Martha Graham, page 40
This mélange of ten characters in search of childhood memories, “dreams of romance,” and “hatreds bred of longings” was layered into “Doom-eager”/Deaths and Entrances—Graham wrote, without attribution—by her “imagination kindled at antique fires,” appropriating a nineteenth-century critic’s phrase referring to “the imperfect genius,” William Blake. Accustomed by now to Graham’s literary machinations, critic Margaret Lloyd alertly understood that “the work…uses the Brontës and their milieu as a flying-field, a starting-off place into the land of common experience in the heart of man…This is the secret of Martha Graham’s greatness.”
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Reality and imagination are no longer two distinct experiences.
—Edwin Denby, reviewing Deaths and Entrances in The New York Herald Tribune, December 27, 1943
That was the operant distinction when Deaths and Entrances opened at the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre, a house “packed…to the last inch of standing room,” on Sunday, December 26, 1943. It was re-presented—after Martha Graham heard the audience applaud and overcame her apprehensions—on January 9. Four decades later, Erick Hawkins spoke uneasily about his part. “ ‘The Dark Beloved’—that was me,” he told David Sears. “I was pretty tempestuous and stormy” at the time, Hawkins continued, with a tinge of bitterness, calling himself Heathcliff to latch on to a fleshly identity because Graham had over-choreographed his puppet-role and it “had no resolution.” Hawkins, standing like a marionette with cut strings, arms limply at his sides, and Merce Cunningham, identically attired and expressionless, often seemed to be attendants rather than suitors, assuming a succession of formalized poses, one critic observed, “more in the nature of abstractions than people.”
The Deaths and Entrances set—suggesting the interior of an old house with three dark, blocky pieces of furniture and “a huge curtained window with the curtains permanently drawn”—maneuvers the viewer into anticipating a traditional theatrical narrative; but within minutes the picture devolves into an impressionistic dreamscape of suspended time and boundless space. Martha Graham anticipates this desired effect in her program note reference to “the secret life of the heart.” Like the heart, the dance keeps beating according to its biological imperative. And, like the endangered heart, there will be arrhythmic instances from which it will need to recover.
Strings and woodwinds, familiar adversaries in Graham dances, with brass grace notes, battle for dominance, the whole knit together by Helen Lanfer’s thunderous, chord-driven piano, starting in knotty menace, hopping and segueing into slowed-down clarinet and oboe, while the “Emily” figure, in black, separated from her sisters in gray, defines her solitude, “thronged with memories of love’s disappointments and rivalries.” The sisters’ “flame burns fiercely,” George Beiswanger wrote, “but the heat is turned within, where hopes and fears, longings and rages continually re-create an inner, almost mythological world.”
When the Dark Beloved, Erick Hawkins, appears, it is more intrusion than arrival; “Emily’s” expression is pained, unwelcoming. The Poetic Beloved, Merce Cunningham, a distraction, not a respite, draws reluctant “Emily” out of her introspection. The men plead; she agonizes. Following a stylized fistfight, they await her next move, squaring off close to her on either side yet projecting vast distances. She breaks the symmetry, turns her back, shuns them, and sallies forth. Duets, when they occur, are initiated by perfunctory handoffs from one so-called beloved to the other, Graham exorcising emotions from “adolescently tender” to “terrifying and horrible.”
At the opposite extreme, the three remembered sisters, in flouncy pinafores and skirts and gay headbands, flow in and flit out like woodland sprites. Their light-footed entrances, vestiges of a simpler past, disturb Emily rather than inspire her. In the time of the present, Martha Graham degenerates into an anguished, trapped maenad, careening this way and that, facing an indeterminate future. She dances parallel to, rather than with, her sisters, unable to accept solace, “giv[ing] animation and rhythm to the ebbing of energy” with liquid variations in speed and emphasis, meticulously calculated and reading as spontaneous.
When the Dark Beloved and the Poetic Beloved return, Graham is drawn to one, pulled by the other; neither man satisfies. Finding no refuge in human love, at wit’s end, she arrives alone at stillness.
She grasps in uplifted hands a glass chalice, grail of art and nurturing vessel of the Divine Feminine.
