MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY
It’s also true, as two programs of four different dances each made clear at Ravinia last week, that the Graham stereotype really only fits certain works, not her entire oeuvre. Indeed, that may have been the point of the programming. These eight works spanned 54 years, and a good half–most of them relatively recent–were lighthearted, abstract, or both.
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Take El Penitente, a work from 1940. Based on the rituals of a religious sect in the American southwest, it’s divided into ten short sections whose meaning is described in program notes. The notes also compare Graham’s dance to a medieval mystery play, and point out that we see not only the play itself but the players stepping in and out of character. So without even a glimpse of the work we know it’ll have Christian elements and elements from the art of the Middle Ages and the American southwest; we know that we’ll see a dance within a dance.
Such easy stereotypes of male-female interaction also infect Graham’s last dance, Maple Leaf Rag (1990). Five couples perch on a stylized, sagging ballet bar like so many birds on a wire, obviously quarreling and making up, embracing and even kissing. The work ends with a man ripping off a woman’s skirt and her pouting, chin on fist.
I believe that as time went on Graham turned her talents at ritualization to questionable ends. Self-glorification marks the 1981 Acts of Light. Its solo for a woman, in quintessential stretchy Grahamesque garb, seems to deify Graham’s artistic agonies: the dancer staggers forward, both hands clasped against one cheek, clearly weeping. The section with some 20 dancers in golden costumes sweeping through classic Graham floor exercises is surprisingly beautiful, like waves rolling in at sunset–but what is it after all that Graham’s glorifying? Her own dance lexicon. In some ways Acts of Light seems the perfect ritual for late 20th-century America: a ritual with no gods but the Self.
