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Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training By Marian Horosko (June 2002) Marian Horosko brings together new and previously published interviews of Martha Graham's "family" of dancers, teachers, choreographers, and actors and interweaves them with provocative biographical material about the life and influence of the creator of classic modern dance. Read a complete excerpt from chapter seven of the book and peruse the table of contents. |
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7 The decade was characterized by noise. Cell phones invaded public places-theaters, restaurants, buses, cars, and planes. People talked loudly into them while walking on the streets. Equipment beeped, rang, banged, or clanged everywhere. Almost every block in New York had a construction site for yet another high-rise building. Martha's 63rd Street home gave way to a high-rise to pay the company's debts. Gloom descended, but eventually a grant provided funds for renovation, placing the school in the basement of the building. Immigration grew throughout the country, along with an increasing number of tourists in the major cities. Computers provided information, games, entertainment, and isolation. Step dancing and Irish clogging, along with tap dancing, returned to the stage. Revivals continued to appear on Broadway. In street and theater performances, ethnic groups beat drums, sticks, or gourds. The Russians, released from travel and immigration restrictions, initiated a second coming to follow their exodus after the Russian Revolution. They settled in Western, Midwestern, and Southern cities-not the usual cultural centers-to teach ballet with or without accreditation from their St. Petersburg or Bolshoi schools. Van Gogh's Portrait du Dr. Gachet fetched $82.5 million at auction. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and its director were tried on obscenity charges for exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, but a jury acquitted them. A Chorus Line closed after fifteen years, the longest run in the history of Broadway. The next big hit was the British import Miss Saigon. Rap talk invaded the airwaves with patter, without musical accompaniment, and included subjects such as sex discrimination, abuse, drugs, and violence, all sprinkled with obscenities. First Amendment rights protected its existence. As the economy heated up, government support for the arts cooled down. Dance became sport; sport became dance; ballet became acrobatic; ice dancing became balletic. Disney characters in films and videos and theme parks provided new opportunities for dancers to work. The large ballet companies received strong private financial support, and their number of guest artists from foreign companies increased. The number of small American dance companies also increased, crowding May and October calendars-the most popular months for reviews-to an unprecedented level. Competitions at home and abroad encouraged young dancers with offers of scholarships, cash, and apprentice jobs in the major companies. Martha Graham created her last works: Maple Leaf Rag (1990) and Eyes of the Goddess (1991). In 1991 she died of pneumonia. Since then, ownership of her works has been a subject of legal debate.
I had taken modern dance at Kansas State College with Jacqueline Van Gaasbeek for a phys ed credit. She was a frustrated dancer who came to New York regularly to take the intensive course in teacher training at the Graham center. The dance club at the college gave me a scholarship to go to the American Dance Festival in New London, Connecticut. There I had my first encounter with Martha, who taught for the first two weeks at the festival. Everyone was terrified of her and I stayed in the back row in the class. As we left the studio and passed her at the door, most of us left quickly. But one day she stopped me and asked, "Who are you? I like the way you use your feet." The next day she put me in the front row. When she left, Robert Cohan taught us for the rest of the summer. And because he said nothing to me, I couldn't decide if I was good, bad, awful, or hopeless. Martha came back for the last week and offered me a scholarship if I would come to New York. In New York, for some reason, Martha and I would end up after class sitting on that nasty little bench outside Studio One. She talked and I listened. She would start sitting very straight and as she became involved in what she was saying, her back would start to round. Suddenly I would see this flash or spark in those black eyes and she would pull herself up ramrod straight. It was astounding to see how she would fight to keep her body awake, alive, alert, and functioning. Our talks were basically her explaining to me that one had to take all the steps in her dance ladder sequentially, without jumping from the first to the sixth step. I had started to perform in works by her former dancers who were choreographing, and I didn't have the time to be her acolyte for eight to ten years, doing the sequence up the ladder, hoping that I would be taken into the company. Touring interrupted my study so that I couldn't maintain the discipline. The loss foreshortened my career. Martha was right about following the sequence of training, but for me it was not possible. After performing for a while, I was offered a choice of a three-month tour in South America or an audition for the leading dance role in the City Center revival of the Broadway show Can Can. I was broke and the South American tour looked like a better move, although the City Center role would have been better for my career. As luck would have it, the South American tour fell through and the dance career was lost. So I became an assistant to a Pilates-based therapist and eventually went on my own. Since the Pilates technique is based upon the pelvis as the controlling factor-as is the Graham technique, pelvis and breath-it was a natural choice for me. There was a gap of contact with Martha until about 1968, when Bertram Ross called me. Bertram said that Martha was in bad shape and needed to get back on stage. She could hardly stand up, had no strength, and had to perform. She came to my studio and I worked with her privately. She said, "Just treat me like anybody else," which was, of course, impossible. We did a mat work warm-up, développés lying flat, used ankle weights, worked on the apparatus doing pliés, and I found that she could do a great deal. She could do a battement [high kick] that would hit her shoulder. She had that capacity to the day she died. She had a naturally