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Martha Graham Dance Co. at Annenberg
Martha's grave contractions
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
It was a fine idea for Randy Swartz, artistic director of Dance Celebration, to kick off his “Pioneers and Innovators” series with the Martha Graham Dance Company. After all, what American choreographer was more revolutionary than Martha Graham? Her company, now in its 80th year, is rising from its own ashes after an administrative and fiscal meltdown.
The company’s artistic director, Janet Eilber, designed a program for its Philadelphia appearance that used students from the University of the Arts. In the opening section, “Prelude and Revolt: Denishawn to Graham,” Eilber took the audience through Graham’s early career with economic narration about her choreographic milestones, using archival film alternating with live performance. She even included a couple of campy dances by Graham’s teachers, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn.
Thirty-three U Arts students performed in the reconstruction of an early Graham work, Panorama. Dressed in red dance togs, they flooded the stage, joyous but self-conscious, trying to get those evolving formations right. Eventually they ignited a series of group leap seizures to great effect. Principal dancer Katherine Crockett gives a wisely understated performance in Graham’s most famous solo, Lamentation (with the famous periwinkle tube dress). Had it been danced at the same pitch as Graham’s, it would have unintentionally come off as parody.
An anti-war diatribe, condensed
Chronicle, a dance anti-war diatribe, is essayed as “Signs in the Street” (Devastation, Homelessness, Exile) and an epilogue titled “Unity.” But its excerpts were too condensed to reveal its courageous artistic power. Elizabeth Auclair and Carrie Ellmore Tallitsch, representing opposing political ideals, danced with full-out conviction, although Auclair’s expressive leg extension lacks Graham angularity, and Tallitsch struggled with pacing.
Chronicle makes a moving political dance statement even when the corps is bumpy during Graham’s famous sickle-skirted jumps. Eilber added an addendum to the work: Graham declined an invitation from Hitler’s propaganda czar Joseph Goebbels to dance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, writing him that she wouldn’t consider appearing in light of Germany’s treatment of Jews, artists and intellectuals.
Only Graham would infuse her 1958 work Embattled Garden with psychosexual torpor and sarcasm. Not only did she possess the guts to depict Adam, Eve and the Serpent in Japanese moderne set designs by Isamu Noguchi; she also made the libidinous scenario a foursome, with the first Biblical couple joined by Lilith. This dance cuts deep as an indictment of repressed mores of the postwar period, and the dancers— Miki Oribara, Tadej Brdnik, Katherine Crockett and Carrie Ellmore-Talliitsch— put it over with pristine technique and wry flair.
Touching makes the difference
Acts of Light is whole-cloth Graham, filled with choreographic signatures. The three-part work succeeds because of its ethereal flow as it moves through cathartic symphonia by Carl Neilson. A duet, Conversation of Lovers, leads to the austerity of Lament, then to the streaming communalism of Ritual to the Sun. Jennifer DePalo and Maurizio Nardi displayed powerful, even rapturous, expression in the duet. But when they weren’t touching, their energy deflated, indicating loss of focus.
Similarly, the concluding Ritual, featuring the full corps, was too regimented and came off as a studio exercise, with yoga poses and Graham’s contraction technique fused or danced without enough rhythmic tension. The section nonetheless provided beautiful moments of communalism.
The middle section, with principal Blakeley White-McGuire in an amorphous fabric envelope, was danced with the most precision. She was flanked by what seemed to be a buff Praetorian guard dressed in leather sumo dance-belts (Halston’s dance fetishista collection). The men moved in stoic Samari drill formations and, paradoxically, seemed both protective and threatening. The coda is a jarringly cryptic processional, leaving one to question what had come before and what it means.
An erratically danced program, but it’s great to see Graham’s company rebuild itself not as a museum troupe embalming an iconic choreographer, but seeking to preserve a vital dance legacy.
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
It was a fine idea for Randy Swartz, artistic director of Dance Celebration, to kick off his “Pioneers and Innovators” series with the Martha Graham Dance Company. After all, what American choreographer was more revolutionary than Martha Graham? Her company, now in its 80th year, is rising from its own ashes after an administrative and fiscal meltdown.
The company’s artistic director, Janet Eilber, designed a program for its Philadelphia appearance that used students from the University of the Arts. In the opening section, “Prelude and Revolt: Denishawn to Graham,” Eilber took the audience through Graham’s early career with economic narration about her choreographic milestones, using archival film alternating with live performance. She even included a couple of campy dances by Graham’s teachers, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn.
Thirty-three U Arts students performed in the reconstruction of an early Graham work, Panorama. Dressed in red dance togs, they flooded the stage, joyous but self-conscious, trying to get those evolving formations right. Eventually they ignited a series of group leap seizures to great effect. Principal dancer Katherine Crockett gives a wisely understated performance in Graham’s most famous solo, Lamentation (with the famous periwinkle tube dress). Had it been danced at the same pitch as Graham’s, it would have unintentionally come off as parody.
An anti-war diatribe, condensed
Chronicle, a dance anti-war diatribe, is essayed as “Signs in the Street” (Devastation, Homelessness, Exile) and an epilogue titled “Unity.” But its excerpts were too condensed to reveal its courageous artistic power. Elizabeth Auclair and Carrie Ellmore Tallitsch, representing opposing political ideals, danced with full-out conviction, although Auclair’s expressive leg extension lacks Graham angularity, and Tallitsch struggled with pacing.
Chronicle makes a moving political dance statement even when the corps is bumpy during Graham’s famous sickle-skirted jumps. Eilber added an addendum to the work: Graham declined an invitation from Hitler’s propaganda czar Joseph Goebbels to dance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, writing him that she wouldn’t consider appearing in light of Germany’s treatment of Jews, artists and intellectuals.
Only Graham would infuse her 1958 work Embattled Garden with psychosexual torpor and sarcasm. Not only did she possess the guts to depict Adam, Eve and the Serpent in Japanese moderne set designs by Isamu Noguchi; she also made the libidinous scenario a foursome, with the first Biblical couple joined by Lilith. This dance cuts deep as an indictment of repressed mores of the postwar period, and the dancers— Miki Oribara, Tadej Brdnik, Katherine Crockett and Carrie Ellmore-Talliitsch— put it over with pristine technique and wry flair.
Touching makes the difference
Acts of Light is whole-cloth Graham, filled with choreographic signatures. The three-part work succeeds because of its ethereal flow as it moves through cathartic symphonia by Carl Neilson. A duet, Conversation of Lovers, leads to the austerity of Lament, then to the streaming communalism of Ritual to the Sun. Jennifer DePalo and Maurizio Nardi displayed powerful, even rapturous, expression in the duet. But when they weren’t touching, their energy deflated, indicating loss of focus.
Similarly, the concluding Ritual, featuring the full corps, was too regimented and came off as a studio exercise, with yoga poses and Graham’s contraction technique fused or danced without enough rhythmic tension. The section nonetheless provided beautiful moments of communalism.
The middle section, with principal Blakeley White-McGuire in an amorphous fabric envelope, was danced with the most precision. She was flanked by what seemed to be a buff Praetorian guard dressed in leather sumo dance-belts (Halston’s dance fetishista collection). The men moved in stoic Samari drill formations and, paradoxically, seemed both protective and threatening. The coda is a jarringly cryptic processional, leaving one to question what had come before and what it means.
An erratically danced program, but it’s great to see Graham’s company rebuild itself not as a museum troupe embalming an iconic choreographer, but seeking to preserve a vital dance legacy.
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