Portraits in Grief After Graham and Jungian Torment in Greek Legends
<First published in the New York Times online September 13, 2007>
As Martha Graham’s “Night Journey” opens, a solitary woman stands motionless upstage holding up a loop of thin rope. Since her back is diagonally turned to us, we can’t tell whether she is looking at or through this loop, but we see that she is fixated. Are these the threads of time, or memory, she’s holding?
Maybe I react that way because it’s not long since I last saw “Götterdämmerung,” which starts with the Norns passing the rope of time. But certainly she holds them long enough for us to feel the loop is ambiguous. “Night Journey” becomes larger in our minds if we only realize later that it is also the noose with which she will hang herself, and if we feel that it is fraught with her own life’s experience. What follows that opening are the memories that most obsess her and lead most inevitably to her death.
The heroine of “Night Journey” is Jocasta, the queen who finds that she has married her son, Oedipus. Their central duet gives us opposite images: one in which she lies on the floor as he descends upon her sexually, the other in which he falls back into her arms like a baby. On surface level, no two images could be more obvious about the Oedipus-Jocasta relationship: they have sex and she’s his mother. But those aren’t the main meanings that hit us as we watch. What’s striking is that Jocasta is passive in the first, Oedipus passive in the second; that they are both pictorial images that materialize out of a continuous dance, and return, disturbingly; and that they suggest that Jocasta has wanted both sides of this relationship, to have this man as her lover and her son.
Other meanings also accumulate. You can’t miss, I think, the look of a Pietà as she cradles her son. And while Graham is telling the specific story of Oedipus and Jocasta, she is also catching what is generally but not literally Oedipal about many male-female relationships.
“Night Journey,” created in 1947, is a classic of the period in which Graham reinvestigated Greek myth along Jungian lines. The central point of telling the Oedipus story from Jocasta’s point of view is enough to remind us how innovative Graham was, especially since the Oedipus myth remains so familiar. It has its clunky moments now, not least when Tiresias the blind seer bounces back onto the stage on his staff as if it were a pogo stick. But at Tuesday night’s opening performance the work was in fresh enough shape to show us why Graham, 16 years after her death, remains one of the great choreographers.
The difference between strong and dim, or good and bad, performances of the Graham repertory can be startling. When in 1979 I first saw “Errand Into the Maze,” the dance in which the Minotaur-Labyrinth legend is told in terms both female and sexual, it rightly brought an entire opera house cheering to its feet with its overpowering physical excitement. When I saw it in 1988, the same work looked stale. (It will be danced again this season, but, confusingly, the Graham company seems to have scheduled it on some performances of next week’s Program C and not on others.)
Tuesday’s “Night Journey” was the first I had seen since the very first time I saw the Graham company in 1976. Elizabeth Auclair danced Jocasta with a kind of quiet I’ve seldom seen in Graham before, an entirely admirable form of restraint. Tadej Brdnik, built in the epic line of Graham male dancers with powerful musculature, presented Oedipus with telling simplicity, especially in the remarkable final episode when he switches from one last sexual contemplation over Jocasta’s body before blinding himself and briskly feeling his way offstage.
Debate about whether Graham’s choreography was still good began in the 1940s and was well advanced by the late 1950s. Controversy about whether the best works were being well enough performed was already lively in the 1970s. And all these arguments reached larger dimensions after her death. The Graham company today is still rebuilding itself from the civil wars and lawsuits through which it has passed in recent years. For those of us who have an incomplete knowledge of the Graham repertory, these are hard times in which to judge several of these dances. There are great Graham dances that I have not yet seen in the theater (“Primitive Mysteries,” “Letter to the World,” “Deaths and Entrances”), and others I believe to be great without having seen any adequate performance (“Dark Meadow”).
What am I to make of “Embattled Garden,” Graham’s quartet study of Adam, Eve, Lilith and the Stranger, as it looked on Tuesday night? Is this the kind of mythological Graham that must always have looked as overwrought as it does to me now? Might it have seemed wholly absorbing as danced by its original cast in 1958? Could another cast today lead me back into its drama? Individual steps and phrases here certainly have astonishing force; I can imagine that in other circumstances some or all of its situations might be compellingly ambiguous. At present, there is a distractingly fashionable prettiness about parts of it that I don’t associate with Graham, but also an unspontaneous style of performance that has bedeviled many Graham performances for decades. It doesn’t help that the Graham company, like so many others, now must perform to taped music.
Opening night began with “Lamentation Variations,” taking Graham’s celebrated 1930 solo “Lamentation” (seen here in a silent 1932 film) and developing it into three new dances by Aszure Barton, Richard Move and Larry Keigwin. The intention is to commemorate the 9/11 anniversary and to honor New York City, home to the Graham company for 80 years. Each of the three dances was in a completely separate style, each started out interestingly, and each lasted just a bit too long. All three, however, demonstrated that “Lamentation” remains inspiring. Still, it would inspire more if we were not shown facial close-ups. “Lamentation” is greatest and strangest when the dancer is seen amid a vast space, alone and continually changing shape in grief.
@New York Times, 2007