Martha Graham: Women’s History Month In Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month in Dance, 1. Much of the history of women in dance is the history of women fulfilling men’s vision of women. This applies to the Indian tradition of devadasis, the ballet tradition of female étoiles/ballerinas, and more. But much of the history of modern dance has been the history of independent women, from Loië Fuller and Isadora Duncan to Pam Tanowitz and Jennifer Monson.

I love this photo of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham for many reasons. (Actually, it’s a photo of a photo; I’m sorry for the reflections. The original belongs to the archive at Jacob’s Pillow.) Principally, it reminds us that Graham, from the late 1930s onward, showed us the converse of the ballet tradition: instead of women fulfilling men’s idea of women, now men fulfilling a woman’s idea of men. This photo shows that Graham did not need to demean men. (Paul Taylor, who danced with her in the late 1950s and early 1960s, argued that her best dances belonged to before 1945, and that he sometimes thought her later roles for men were just “dildoes”.) This is not the only photograph to show that Graham delighted in the elevation of the young Cunningham. And she, twenty-five years his senior, took to the air beside him, cut an exultant shape in the air before him, and made drama from the exuberant co-existence of the sexes.

Balanchine and Graham, George and Martha, dominating the choreographic climate of New York for over thirty years, did much to create the fruitful tension that fertilised what I have called the New York School of Choreography. That climate soon became international: in Britain and Europe, John Cranko and Kenneth MacMillan both lapped up ideas from both those New York exemplars. But it was Graham who definitively established the principle that dance drama can re-tell female-male relations from a woman’s vision; that history and myth can and should be re-interpreted to show how it has been for women; that even such witches and murderesses as Medea (“Cave of the Heart”, 1946) and Clytaemnestra (“Clytemnestra”, 1958) had urgent inner lives that deserve consideration; that a myth as tragic and central as that of Oedipus, killing his father and marrying his mother, can and should be re-envisioned through the eyes of the mother who became his wife (“Night Journey”, 1947), with the larger subtext that any woman may in due course become her husband’s mother in the larger psychological terrain of the marriage bed.

Graham’s own physical skills peaked either in or before the early 1940s. Her poetic imagination did not diminish, but her choreographic language began to rely less on sheer movement and more on Noguchi props. Much of her utterances on dance became both portentous and pretentious. Rebellion against Graham became an energising factor for successive generations of choreographers. The power and largeness of her vision nonetheless remained heroic. In the years after Balanchine and Graham died, Cunningham admitted that those two had been the greatest choreographic influences upon him. (This from the man who moved furthest away from each.)

Today we never see Graham’s solo “Frontier” (1935, to music by Louis Horst), in many ways the opposite of her now too-familiar and now too-facial “Lamentation” (1930). Subtitled “American Perspective of the Plains”, it exemplified the thrill of an independent woman in action, slicing and pacing up and out into new terrain; and its Noguchi set worked with the choreography to create the drama of the historic conquest of space. A few of the recent revivals of other Graham classics have been Graham-lite. Graham dance theatre is not often now an inspiring fact; yet it remains an inspiring idea.

#women’shistoryindance

Wednesday 3 March

Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, early 1940s. The original of this photograph is in the archive at Jacob’s Pillow.