to Graham’s financial difficulties, Salzedo appealed on her behalf to the impresario and producer of the Metropolitan Opera Musical Bureau, F. C. Coppicus: Would he be willing to manage Graham and her Dance Group for a national tour? Coppicus’s reply was that she would first have to test her box office viability on a European junket, an enterprise the American danseuse had never attempted. Salzedo then turned to another friend, Henry Allen Moe, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, only to discover that the institution’s commitment to “the artistic power of this country” did not, as yet, extend to financial support for the dance.
However, Moe consented to consider an application from Martha Graham in May 1931, requesting that she “please give [him] a list of persons who know your work in the field of creative dancing? I want to consult with them.” The door was opened for testimonial letters from Graham’s sprawling network of collaborators, sponsors, critics, and admirers. Leopold Stokowski, Alexander Smallens, Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, Otto Luening, Nellie Cornish, Irene Lewisohn, Rita Wallach Morgenthau, Blanche Walton, Alvin Johnson, Edith Isaacs, Dorothy Lawton, John Martin, Mary F. Watkins, and Mary Hunter Austin attested to Graham’s standing among American modern artists as the living, breathing rationale for the field of the dance to become the next initiative in the culture of philanthropy—and the philanthropy of culture.
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In her annual summer custom, Martha Graham went west for a month to her mother’s. At a dinner in Santa Barbara, Graham met the photographer Imogen Cunningham, visiting from Oakland. Born in Portland, Oregon, the fifth of ten children, named by her father after the cross-dressing daughter of King Cymbeline, and growing up in Port Angeles, Washington, Imogen graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, apprenticed with photographer Edward S. Curtis—platinum-print chronicler of the monumental The North American Indian—and studied chemical photographic lab technique in Dresden. Married, and the mother of three, at forty-eight she was on the brink of a career retrospective at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.
Just as Martha Graham professed that Denishawn and the Greenwich Village Follies were faded from her memory, Imogen Cunningham had moved beyond gauzy, soft-focus pictorialism and was obsessed with close-in, clinical detail. Both artists favored the purity of straight, unmanipulated images; Cunningham’s affinity with Neue Sachlichkeit paralleled Graham’s “stoic descriptiveness” in choreography. “She uses her medium…with honesty,” said photographer Edward Weston, in praise of Cunningham, “no tricks, no evasion; a clean cut presentation of the thing itself.”
Imogen Cunningham was no stranger to the dance; in the early 1920s, for her first commercial assignment, she photographed a tableau by Adolf Bolm’s Ballet Intime; in 1929, she documented dance students leaping outdoors at Mills College in Oakland; and her current work explored what she believed to be the most expressive components of the human body—the hands and the feet.
Graham agreed to pose for a private portrait session at her family’s old farm in Goleta Valley against a backdrop of rough-hewn, open barn doors. The sun was bright, “the [day] was hot, the smell unpleasant and the flies bothersome.” Cunningham used her trusty Graflex, a 4x5 single-lens reflex with a focusing hood. Encased in Honduras mahogany and black Moroccan leather, the “RB” (rotating back) model allowing her to shoot vertically or horizontally without having to turn the camera on its side.
Two of Cunningham’s modest Graham portraits were published in the December 1931 issue of Vanity Fair. In a pose from Primitive Mysteries, shaded eyelids and sculpted lips are set into a pale oval face, heels of palms impressed against temples, extended fingertips like a ten-pointed crown. In the other picture, eyes are downcast, hands cupped tentatively around the neckline of a demure frock. The magazine called Martha Graham “the leading exponent of modern choreographic art…[who] has worked to evolve a dance of integrity of movement and idea.”
Cunningham took nearly one hundred pictures of Martha Graham that day, harsh sunlight bringing out planes and contours as the restless camera roamed from head to toes. Graham never looks into the lens, her expressions flickering from meditative and prayerful to ecstatic and pained. Her neck is arched to show bulging vessels and straining muscles. The viewer’s gaze is led downward to a bare shoulder, lifted arms, an unclothed bust and torso. The knitted garment falls away to reveal rounded, raised breasts dappled by daylight. Knees apart beneath the tented folds of a summer frock, hands cup or clasp into the concave fabric. In the floor exercise that began her classes, Graham’s feet, soles nearly touching, rest upon a black cloth or on the ground. Or the skirt is pulled above bended knees to show relaxed, bare legs, the dancer’s head cropped from the frame.
It was one thing for Martha Graham to allow herself to be seen, another to be seen into. After reviewing the contact sheets with Graham from their day en plein air, Imogen Cunningham “suspected the choreographer’s disapproval,” and never heard from her again.
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Tanned and healthy from gardening, sunbathing, and meditating on her mother’s lawn; and obsessed with planning her next dance piece, toward the end of August, Graham joined Horst for their second tour through the New Mexico pueblos. Attuned to solstices and seasons, Graham was fascinated by Indian rituals that attached communal dances to feast days year-round, marking the start of buffalo and antelope hunting, the change of pastures, first planting, the appearance of fruits, and the harvest. Anthony Dorame, a member of the Tesuque Pueblo, has written, “Cycles are circles that travel in straight lines. The seasons come in cycles, yet each season marks the passage of another year. We receive our names, plant, harvest, marry, dance, sing, and are buried in concert with the cycles.”
Sixty miles west of Albuquerque, atop the Great Mesa of the Acoma (in Keresan language, Haak’u, “the place prepared”), the old stories said that the people had lived there for eternity. Unlike kivas, Acoma structures were rectangular, and set within residential areas. Horst and Graham witnessed the Acoma Corn Dance, filled with poetic songs. Their next stop, heading north and east, was the pastoral Laguna (K’awaika) village, nestled into a sandstone slope above the San Jose River. A few blocks from the kiva, the visitors entered the eighteenth-century St. Joseph’s Church. Near an abandoned walled reservoir they saw faint imprints “where the feet of women once wore deep trails into the rock.”
Three of ninety-one poses Martha Graham made for Imogen Cunningham during their daylong outdoor shoot at Goleta, near Santa Barbara, late summer 1931. The “crown of fingers” (top right) is reminiscent of the Virgin’s stance in Primitive Mysteries. (Photographs by Imogen Cunningham)
Mesa Encantada from Acoma Pueblo, 1899. (Photograph by William Henry Jackson)
Further north lay the Zia Pueblo, on the banks of the Jemez River, built upon the “four stratified worlds” underground. At the deepest foundation, the Yellow World, lived Tsityostinako, the original mother, accompanied by her two barefoot daughters, Uchtsiti and Naotsiti. Endowed with the “powers of creation,” they invented the sacred dances for the society: “We are the best dancers,” the Zia say. “Our people raise their knees higher and stamp harder than any Pueblo.” The two sisters led their people upward over time through the intervening Blue-Green and Red Worlds to emerge onto the surface of the White World, an Amazonian place of feminine power, where “the women boasted that they could do without men.”
Heading north from Zia, at the south end of the Cañon de Don Diego, was Jemez (in Towa language, Walatowa, “this is the place”), a people known as “the highlanders of New Mexico, constructing their pueblos on lofty mesas among the yellow pine.” The Jemez were fort-builders with a long history of resistance to the Spanish occupation. By the time of Graham’s visit, the insular community was refusing Anglo admittance during traditional religious ceremonies.
