Martha Graham Season Opens
“Lamentation Variations,” “Embattled Garden,” “Night Journey”
Martha Graham Dance Company
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
September 11, 2007
by Susan Reiter
copyright © 2007 Susan Reiter
They got right down to business on the opening night of the Martha Graham Dance Company’s first New York season in two and a half years. With a gala scheduled for the second week, this was not an evening of glitz but a serious, purposeful introduction to the somewhat streamlined, clearly back-in-business troupe that has weathered considerable financial (and, previously, legal) storms. The roster includes most of the dancers promently featured the last time the troupe performed — with the notable exception of the glorious Fang-Yi Sheu.
The season’s repertory is dominated by undisputed masterworks from the 1940s, but this program also took in Graham’s efforts in the previous and subsequent decades. The 1930s were represented by an impressionistic 1932 film of Graham herself performing “Lamentation,” her brilliantly restrained, eloquent investigation of grief. Far from a document of the complete dance, this (uncredited) silent color film was more a series of close-ups, evoking the intense tautness of the tubular costume’s fabric, the stark focus of Graham’s face, the odd shapes made by a hand or a foot encased in the fabric. It did include the dance’s final moments — the simple yet devastating folding over, evoking resignation and submission to sorrow.
The film was shown as the starting point for the evening’s pièce d’occasion, “Lamentation Variations,” for which an intriguing trio of choreographers were invited to create brief works responding to the film. In addition, given the date on which the New York season was opening, the idea of commemorating the city’s devastating events on that date in 2001 was also part of the mix, according to the program note.
Each of the resulting brief studies made a distinctive impact. If the association with the Graham work was not always in evidence, one welcomed the absence of literal homage in the ways each choreographer absorbed its inspiration. Together they made for a satisfying, if modest, triptych. Aszure Barton’s duet for Miki Orihara and Yuko Giannakis, set to a haunting George Crumb female vocal, locked the two women, sporting ponytails and stylish black dresses, in a central circle of light. Bending and reaching with slippery ease, jutting their limbs out at sharp angles, they remained close together and locked in place. Initially, they moved in unison but eventually slipped into separate sequences, till one of them slid to the floor and lay on her back. The other, standing angled her body away as though afraid to look, but then the fallen one sat up and, as the work concluded, gave a small, private smile.
Richard Move sent tall, willowy Katherine Crockett on a slow, slinky traversal from stage right to stage left. With her cascading blond hair and softly draped black top and pants, she radiated glamour but also a certain eerie unknowable quality. Accompanied by DJ Savage’s computerized manipulation of a single Beethoven measure – an echoey wash of sound rather than distinctive notes – Crockett tilted and hesitated, as though always testing the space ahead of her before advancing. At one point she performed a mesmerizingly slow 360-degree pivot in relevé and in the final moment, not quite having made it fully across, she arched back and swayed, unwilling — or perhaps unable — to go further.
The full company of 20 appeared in dark clothes – some casual, some more glamorous (including a couple of evening gowns) — to create a vividly animated yet restrained slice of life in Larry Keigwin’s work. Sometimes a unified force, at other times split into three distinct groups, they did not always move so much as behave and gesture, communicating individual purpose within a larger social force. Here and there someone looked outwards with an expression of disbelief. Several times, everyone stood with cupped hands fluttering in front of them. Keigwin’s ability to create a clear, forthright stage picture while maneuvering such a large ensemble was impressive.
“Embattled Garden” (1958) often seems on the verge of satirizing itself, as two couples engage in often predatory encounters in Graham’s biting evocation of a rather racy Garden of Eden, with repressed sexuality oozing out of every pore. Adam and Eve (David Zurak and Jennifer DePalo) may initially seem at a safe remove from the leering, scheming Stranger (Maurizio Nardi) and Lilith (Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch) who lurk beneath and on the slender tree of Isamu Noguchiu’s brilliant, vibrantly colored set. But just as their “garden” is a set piece full of treacherous open spaces, his stolid reliability and her blithe innocence are no match for these aggressively sensual interlopers. The fierce posturing and costume allusions to Flamenco verge on the silly, even if they relate to the insinuating melodies and primal pulsations of the score by Carlos Surinach.
The shifting relationships are not always clear, but Maurizio Nardi’s emphatic Stranger, launching himself vigorously from his perch up in the tree, clearly delighted in being up to no good, while Ellmore-Tallitsch’s restrained Lilith bided her time with sly, confident lasciviousness. Pairings in the space between the two set pieces seethed with tension and hostility. Zurak and DePalo clutched at each other fiercely in their tempestuous encounter, straining to regain control of their destiny, and then the two men tumbled through gymnastic maneuvers in their own power struggle. When each pair had retreated to their separate set pieces at the end, Eve was no longer the blithe, demure creature who began by indolently combing her hair, but more like a wounded animal, clutching at his legs. Over by the tree, you could almost sense Lilith purring with satisfaction and the Stranger smirking and eager to do further mischief.
“Night Journey” (1947) requires a fiercely dramatic portrayal of its pivotal role, Jocasta, and while there was much to admire in Elizabeth Auclair’s intelligently shaped and intensely committed performance, at times she came across as too demure to be a queen. Tadej Brdnik conveyed the muscuar authority and easy confidence of Oedipus without exaggerating the role into a puffed-up action hero. Graham’s theatrical savvy lies in shaping the story as a flashback, with the portents of doom evident from the first moment the ominously shapeless figure of Tiresias (Nardi) first thumps his stick on the ground, even as the protagonists are anguishingly slow to realize the ominous web they are weaving through their intimacy. The ultra-sylized look is vintage Graham, and one can admire the fervent theatricality while also having to acknowledge that its old-fashioned approach can create a certain distancing effect. But at its most powerful moments — and there are many — Graham summons up primal emotions with devastating ferocity. As the Leader of the Chorus, Blakely White-McGuire, with her coiled attack and fervent intensity, was magnificent. She was mesmerizing even when frozen in a lunge upstage, observing the central couple’s seduction from afar as though to seal their doom.
The company is featuring an introductory speaker at every performance — many dance world luninaries and others who will speak anecdotally of their experiences or encounters with Graham and set a context for each program. James Lipton filled this role on opening night, spekaing duirng the pause after “Lamentation Variations.” He told of meeting Graham in 1968, through Walter Terry. The three went to lunch when Graham, who admired Lipton’s book “Exaltation of Larks,” asked permission to use its title for a dance (which never materalized), and, Lipton recalled, she and Terry engaged in some of the raunchiest gossip to which he’d ever been privy. He spoke with his trademark orotund solemnity, but also with evident personal connection, of Graham’s significance and enduring impact.