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Deaths and Entrances barely launched, Martha Graham’s agitated attention alighted upon another dark story about three sisters’ rivalries and divided affections. “I am reading some about and in King Lear,” she told Erick Hawkins. “I think I will have to do something that stems from that some day.” In the Bennington library, she also found “Freud and the Future,” Thomas Mann’s tribute essay concluding that “the analytic revelation is a revolutionary force…Once roused and on the alert, it cannot be put to sleep again.”
Hawkins’s choreographic enterprises continued to pursue romantic ends, his planning notes and sketches glorifying a certain type of ardent, demonstrative fellow who shrugged off control of his feelings to chase the object of his affection. Graham, on the other hand, preferred to examine the fickle forces dividing women from men, the most potent of these, in her view, being the allure of art-making: “I wish I could tell you in some way that you could never be a stone around my neck as you say. I am afraid I might be around yours,” she warned her lover, “and that is I think a deep cause of trouble between us.”
26
Interlude—Appalachian Spring
If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where are Hamlet and Lycidas?
—James McLaverty, Studies in Biography (1984),
citing F. W. Bateson, Essays in Critical Dissent (1972)
…to which we add, in the spirit of dance becoming modern, “and where (furthermore, when) is Appalachian Spring?”
To aficionados and devotees, Appalachian Spring has become familiar, over the past eight decades, by holding steadfast in the repertory of the Martha Graham Dance Company. The musical score by Aaron Copland, its “harmonic treatment, based chiefly on open fourths and fifths” infused with Shaker and folk tunes, “evok[ing] our sparse and dissonant rural tradition rather than the thick suavities of our urban manner,” sets the comforting, beloved tone. When the piece was born at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1944, during wartime, it staked a claim in the culture at large with a potent mixture of sepia American nostalgia and future-facing hope—real or imagined—to keep the dance in the Zeitgeist. As our current tortured age, like every age, seeks definition through art, the work’s arms remain open.
Martha Graham imposed her unchanging will to change upon Appalachian Spring. To select two black-and-white filmed versions of the piece with Graham starring in both—to sit as a spectator before the premiere in the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium, and the orchestrated Dance on Film of 1958 directed by Peter Glushanok—and oscillate between them, is to realize, and gratefully accept, that her classic is defined by layers of impermanence.
Onto Isamu Noguchi’s quiet, deftly framed set, bare wood outlines of a peak-roofed house, a porch with narrow rocking chair, a wall with a bench that is also a church pew, a stylized tree stump doubling as a pulpit platform, and, across the yard, a fence, the dramatis personae come in “Very Slowly,” as Copland demands. The processional, like “Steps in the Street,” presages a lull before the storm. Erick Hawkins, at thirty-six, in tie and black jacket, is the original 1944 “Husbandman.” Stuart Hodes, at thirty-four, would become the more informal “Husband” in 1958. This distinction is key to the origin of the dance, because the former name meant householder and tiller of the soil, not necessarily a married man. Martha Graham is, of course, the “Bride,” also dressed in somber black; fourteen years later, having married Hawkins in 1948, she would be the beige-garbed “Wife.”
Martha Graham (center) and Erick Hawkins (right) in Appalachian Spring, with May O’Donnell (left, seated) and Marjorie Mazia, Yuriko, and Nina Fonaroff, ca. 1944. (Photograph by Arnold Eagle)
Merce Cunningham created the role of the “Revivalist”; Bertram Ross took on the long dark coat and wide-brimmed hat for the later iteration, “The Preacher.” Elegant May O’Donnell embodied the wise, mature “Pioneering Woman,” succeeded, as the “Pioneer Woman,” by Matt Turney. The four maiden “Followers”—Nina Fonaroff, Pearl Lang, Marjorie Mazia, and Yuriko—became known as “Worshippers.” In 1958, Yuriko remained, joined by Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, and Miriam Cole.
There is eye contact, but an absence of intimacy, while the paths of “Bride” and “Husbandman” diverge, she to sit within the home, back tensely turned, guarded by the Pioneering Woman. The Bride will sneak an occasional glance over her right shoulder toward the downstage fence that feels miles away, where her man stands, crooked arm resting upon the top rail, appearing composed, gazing with the intimation of a smile over the expanse of plains.
