Past Masters and Schlockmeisters
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance PAST MASTERS AND SCHLOCKMEISTERS BY LAURA A. JACOBS The premiere featured in Martha Graham's three-week engagement at the New York City Center this autumn was Persephone, a dance...
...In contrast to the driving grace of his rhythms and the sensuous bramble of tonalities, her choreography appeared small and not very memorable...
...Calcutta...
...Notwithstanding their heavy contours, Graham's recent works are helium balloons...
...Martha Graham'ssoloofloss from 1930, Lamentation, also lasts about five minutes...
...Dancers stomped and scrambled in a kinetic equivalent of the infant gurgles spliced into Sergei Prokofiev's score...
...hovering in front of them is a metal zigzag structure that might have been intended as foliage but comes of fas a corporate logo...
...The only impressive design element comes into play at the beginning, when the stage floor is covered in yards of black veil and the dancers creep beneath it like dead souls under the earth's skin...
...With its self-consciousness and lack of dance impetus it was more a gussiedup intellectual exercise, an occasion for Marin to depict innocence as ignorance and social interaction as a corrupting force...
...Her technique evinced the grandeur of the psyche while presenting the body in all its craggy, contrary volume...
...A director with African servants attempts to shoot a movie against a small jungle backdrop...
...What began as a journey toward naturalness—Graham's stubborn confrontation with the ground and the grave—has become an iconography rivaled in formality by ballet alone (but lacking ballet's vitality of articulation...
...Cinderella and the Prince were given bland, Dondi-like expressions...
...Eden brims with Adams and Eves tracing out a most conventional sort of writhing design...
...Marin handed us a blunt equation—society is artifice—and refused to show where grace fits in...
...By no stretch of the imagination was this Cendrillon a ballet...
...Yet except for such irrepressible early to midcareer works as Primitive Mysteries, Appalachian Spring and El Penitente, it may come to be thought of less as "modern dance" than as a national art form—treasured for being archaic...
...The fabric doesn't allow for much movement, though, and it is soon cleared away...
...The subject being both mythological and somewhat morbid, it is surprising that Graham didn't get to it sooner...
...The premiere of Eden, the piece Marin choreographed right after Cendrillon, was one of two early dance events in this year's Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Apademy of Music (the other was her Babel, Babel...
...Everyone's hair was orange and biblically flowing...
...They then back off against the brick wall and machine gun fire is heard...
...It is probably not their fault...
...Yet how endless is its one, slow, engulfing wave of sensation...
...Any questions...
...What follows is generic Graham —nicely crafted, insubstantial...
...One long pas de deux could have come from Oh...
...It was made for prophets, not virtuosi...
...Two dancers climb the brick wall...
...The puppet-show aura pervaded the choreography as well...
...On Dance PAST MASTERS AND SCHLOCKMEISTERS BY LAURA A. JACOBS The premiere featured in Martha Graham's three-week engagement at the New York City Center this autumn was Persephone, a dance based on the Greek myth in which the daughter of Demeter is kidnapped by Hades and forced to live for a time in the underworld...
...New York's own Martha Clarke, formerly with Pilobolus and recently acclaimed for such dance/theater creations as Vienna Lusthaus and Garden of Earthly Delights (the latter inspired by the Bosch painting), has a comparable tendency to run poetically amok...
...One searches the dances of Marin, Bausch and Clarke in vain for movement that transcends mere cleverness...
...In this she is not alone...
...Enveloped in fabric and seated on a bench, a woman rocks gently, her pain a growing awareness...
...Like The Rile of Spring, donebythe company three years ago, this work has a Stravinsky score (although Graham bypassed Stravinsky's sown Persephone in favor of his Symphony in C), and it focuses on a maiden who is, in a sense, sacrificed...
...Again the dancers were masked—in a flesh-colored fabric that gave them a neutral, if harrowed, look...
...The only effectivechoreography is for a couple sporting clear plastic raincoats and hats: To a doubletime rock beat, they perform a marvelously synchronized dance of domestic bliss and battle...