flexible body. She could use her feet like an inchworm, they were so flexible and beautiful in the instep, although arthritic in the toes. There is no doubt that she was physically gifted and used her technique carefully-she had once hurt her knee as a result of being dropped-but it was her spirit that amazed everyone. I had the feeling that she had discovered, at an early point, that she had an incredible and unlimited range of movement and that she had to find something to do with it. Then there was the day when I had to explain to her that she had to contract to do an exercise. The words stuck in my throat. Was I going to explain to the creator of a methodology based upon the contraction how to do a contraction?! She laughed with me. She came for sessions with me three times a week, beginning with thirty minutes of work because she was weak, but eventually stayed a full ninety minutes. For me, it was such a treat to give back to someone who had given me so much. Her last season, there were really only three steps she could do: throw her leg up past her shoulder, bourées [tiny moving steps], and a split fall forward, with help getting up. But you couldn't take your eyes off her! At seventy-five, she still had such power. Her last performance was in The Lady of the House of Sleep, in 1968. When she was in her nineties, I always saw her, in my mind's eye, as she was when I first met her. But she was, near the end, an old woman struggling to make her body do things it could no longer do. I could see the visible frustration of her mind. She knew what to do and how to do it but was no longer being able to command her body to do what she loved best in the world, to dance. There would be tears in her eyes, and I found it heartbreaking. She kept making valiant efforts, but the machinery wasn't there any longer. Her sessions were sporadic after a while and limited to the beginning of a season, when she would phone me and say, "I have to be able to stand up and take a bow. My legs are weak." Then she would work during her sessions with me and appear at the last bow with two strong male dancers at her side, who had just lifted her from her wheelchair when the curtain was down and who stood beside her as she bowed on stage. Her spot to watch the performances was on stage right in her wheelchair. The dancers said she would frequently fly out of that chair during rehearsals and do phenomenal things, as if she were not confined to it. Then she would sit down again. Martha was a performer first and an amoral person. She did exactly what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it, without any thought about rules or cultural conventions, in order to produce what she produced. It gave her freedom from guilt. There were no victims. People came to get something from her, and they took what they could or wanted. It was not her responsibility. (as restager) Panorama was re-created after Martha died and was very well received. It had been performed at Bennington College in 1935. Those who followed and believed in Martha used their own creative ability to piece together, recompose, and reconstruct from those film clips and photos a spirit of the piece. It was not the original to the step or a replication. There was no record. Those works bear the creative signature of the artists who were dedicated to and who worked with Martha. Until her death, Martha Graham gave her seal of approval to those pieces. After death, they were done for Martha with love. In 1998 the longtime site of the school, on East 63rd Street in Manhattan, was sold to pay off a deficit. Plans to move the headquarters to a new building erected on the same site were canceled because the company was unable to raise the money necessary to convert the raw space into studios and offices. Nor was there enough money to pay rent elsewhere. Legal complications of every kind seemed to descend upon the entire organization. Students, teachers, accompanists, and office personnel were in tears, angered, and disheartened. On May 25, 2000, the Martha Graham Dance Company pulled out of two major festivals, the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and suspended operations because of financial problems. The board of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, the umbrella organization for the company, school, and junior group, announced that operations would be suspended for the foreseeable future. However, Graham's legacy had a tiny stronghold at the Peridance studio in lower Manhattan, where Yuriko was giving classes independent of the school. There I organized a Graham-based program for foreign students on visas, summer students, and certificate students abandoned by the Graham school's closure. I enlisted teachers from the school and former company members of the Graham family: Marnie Thomas, Ethel Winter, Dudley Wil- liams, Jeanne Ruddy, Armgard von Bardeleben, Donlin Foreman, Joyce Herring, Steve Rooks, Susan McGuire, Linda Hodes, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Pearl Lang, Yuriko, and myself, as well as current members of the Martha Graham Dance Company. By some quirk of fate, I was videotaping Yuriko's class at Peridance when we heard the announcement that the school, company, and ensemble operations were closed as of May 25, 2000. After class, Igal Perry, the director of the Peridance Studio, who had studied Graham technique and had been in the Bat-Dor Dance Company in Israel, asked my mother and me to come to his office. For several years, my mother had been declining his offer to create a modern Graham-based department at Peridance because of her teaching schedule and freelance work for other companies out of town. But here was an opportunity to help the dance community with classes, first offered as a summer workshop, on three levels of technique. So, in June, we started the program to give the students of the dance world another place to study the technique. Company members were allowed to take class free of tuition. They were also able to earn some money by teaching classes at Peridance. We called it a Graham-based program since we are not the official school. My calls were answered with enthusiasm, and the roster of teachers, dancers, and accompanists represented a wide spectrum of generations from early days to the present. The program continued through the summer, fall, and winter with an eye to the future. Yuriko and I then set off to stage Appalachian Spring for the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago.
© 2002 University Press of Florida. All Rights Reserved. | |
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