Dance
McDonagh, Don
Mazursky shows no sense that the pursuit of unequal stereos doesn't help to sustain an egalitarian society. He views America as a land where you can buy whatever you want, and be whatever you...
...At least in Russia," Vlad laments, "you knew who the enemy was" -- an interesting line about paranoia and the comfort of certainty, had Mazursky bothered to examine it...
...The imaginative intensity that illuminates her best work is missing...
...The sisters as adults relive episodes from the recent and distant past and try to resolve their present relationships...
...They are so good, while the most recent work is so derivatively thin...
...It sounds inconsequential, and it w a s . More substantial fare was included in most of the programs...
...After she is chosen she is tied with a winding rope and tossed about from one group of men to another...
...The piece is divided into three sections -- "Hymn to the Virgin," "Crucifixus" and "Hosanna...
...In her own version, the story of human sacrifice to assure successful growth of the tribe's plantings is told with a certain arbitrary brutalness that is a little shocking...
...Moscow on the Hudson views New York, in short, as the best of all possible worlds -- a world not just according to Ronald Reagan, as some have charged about the film's politics, but a world according to Mayor Koch...
...Miss Graham continues to choreograph new works, but they seem to be done more from memory than out of the passionate conviction that marks her great dances...
...New York, N.Y...
...It gives one the sense of rape rather than rite...
...I I I 5/18/84 ] I 18 May 1984:303...
...The forms were originally created by Noguchi for "Alcestis", though the program omits mention of the earlier work...
...I n " Seraphic Dialogue" some of the new costumes were abandoned after their first appearance for a return to the originals...
...These were repertory pieces from the decades of the thirties, forties and fifties...
...What had been a rather tentative "Primitive Mysteries" became a forceful dance in the latter parts of the season...
...There are almost no WASPS in the film and nary a view of the hinterlands...
...This season she offered" Phaedra' s Dream" and" The Rite of Spring...
...Christine Dakin and Larry White were a very effective pair in "Errand," and Jean Louis Morin showed a strong intense character whenever he appeared...
...Overall it lacks any strong imaginative impulse...
...Embattled Garden," dating from 1958, is another examination of close relations, this time the biblical Adam, Eve, someone called "The Stranger," and Lilith (some legends hold her to have been Adam's first wife...
...A solitary woman in white enters in the midst of fourteen women in dark blue dresses...
...It has all the feelilng of rite and ceremony that the larger scaled "Rite of Spring" so conspicuously lacked...
...Goddamned insane country," he yells, and calls New York "brutal, crazy...
...his girlfriend puts down Italy...
...Creatively, Miss Graham is plagiarizing herself with her new works, and not very well...
...Overall the company is strong, perhaps not the powerhouse that it was in the early sixties, but one that is rest~onsive to Miss Graham's needs and has demonstrated a car,o,-,ty for growth...
...It is only a small thing, but the sum total of such moments and the intensity with which each gesture grows organically out of the last, makes the piece powerfully effective...
...Individuals like Takako Asakawa, Peggy Lyman, and Yuriko Kimura as the ranking female dancers in the company were in excellent form, as was newcomer Maxine Sherman in "Garden" as Lilith...
...In Mazursky's universe, here actually means New York...
...All of her new works have been costumed by Halston, and some of the standard repertory pieces as well...
...When Leopold Stokowski introduced it to the United States with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the thirties he asked Leonid Massine to choreograph it...
...Little is clear but nothing happens by chance...
...Deaths and Entrances" examines the hothouse lives of the Bront'~ sisters with brooding intensity if not complete clarity...
...There is no sense of inevitability or fore-ordination but the workings of chance...
...neither Main Street nor most of the American working class (remember Silkwood) are Seen here, nor does anyone except a single Soviet Jewish refugee appear to have any religious attachments -- Protestant, Catholic, or Russian Orthodox -- despite their ethnic identities...
...The bishops' appeal for reasonable but nonetheless bold initiatives to counter the arms race could not come at a more appropriate time...
...The discovery of Miss Graham on stage standing amidst her dancers inevitably provoked audiences to demonstrations of warmth and enthusiasm during the curtain calls...
...That was a mistake since it had added immeasurably to the enclosed hermetic character of the house in which they were living...
...Commonweal, May 20, 1983 llissues for $9 - OFFER FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave...
...In keeping with Miss Graham's long-standing penchant for having her female dancers covered from throat to instep and her male dancers wearing the equivalent of the briefest swim trunks, Halston has produced costumes that conform stylishly to the requirements, but show little imagination...
...The "Chosen Maiden" was danced by the then younger Miss Graham who gave, by all accounts, one of the great performances of her career...
...Miss Graham simply endures, doing her work and allowing herself to be rediscovered every time another generation comes along...
...The decision was a wise one...
...In the sixties the structural purity o f " Primitive Mysteries" was a revelation to tha t generation...