...Still, the whole affair was visually stunning, with Halston's bold greens and blacks right for once, and his pinto costumes suitably bestial...
...Her current dancers, however, are athletes (albeit superb ones), with more strength than insight...
...Graham's repertory will live on, of course...
...Further universality was achieved by costuming the company in leotards with sewn-on genitals...
...Halston's costumes can charitably be described as undistinguished...
...Eden runs 90 minutes with nary an apple (though at one point three ladies in Nefertiti postures appear bearing pomegranates...
...In later years Graham allowed that technique to evolve into a fluid, pebblesmooth style until today it masks her dancers like Kabuki robes...
...They aspire to atmosphere...
...At the beginning of Eden a man and a woman stand naked in front of a heap of clothes, bending in agony to dress piece by piece...
...There isn't much point in being critical of them—the fact that she can still choreograph at 93 is miracle enough...
...Otherwise Eden is all soggy clich...
...She pulls violently away from herself, but the fabric—her sorrow—stretches with her, consumes her...
...In five minutes she's said everything she has to say on the subject...
...Of more serious concern is the state of the Graham repertory, or rather the performance of that repertory...
...Granted, you can find these ideas hanging inchoately around the tale, like a mist at dawn...
...The sisters and the other residents of the principality wore nasty, baby-faced masks, and their costumes were padded with lumpy layers of bourgeois fat—the Botero approach...
...Graham's Rite was not equal to Stravinsky's music...
...Sexual repression, neurotic terror, the dilemmas of fate—these were the seas she charted...
...And it ends in grandly sophomoric style, with a gorilla seated on his own tiny island ripping clothes off a Barbie doll, while across the stage a film of white men interviewing Pygmies rolls silently...
...But they clear as other themes take over: fate and its relation to goodness, the potential for individual happiness in a rigid community...
...Last winter the City Center was also where French choreographer Maguy Marin brought her Cendrillon (Cinderella)—a production wholly embraced by audiences and critics, despite its extremely cynical treatment of the fairy tale...
...She thinks a string of associations accumulates its own meaning, and that editing is therefore unnecessary...
...The company moves through the steps of her mythological works and interior monologues ever more elegantly, expresses the drama ever more routinely...
...Marin "deconstructed" the story, first by setting it in a gridlike dollhouse, and second by masking her dancers...
...it is what makes us human...
...The ghosts that haunted Graham no longer haunt our times very effectively...
...West Germany's Pina Bausch choreographs in much the same fashion...
...The powerful contractions of their muscles bear little relation to the spiritual isolation behind Graham's vocabulary of weighted, arrhythmic movements...
...They are Everycouple —wearing their gender roles as transparently as their raingear, moving through life like wind-up toys...
...At a post-performance discussion Marin explained, "I just go with whatever comes into my head...
...Halston usually has a homogenizing effect on Graham, pushing her less inspired dances into the realm of glitz...
...Zip!—Marin has taken us from shame in the bushes to the Holocaust...
...What is disturbing about this school is that its works do not attempt to touch the passions, explore psychology or recreate rapture...
...There is no escape from bereavement, Graham is telling us...
...The maiden's death was a suicide of shivers...
...The dancers, often in couples, perform a series of variations on the themes of intimacy, desire, vanity and war...
...An exposed brick wall, nightmare lighting and the recurring sound of a needle stuck in a groove of static set the scene for Marin's contemplation of the sexes—stripped down and post-lapsarian...
...This one concrete wail means more than all of Marin's presumptuous nudes...
...There are men dressed up as knights, more intent on rape than pursuit of the grail...
...Persephone, alas, doesn't even look good...
...Graham made a career of dramatizing the compulsions and contradictions of the soul...
...At the back of the stage we see some bare branches clumped together...
...They present human existence as a fait accompli: We are fallen...
...Eclecticism reigns...
...They illustrate...
...little good can come of our state...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 16