The Followers awaken, into a round of deep planting and reaped harvest, reminiscent of the Rite from a long ago Spring. The Revivalist’s flock inspires the Husbandman to burst from reverie, demonstrating to his reclusive lady—with slides into near-splits, kicks that arrow upward, hands on hips, arms akimbo, and knees practically touching his chin—that he is “rarin’ to go.” Yet, when he lays claim to the Bride, takes her arm, pulls her from shelter, descends the home steps, and they hit the ground together, they are met by a huge minor chord. She heads over to the fence before the couple retreats to make way for the Revivalist instigating his Followers into a square dance manic with primitive pageantry.
Twelve minutes have passed. It is time for the maenad, Martha Graham. She enters the hurricane she has made and, spiraling toward its dark heart, becomes lost, out of sync with the resolved Husbandman standing by the fence, protection against the wilderness and gateway to the rest of life. A jarring move, the Bride cradles an imagined newborn, only to hand it off to the Pioneering Woman who joins with the Revivalist to greet and embrace Bride and groom in courtly fashion. The men shake hands solemnly, bowing in obeisance.
With Copland’s rousing rendering of “Simple Gifts,” first performed and sung (or “received”) in 1848 by Elder Joseph Brackette of Alfred, Maine, “turning about with his coat-tails a-flying” in a Shaker worship service “Quick Dance,” the clouds of decorum lift, allowing the couple to proclaim and advertise their love, in equal measure, for each other and to the world. Graham permits herself a wide smile in the premiere version of the pas de deux; fourteen years later, a reserve brought by age has taken over. In both performances, the lyrics of uplift, reverence, and instruction return us to the bedrock of Martha Graham’s purposeful choreography:
’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
’Tis the gift to come down, where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning, turning we come round right.
The palette darkens. The Revivalist lurches about, falling to his knees, flailing. His “wedding sermon segues into fire-and-brimstone threats that have more than an edge of hysteria to them.” He points at the couple, warning against temptations of the flesh. “The Pioneering Woman…remembers and sympathizes with [their] dreams,” and, arms around the Husbandman, she presages the “disappointments and harsh demands and dangers to be found in the still-untamed land. The horizon may be wide and endless,” her gestures say, “but it also is empty [and] the encroaching night is not necessarily beneficent.”
Her message lingers in the Husbandman’s thoughts; tempted, he looks longingly beyond the fence. Will the homestead be a refuge from the necessary storm of their coming lives, or an inhibiting haven? The reprise of “Simple Gifts” provides a clue; he goes to the Bride, encourages her to revisit her twisting, omnidirectional steps, heartened by her doom-eagerness.
Erick Hawkins (left) and Martha Graham (right) are greeted by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (center), following the debut performance of Appalachian Spring at the Library of Congress, October 30, 1944.
In the waning moments of Appalachian Spring, desire and reticence are writ large in the body of the Wife/Bride. Will today’s amorous promises become satisfied in tomorrow’s “promised land”? The decisive Husbandman/Husband, mounting the few stairs to the home, crosses the threshold, and stands behind the rocking chair, waiting.
Martha Graham pauses, immobile, inhabiting the stillness she always loves, and runs her palms down the front and sides of her dress, smoothing anxieties of wonderment and anticipation. She is the Chosen One chosen by him; what will the choice be for herself?
She spins rightward and enters the house.
In the 1944 premiere of Appalachian Spring, she sits deliberately, Erick Hawkins places his right palm gently on her chest, just below her shoulder, and the lights fade.
Fourteen years later, Stuart Hodes places his hand upon her shoulder, their eyes meet, she lays her right hand atop his, and, with her left arm extended, gestures, up—and away.
