On Dance
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance MARTHA GRAHAM AT94 BY LAURA A. JACOBS For many autumns now, the Martha Graham opening night gala has been an event to wonder at and sigh over. Reminders of Graham's greatness...
...Isamu Noguchi constructed the sets for this mixture of passion play and vaudeville out of sticks, ropes and black rags...
...The bald-faced openness and the tomtom beats in Horst's music for El Penitente call us back to primary Graham— to her earlier Primitive Mysteries, and to "fragments" likei Deep Song (1937) and Heretic (1929), both happily revived this season...
...It is set to a score by Hunter Johnson, yet the sound is generic Graham: whiny strings and a portentous rumbling in the basses that spells DRAMA...
...Also on the program was El Penitente, a dance performed intermittently in past seasons...
...I am convinced that Graham needs air and silence in her music, the sort of hard simplicities that urged her on to the implosive, sometimes monstrous shapes and patterns of her early dances...
...The company needs the glitz...
...Reminders of Graham's greatness flood the papers and airwaves in anticipation, unlikely guest stars are announced, and old dances are recostumed by Halston in crotch-hugging Qiana...
...Plisetskaya would have done well to take a cue from Baryshnikov's self-effacing seriousness...
...I should have thought that for a Russian artist its appeal would have been obvious...
...Why not Heretic...
...Baryshnikov brought no agenda of his own to the role, only his usual painstaking, compressed modeling of each phrase...
...Dragging on for almost 45 minutes, it had everyone groaning...
...One could not help being reminded of Baryshnikov's heart-rending performance in Balanchine's The Prodigal Son, with its similar theme of seduction and betrayal, or of the penitential persona he so convincingly assumed dancing Albrecht in Giselle...
...Despite the fact that Graham's choreographing at age 94 is a feat, her recent work has been negligible, making going to her concerts a bit of a chore...
...And she might have considered appearing in something that was less of a warhorse than Dying Swans...
...The big hit of the evening was Maya Plisetskaya, long-time grande dame of the Bolshoi Ballet...
...Take Letter to the World, a vintage Graham drama about Emily Dickinson, that was revived for this fall's opening-night gala at the City Center after a long absence from the repertory...
...Indeed, Graham has never really tried to make us laugh...
...Even in a "joyous" dance like Diversion—given a lethargic performance on gala night— the mood is pretty solemn...
...Not to mention lacking in wit...
...Mikhail Baryshnikov, by contrast, was all modesty in the title role of El Penitente, which required him to remain earthbound and to flagellate himself with a horse-hair whip...
...Graham modernism long ago gave way to Graham theater...
...Louis Horst, Graham's mentor and music director (from 1926-1948), supplied the score here, a stark yet innocent composition for piano, flute and tom-toms...
...They are scarily Medieval and among the best Noguchi has designed for Graham...
...The music often hasn't helped...
...Other than her ability to get through the piece, she had nothing to show us but her own lingering desire for the limelight...
...But when she moved on to soupy scores like Norman Dello Joio's for Diversion of Angels (1948) and those for her various mythological dances, her work began to seem rootless, self-consciously arbitrary...
...Plisetskaya, famous for her liquid arms but looking flat-footed and stiff in the legs—as well she might in her 60s—performed this solo with the far-away eyes and coyly thrust chin of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard...
...Graham did not, it is true, do badly choreographing to Aaron Copland's suites...
...Russian ballerinas never die, it seems, they just drift into a Saint-Saëns twilight of Dying Swans...
...The work breathes both cold and fire, and ends in a hushing sort of death...
...Giddiness in craft and playful musicality do not seem to interest her...
...El Penitente premiered on the same August night in 1940 as Letter, but the two dances are quite different: Whereas Letter is overwrought and monotonous, El Penitenteis spare, inventive and witty—masterful if not a masterpiece...
...It is a dance for a whiteclad woman who rages gently avowedly against an imperious wall of blacksheathed females...
...The opening night audience wanted nothing to do with Letter to the World, featuring screen star Kathleen Turner reading Emily Dickinson's poems while Terese Capucilli gave kinetic expression to them as a dancing Emily...
...He filled out Graham's shapes without adding undue weight or scale, and the dance rewarded his naturalness...
Vol. 71 • October 1988 • No. 18
