Martha Graham
How does a company Martha Graham created in 1926 to serve her incredibly talented voice continue to evolve after her death in 1991 (at age 96)? Or, does the work of a primal force in modern dance, who choreographed 181 dances using her original physical vocabulary and style over a period of 70 years, become a living museum?
Kerville Jack
Photos by Costas
The jury is out. But the 2008 re-creation of Graham’s “Clytemnestra,” an epic dance-drama built on Greek mythology and tragedy, last performed in 1964, was a superbly engaging hit at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. Graham conceived this well-integrated piece, premiered in 1958, in its entirety—dance, music, costumes and props.
Celebrating its 83rd season, and the 50th anniversary of this full, evening-long masterpiece, the company epitomized Graham’s original choreography, embodying universal themes from a psychological perspective. The beautifully sculpted dancers commanded the stage with emotion and precision. Isamu Noguchi’s set and Halim El-Dabh’s music, performed by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra with singers acting like a Greek chorus, underscored the contemplative and traumatic themes.
Based on events in the lives of the star-crossed royal family of Atreus, the story of the dance is essentially this: Queen Clytemnestra’s sister Helen, married to her brother-in-law, is seduced by Paris and carried away to Troy. So, King Agamemnon sails off to bring her home. Agamemnon tricks his wife into sending her favorite child to him to give in marriage to a great Greek hero. Instead, Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter on the altar of fire to ensure success in the 10-year Trojan War that follows, with scenes of rape and killing. Clytemnestra rules the kingdom during this time and takes a lover. Agamemnon returns with his enslaved mistress, the royal princess of Troy. Seeking revenge for the arrogant King’s deception and death of their daughter, Clytemnestra knifes him. Then her children, Orestes and Electra, kill her to avenge their father’s murder. From the kingdom of the dead, Clytemnestra set the Furies upon Orestes to drive him mad. The gods intervene and transform the Furies into well-wishers.
The drama begins with the messenger of death, bald and bare-chested, walking across the stage with his giant staff topped by a gold, coiled serpent. Banished to the Underworld for her vengeful murder of Agamemnon and dishonored among the dead, Clytemnestra is riven with anger and guilt. Searching for vindication, she relives, through flashbacks, the events of her life that have brought her to this end. She is a tragic, yet triumphant heroine who solves personal conflict through acceptance and forgiveness. Graham tells the epic through the radical language of movement she created: contraction and release of the torso and pelvis, use of floor movement, sharp, angular, jagged movements and spiral curves. She sought to increase the emotional communication of the dancer’s body.
Graham externalizes the labyrinths of mind on stage: sexuality, arrogance, pride, anger, revenge, fear, anxiety, anguish, hate. Faces are expressive. Mouths open in anguish, hands cup, bourrées are on half toe and on knees. Body slaps give emphasis. Olympian men powerfully step in wide stride. Props are symbolic, as in Clytemnestra’s red cloak tightly covering her and flowing outward, spreading emblematic blood everywhere.
Graham’s technique/style, themes and sensibility have a timelessness that stretches from ancient into contemporary times. Probing Clytemnestra's thoughts, Graham demonstrates her genius for capturing the emotion of women caught in the net of rejection, betrayal, jealousy, hatred and revenge; she confronts the ever-burning social and political questions of their subjugation and human justice.
New to this re-creation are supertitles and supplementing program notes which help to “clarify the chronology, since much of it takes place in the memory of the Queen or through stream of consciousness,” explains Janet Eilber, former Graham dancer and the company’s artistic director. “Today's audience is not as familiar with the classics as the audience of 1958.”
Eilber also notes the usual evolution happens in dance, evolution that Martha herself embraced. “The physicality of dancers is constantly changing; dancers become more and more facile and energized, and audience expectations match this constant upgrade,” she says. “We don't try to play Mozart on the original instruments. We try to maintain the emotional power of the themes while allowing the current company to interpret the roles with their own contemporary physicality.”