27
Dark Meadow
Martha Graham’s succinct program note, a premise for the action to come, tells the spectator that Dark Meadow “is concerned with the adventure of seeking. This dance is the reenactment of the Mysteries which attend that adventure.” Four tributary themes to be traversed in the journey, named separately, she says, will converge: “Remembrance of the ancestral footsteps…Terror of loss…Ceaselessness of love…” and “Recurring ecstasy of the flowering branch.” The music is a double quartet for strings and winds by Carlos Chávez; artistic collaboration by Isamu Noguchi; costumes are by Edythe Gilfond, and lighting by Jean Rosenthal. The dramatic figures—designated as “She of the Ground” (May O’Donnell), “He Who Summons” (Erick Hawkins), “They Who Dance Together” (Pearl Lang, Natanya Neumann, Marjorie Mazia, David Zellmer, Yuriko, Mark Ryder, Ethel Winter, and Douglas Watson)—are led by the choreographer-protagonist, “One Who Seeks” (Martha Graham).
In the pre-Socratic poet Empedocles’s Fragments 119-20-21, Graham found an image of “the Soul having fallen from the region of light into the roofed-in Cave, the Dark Meadow of Até.” Here and now, we are seated in a theatre, in the thrall of Martha Graham sweeping us to a barren realm where the red-robed One Who Seeks has spent an eternity. Voices of oboe, bassoon, clarinet, and flute vacillate from harmonious to dire; processional, sadly dissonant, they push and pull her among a quartet of anthropomorphic plinths.
He Who Summons makes an entrance, after minutes that could be days or eons, into the space around him. During the summoner’s sprawling-limbed, tribal display-dance, prideful breastbone uplifted, the seeker recedes, eyes downcast, maintaining an estranged demeanor while the festive, ecstatic ensemble performs a rustic zarabanda. We who have become attuned to Graham’s postures of passivity know she may appear distanced but remains empowered.
Erick Hawkins (He Who Summons) and Graham (One Who Seeks), in Dark Meadow, 1946. (Photograph, 1948, by Philippe Halsman)
The string-driven duet of summoner and seeker is a struggle of opposites rather than a pas de deux. She faces away from him. He tugs and restrains rather than embraces her, lifts a plastique-statue rather than a pliant body. After strained irresolution come retreats to separate terrains; she spins downstage left, he hurtles upstage right.
The lithe, statuesque She of the Ground, the couple’s green-caped foil, is a mediating force across the landscape, head held high, arms extended parallel to the earth, archaic feet planted, high-stepping decorously. At intervals, she will kneel in prayer to the originating soil, and defer to the frenetic soliloquies of the wandering One Who Seeks, taking tremulous turns, trapped in an exorcism.
One of the four obelisk-stelae is a heightened triangle, at its peak a skeletal cross, inverted dagger-like armatures draped with black cloth. The impassive summoner hides there, invisible to the seeker. A compassless soul, trembling and blinded, she arrives at the altar of his temple and begins to pull down the fabric. It unspools from the tombstone. He is revealed—to us, not her.
She teases the material out, unrolling it on the ground. In a reprise of Lamentation, the One Who Seeks gathers the cloth Lethe into thick folds, and, prostrate, eagerly shrouding herself in the garment she has fashioned, assumes monstrous, inchoate shapes.
Accustomed to Graham’s conventions of exposition, development, and recapitulation, we lived in hopes that “They Who Dance Together,” the four couples, would do justice to their typecasting. Alas, we are compelled to witness a masque dance of death, men lifting women pietà-like. We anticipated that the attractive She of the Ground would claim her magnetic role; instead, she becomes the summoner’s second woman, inciting the seeker’s jealous tension.
In their final encounters, we watch He Who Summons and One Who Seeks partnered in a “Postludio” of rough strife entwined in the weeds of the Dark Meadow. The score has darkened. Brief triumphs succumb to reluctant defeats. The two lovers reprise unresolved conflicts and subverted expectations: Holding on to each other for dear life, then letting go—embrace or bondage? His palms, fingertips joined, meet upon the flesh of her brow—permitting sight, or predicting blindness? His hand laid on her hip provides then relinquishes support when she twists away—freedom or abandonment? When her body is crouched below his, is he protector—or dominator? When she turns her head and gazes out and to the right during his ardent embrace, is she imagining their intimate future—or, ever the soloist, rebuffing his seductions?