...The large intrusive goblet functions as a trump card and gives the triumph to her...
...Much the same could be said for "Phaedra's Dream" choreographed to"Lux Aeterna" by George Crumb...
...The earliest piece presented was "'Primitive Mysteries" which in 1931 was one of Miss Graham's earliest successes...
...Deaths and Entrances" is very much like a dream where fantasy logic rules...
...Errand Into The Maze," 'Seraphic Dialogue," and "Diversion of Angels" were other strong additions from repertor_y that gave the Graham programs their disturbingly mixed character...
...She remains clearly in charge of her company, which offered a three-week season at New Yor~ State Theater in early spring...
...The danger is that both capitals will drift right by the present "window of opportunity...
...The set consists of three monumental stone shapes: one right-angled, another inclined, and the third a large wheel...
...Phaedra's initial mistake was to conceive an illicit passion for her stepson Hypolytus, and was the subject of Miss Graham's previous and stronger work titled "Phaedra...
...until we've pursued our current buildup or demonstrated our will by Congressional approval of the MX or deployment of the missiles in Europe next December, the Soviets until European peace demonstrations take their toll or America's '84 presidential election is over...
...Only once is a real question raised, when Vlad, predictably, gets mugged...
...Each has several channels incised on its face...
...each the group marches Commonweal: 302 slowly from the stage In unison and returns the same way...
...Mazursky's tired, huddled masses are always first cousins to Bloomingdale's clientele...
...Vlad's black pal puts down the South ("I was a refugee from Alabama once...
...He views America as a land where you can buy whatever you want, and be whatever you want, with no concession to the conflict between economic freedom and social justice that so troubles our politics...
...She becomes, we assume, the first among equals, but the solution is not as important as the telling with its whisps of memory and flashes of insight...
...Arch Lauterer's set was kept for the most part, but the large curtained window that dwarfs the dancers was omitted...
...The Stravinsky "Rite" has exercised an incredible attraction to choreographers, starting with Nijinsky who produced the first ballet to the score...
...These latter would be just as well left alone...
...and Mazursky -- in an interview at the film's release -- for good measure put down California, too: "There's more happening in an hour here than there is in Los Angeles in a month...
...Moscow on the Hudson doesn't so much contrast Russia and America as New York and the rest of the world...
...On the one hand, new life is being ' pumped into the movement for arms control...
...It is Lilith and "The Stranger" who disrupt the innocent garden in which Adam and Eve dwell...
...On the other, there is also the danger of irreversible steps in escalating the arms race . . . . Will the two superpowers continue to stall for advantage - - the U.S...
...Despite its aggressive tone the work has some beautiful moments for the corps...
...At the end, the most driven of the sisters places a glass goblet on a game board where her sisters have been moving odd shaped pieces...
...DON McDONAGH The Bishops' Pastoral O n every side of the nuclear issue, we are seeing new uncertainties and a sense that everything must be thought through again...
...The movie's poster, appropriately, takes off from the brazen New Yorker cover that collapses the United States to Manhattan and California...
...Miss Graham is still a force as a master of dramatic dance, a form of theater that is once again being taken up seriously by a generation of choreographers that was weaned on minimal dance...
...Now the power of emotionally laden gesture has new meaning...
...My nomination would be "Punch and Judy...
...Now twenty years later, Phaedra dreams of this same stepson engaged in a homosexual eacounter with someone known simply as "The Stranger...
...Departing from her usual custom of commissioning music, she selected two scores from repertory...
...I ' d rather be here," Vlad acknowledges...
...If Miss Graham were a building, some government agency would have already affixed a commemorative plaque to her...
...He escapes serious injury, but bruised and bloodied, rampages against America in a coffee shop afterward...
...In ohe of those stunningly simple but provocative gestures, Miss Graham suggests a readiness for transgression by having Eve allow Lilith to tie her formerly loose hair with a ribbon...
...We have in its stead a kit of dance movements that is Grahamesque in outline but not in content...
...From the vantage point of ninety she is surprised by little...
...10016 Please send the next 6 months of Commonweal to: Name Address City, State, Zip [] I prefer a full year subscription at $24...
...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...
...Dance NARTHA GRAHAN A MASTER AT NINETY M ARTHA GRAHAM celebrated her ninetieth birthday on May 11, 1984...
...Who knows, for her next season Miss Graham may decide to revive some of her humorous dances...
...They spend a great deal of time thrashing about while Phaedra dashes to and fro quite upset...
...The dancing of the company grew more assured as the season went on...
...Miss Graham's gestures and vocabulary are there...
...It has retained its powerful impact because of the rigorous logic of its construction...
...Instead, another exile, a giant from Leningrad, across the coffee counter, straightens Vlad out by asking him where he would rather be...
...The Chosen One" is plucked out by the Shaman the way someone would pull a grape from a cluster...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
