Martha Graham’s “dance story” is of natural and immediate interest to people of the theatre. Her technique is founded on the principle of contradictory impulses in human action, and, so, in emotion. Many of her dances have scripted narratives; those that don’t unfold with high pictorial tension and emphatic rhythmic suspense. Theatrical values—staging, lighting, decor, costuming—are critical to her effects. Hers is also a literary theatre, influenced by the dicta of philosophers and poets. During the 1970s, her own pre-curtain addresses to the audience about life and art were dramas in their own right. Finally, the way she conceives of the dancer in the diorama is closer to Euripides—or to Verdi—than to Petipa, Balanchine, Cunningham or Tharp.
Graham’s figures are often heroes in crisis; like their tragic antecedents, they are called upon to revise their willfulness under pressure; but one never questions their identities. They endure dreamlike tests, but the dream never distorts a basic sense of self, or pitches the hero into a landscape where his or her unique shape is lost or melded into a more general image. On the Graham stage (even in the case of companionable group dances without narrative, such as Diversion of Angels or Acts of Light) there is always plenty of space around each body to set it off and make it legible: the dancer moves in her own moral nimbus. Perhaps it is this aspect of Graham’s imagination that led Lincoln Kirstein to suggest a ballet in which the choreographer herself would impersonate Alice in Wonderland—a character who, Kirstein added impishly, “seems to me the essence of Martha’s spirit.”
Ernestine Stodelle’s new book Deep Song is also concerned with “Martha’s spirit”; its reverent perspective, however, is far less ironic than Kirstein’s. Unfortunately, the book reads as if the author felt Graham peering over her shoulder periodically as she wrote. There is a section, midway through, which offers up a conceit so exalted and fancy that it might have sailed out of Renaissance prose: Graham at the helm of a ship called the “Jocasta,” bearing her “collaborators” Sophocles (“clad in his
toga”), Freud (“tie flying in the morning breeze”), the composers Louis Horst and William Schuman, and “the indispensable sculptor-designer Isamu Noguchi,” in tandem with “the inhabitants of Mount Olympus.” A more pedestrian writer might have observed that, in the ’40s, Graham embarked on a series of works on ancient Hellenic themes; clearly Stodelle does not enjoy the pedestrian’s objectivity.
Stodelle was not a Graham dancer—her mentor was Graham’s contemporary Doris Humphrey—but she was part of the tight, dedicated and impoverished circle of pioneering modern dancers in Greenwich Village during the late ’20s and ’30s, and still seems to share the awe that young devotees felt toward Graham at that time. “Young men fall in love with her after every lunch date,” Agnes de Mille once wrote of Graham’s admirers. “Young women
become votive, vestals, and this can get tedious.” Stodelle gives an insider’s sense of the time and the relationships it fostered. Her vivid cameo of the artist in the ’30s is an example:
“Occasionally a single figure would emerge from the elevator and stand waiting for someone in the vestibule near the outside door. She was generally dressed in dark clothes, and if one was standing next to her by chance, one was struck by the thoughtful, intense expression in her deep-set, amber-flecked eyes. Her straight back and sturdy legs, her pulled-tight long black hair twisted into a bun at the nape of the neck, and her trigger-ready awareness of what was going on around her fairly shouted her name. When she glanced at you, she seemed to know immediately who you were—nondescript, anonymous you—with the same sudden recognition that you had felt when you realized you were in the presence of a dancer who had sent you reeling home from her last concert, your life forever changed.”
If Graham had been a playwright, this picture would be interesting, and extraneous. But in the case of a dancer—and choreographers are invariably dancers first and forever—one cannot speak accurately of the art without becoming personal. How a dancer conducts herself anywhere is of interest; in Graham’s words, “the body never lies.” The elements of Stodelle’s observation are embedded in the dynamics of Graham’s dances Primitive Mysteries, Errand into the Maze, Clytemnestra. And the relationship between the artist and the audience that Graham fostered in those works, consciously or not, is here, too. When Stodelle lets her book be what it wants to be—a leisurely and admittedly limited memoir—the rewards are rich.
But the book’s larger ambitions (it began as a grand scheme to compose “an entire history of American modern dance,” but was later narrowed into “a critique of Graham’s performing and choreographing achievements, not a biography”) severely limit its usefulness. So much emphasis is placed on the distancing of the work from the life that one can’t help but suspect that Deep Song was turned out at least in part to counter Don McDonagh’s full-length 1973 biography, in which Graham’s affairs and, more disturbingly, her drinking in the ’60s, were calmly set forth in detail. Stodelle’s treatments of the dances are descriptive, with no sustained intellectual speculation or analysis. Her access to the private Arthur Todd collection of Graham papers and memorabilia (a collection McDonagh doesn’t list among his sources) yields much of interest, and she attaches a compendious bibliography.
Deep Song is worthy of attention, but much of what it has to say of importance depends for full appreciation on a thorough acquaintance with Graham’s work and the literature about her. The 48 pages of finely produced photographs, mostly by Barbara Morgan and Martha Swope, are, on the other hand, immediately communicative, and will sustain the browser until the needed prerequisites have been acquired.
Mindy Aloff is dance critic for The Nation and senior critic for Dancemagazine.
