by Leigh Witchel
The Martha Graham Dance Company has decided to celebrate being 100 at 98. Management knows how to add; it’s decided to stretch the celebration to three seasons. If I make it that long, I might too.
The season at New York City Center featured a premiere by Jamar Roberts and Graham’s last work, but perhaps the most interesting item was the company bringing into its repertory Rodeo, done by Graham’s friend Agnes de Mille. It was performed with a re-orchestration by Gabe Witcher of Copland’s score for bluegrass orchestra, something that will make it less expensive to stage and tour yet still use live music.
As offbeat as that may sound, it wasn’t. The instrumental ensemble was much smaller, with guitar, mandolin and banjo filling in for brass and woodwinds. The sound was thinner, but the feeling was less diminished than intimate. In another successful tweak for portability, lovely projections of prairie landscapes by Beowulf Boritt were used instead of scenery.
At its simplest, Rodeo, or its subtitle, The Courting at Burnt Ranch, is about trying to fit in while having a crush on the wrong guy. De Mille’s ballet, made in 1942 two years before Graham’s Appalachian Spring, was also a wartime ballet that patriotically looked back to an idealized America. With 80 years hindsight we can see the cracks in the painting, but there was a reason for that portrait.
Laurel Dalley Smith played de Mille’s lead role, the Cowgirl, as awkward but not a figure of ridicule. Even though she had a crush on the Head Wrangler, Alessio Crognale-Roberts, she found in the Champion Roper, Richard Villaverde, a man who wasn’t a player. He was sweet tempered and danced with her gently.
The square dance entr’acte didn’t have an outside caller; Leslie Andrea Williams called it out from within the cast. Later, both the Roper and the Cowgirl made fast changes; Villaverde put on tap shoes and Dalley Smith reappeared with a skirt, awkwardly bobbing her head as she danced with Villaverde. Crognale-Roberts finally took notice, but Villaverde won Dalley Smith in a tap solo. Bless his heart, though, he could barely tap.
There’s nothing in Rodeo the dancers couldn’t do (except tap), and it looked like something they should do. Their performance wasn’t as specific as it is in Graham, and the link to Graham was less vocabulary, but era. You could sense the 1940s, how theater and Broadway worked with a broad innocence in the delivery. There were big smiles, big gestures when the women flounced off after a joke, or when another woman who cried or became nauseous when courted.
If there were other lessons to be learned in Rodeo, it might be an old adage and a new one: as the cowgirl made calf eyes at the Wrangler in front of the Roper, Dance with who brung ya. And when the Wrangler finally noticed her later, If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it.
Jamar Roberts is very much a message choreographer as well (From a profile of him when he staged a work at Miami City Ballet, Questions like, “what do I need from this work?” and, “how can this work be of service to the world?” build the foundation of his artistic expression.) and he thought of his premiere for the company, We the People, a “protest piece” as Artistic Director Janet Eilber conveyed in her curtain remarks.
The work began in smoke and silence, with Williams, who is Black, at center, reaching, collapsing, twisting, then shaking, slapping her thighs. Behind her, the rest of the cast stood in the shadows, watching.
To recorded folk music, a trio of women danced, and that grew to nine of the ten dancers in the cast (Villaverde joined only for finale). Later, Crognale-Roberts stood alone in silence with his legs wide, his fingers in his belt loops, in an echo of the American postures we also saw in Rodeo, but looking at that icon from a more ambivalent view, starting and stopping in silence and smoke, simmering with angst and anger. He stood, and the lights went out.
The piece moved fluidly from idea to idea, as solos and small groups became later ones. The company tackled this even more easily than Rodeo; the dancers did whatever was thrown at them. Some of the things were more familiar than others, such as the cast coming forward to stare at us.
The strength of the dance itself held the work together more firmly than the message; Roberts is becoming more and more adept with long movement phrases. Marzia Memoli tore into a female solo, then Lloyd Knight and Crognale-Roberts joined her, and the rhythmic propulsion made the trio gripping.
We the People hammered its point home with Knight crouching in silence, as if to hide. He reached forward and arched back in the darkness during his slow solo, finally winding up face down, with his hands behind his back, a reference that hopefully one day will seem opaque.
The piece culminated with a line dance for the full cast, again, with the same visceral note-for-step propulsion. Once again, they came forward, reaching towards us, but the work ended with them walking away into darkness.
In today’s New York City, dances with a message are generally preaching to the converted. So as with any form of elevated expression, the message isn’t the main thing; often we already know, and likely agree, with what it is. Lecturing on the perils of living while Black in America probably has about as much traction as an airline safety video. The hope from the seats is to say it in a way that makes us hear it anew. It helped that Roberts is becoming more and more skilled at making choreography that is compelling on its own.
It’s striking that Graham’s final utterance, Maple Leaf Rag, created the year before she died at age 96, was a parody. Besides her advanced age, this was also the era of Ron Protas and in the same way that folks whisper that Balanchine’s final Variations for Orchestra relied heavily on the input of Suzanne Farrell, it would not surprise if other hands were involved.
To recordings of three Joplin rags, the Maple Leaf Rag, Bethena and Elite Syncopations, the premise of the work is based on what Graham would do when she felt uninspired: ask the pianist for the Maple Leaf Rag. Williams, in an enormous skirt, slowly revolved across the stage on portentous chords. The rest of the cast followed suit in contractions. Xin Ying fretted on a joggling beam at center stage, and it was all a parody of the drama drama drama that became part of Graham’s mystique.
Bethena began as a series of duets, followed by each couple settling down on the beam, weighing it down further. After, three harpies and two men, representing every Greek myth Graham ever touched, angsted their way across the stage. The others on the beam clapped in appreciation. To end the movement, Knight carried Ying out sideways; to end the whole affair, he whipped off he skirt and ran off. Everything was played hard for laughs. It’s not as if Graham never made a joke, but given Maple Leaf Rag’s position in the canon, it felt here as if it undercut the repertory.
This is the kickoff of Graham’s centennial celebration, but this last run at City Center brought us just three full Graham works, of which only Appalachian Spring is top-drawer. The fourth work, the brief Satyric Festival Song, is a reconstruction done after Graham’s death to different music than Graham used.
A mixed-rep show like this hints how far the Martha Graham Dance Company is going from Martha Graham. We saw core Graham technique only lampooned. The company is made up of strong, versatile dancers who have performed with several other groups in other disciplines, but is there such a thing any longer as a Graham dancer? Graham technique and the attendant vocabulary is something we don’t want to lose.
There’s a reason the company has ventured farther afield, and its survival and stabilization through periods when it looked as if it wouldn’t is the strongest argument for the course it has taken. Still, echt Graham exists, and hopefully the centennial will bring much more of it.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
Rodeo, We the People, Maple Leaf Rag – Martha Graham Dance Company
New York City Center, New York, NY
April 17, 2024
Cover: Martha Graham Dance Company in Rodeo. Photo © Carla Lopez, Luque Photography.
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