by Leigh Witchel
There wasn’t a ton of Graham on hand at Martha Graham’s company during the City Center season, but what it danced, it danced well.
“Appalachian Spring,” with its epochal Copland score played live, got a convincing, spirited performance that advocated for the choreography. In 1944, Graham was thinking about a time just over a hundred years prior. It’s now about 180 years in the past.
This is a wartime ballet. Graham and Copland thought of it as a contribution to the war effort. So did designer Isamu Noguchi, who had voluntarily gone into the internment camps in 1942 (he was released after 6 months).
Noguchi’s brilliantly simple set is the first thing we see: It’s a homestead reduced to its framework: a fence, a stump, a step, a rocker. Graham’s movement response was just as elemental and right: the Husband, then the Bride touching the outside wall: This is home.
Lloyd Mayor, celebrating his final New York season with Graham, was a purposeful, centered Husband, who was able to go to the fence and stare outwards, and have us imagine what he saw. After 10 years in the company, he’s aged into the part, with a big jump and a weighted quality.
Lloyd Knight, in the Preacher’s role originated by Merce Cunningham, was an egotist; his four followers surrounded him like chicks. In perhaps the weirdest example of everything old being new again, he did a crouched duckwalk with alternating arms. You’ll see that exact step in almost every great Lip Synch For Your Life.
The Pioneer Woman, Natasha M. Diamond-Walker, sat alone; her spirituality was connected to the land and sky. The Bride, Anne O’Donnell, fluttered her hands, thrilled by possibility. The Pioneer Woman mimed caring for the Bride’s baby. The men shake hands; the women embrace. Everyone acknowledges everyone else, the priest blesses the couple. It’s a small community, in a seemingly limitless world.
The most famous section of the score, Copland’s variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” became a freely composed grand pas de deux for the Bride and the Husband with solos, but Graham didn’t place it as a ballet choreographer might – as the big soaring number right before the end.
Instead, the work moved into darker territory. The Preacher’s solo betrays his angst. The Pioneer Woman also blesses the Husband, but as he jumped and danced, you could see his doubt: will the crops survive, will my child be well? The Bride’s fear for her child was more overt; she mimed it. He embraced and danced with his wife, and the work closed with a quieter, more fragile and honest conclusion.
“Canticle for Innocent Comedians” is one of the ways the company has approached After-Graham: taking her material, some of which is not documented well enough to recover, and starting anew. “Canticle” does have one duet by Graham in it, and a new, nifty trick. When the cast appeared in three tight huddles, there was smoke rising from each of the groups, but no visible way it got there.
The most novel variation was in casting: several sections were double cast swapping genders. If anything, the performances showed how gendered movement is in perception. We don’t see movement as unisex.
The changes built slowly. The first solo was done either by a woman or here, a man (Lorenzo Pagano), the second duet by Alleyne Dance had only a single, male cast. Robert Cohan’s solo in silence had two casts, both women. Juliano Nunes’ duet was done this time by men, but it was at Yin Yue’s trio that it seemed the gender swap looked more like women acting like men – crouching low, slapping their knees. Yet the women did it three times to the men only doing it on a single night.
Graham’s original duet that is the one surviving section of her choreography was presented as written: a big man swings a small woman around, including supporting her by her grabbing her legs tucked up into a diamond.
The final solo was done by a man, but the decorative poses, the curved rather than straight axis, and the keeping of movement close to the axis rather than extended away read as female. Is it because I learned those cues studying ballet (if not the most gender-typed art form, damn close) or is it because I saw a woman do the solo first?
And so the Graham company continues examining its repertory and purpose, looking to provide fresh reasons for its existence. The decision was made long ago that it was not to be a museum. That can be respected. It’s done some great commissions and some wretched ones.
It’s also taken some interesting liberties. Another piece of Graham Americana, “American Document,” was made in 1938 and extensively reworked for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1989, while Graham was still alive. The company presented a new version in 2010, which was “not a dance by Martha Graham.”
Still, the company wouldn’t exist at all without its namesake, and now that her work is being danced well, can we please have some more of it?
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Appalachian Spring,” “Canticle for Innocent Comedians” – Martha Graham Dance Company
New York City Center, New York, NY
April 10, 2022
Cover: Lloyd Mayor and Anne O’Donnell in “Appalachian Spring.” Photo credit © Melissa Sherwood.
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