Martha graham, p.26
Martha Graham, page 26
One of the popular Shaker hymns praised King David dancing before God as he brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem: “Come, life, Shaker life, come, life eternal, Shake, shake out of me all that is carnal.” Ernestine Henoch Stodelle, a member of Doris Humphrey’s ensemble from 1930 to 1934, wondered forty years later, “Did we, as the ‘original’ Shakers, sense the ‘immortality’ of [her] inspired work when we started rehearsals [for Dance of the Chosen]?…The historical fact that the Shaker clan would gather in their immaculate Meeting Houses to pray together and then to dance out their creed, ‘Ye shall be saved when ye are shaken free of sin,’ was as stimulating to us as it was to Miss Humphrey.”
Shaker “believers” shunned the vanities of instrumentation and vocal harmonizing when they “sang in gift…forcible, clear & plain to the Heavenly Host,” marched heel-and-toe, “took nimble steps,” waved their arms skyward, and stooped, beckoned, “motioned and pantomimed.” For the music of Dance of the Chosen, Humphrey opted for a single drum and the offstage soprano of Pauline Lawrence accompanying herself with an accordion (later a harmonium).
All the performers were women: six Brethren attired in long, black coats and flat, wide-brimmed black hats, and six Sisters in starched bonnets and brown burlap dresses with white collars. “Down the center between the sexes,” Stodelle recalled, “was an invisible line, which no sister or brother crossed, no matter how fervent their dancing would become.” (In Doris Humphrey’s staging for her repertory class at the Connecticut College School of Dance in August 1955, a chalk center line was drawn on the floor).
Humphrey was the presiding “Eldress,” silent and seated. As the piece progressed, she awakened into motion to weave among the women until she paused to clap and call out an incantational, jubilant exhortation. “There was a center figure, yes,” Humphrey wrote, referring to herself in the third person, “but by far the strongest and most important movement was given to the group, and it was their collective strength which gave power to the dance.”
Doris Humphrey (center) and ensemble in The Shakers. (Photograph, 1938, by Barbara Morgan)
Doris Humphrey was fascinated by the “compulsions” of the Shakers, “a group of people who are united as individuals in their efforts to reach what they feel is salvation”…“they are creating a world…where the spirit can soar.” Before Sabbath-day meetings, the brothers and sisters retired in their separate rooms “in silence for the space of half an hour,” to seek within themselves “a sense of the Gospel” before being summoned forth to dance—“Let us labor!”
The Dance of the Chosen unfolds quietly, the divided men and women kneeling in an upstage-facing “three-sided square,” hands clasped in prayer, gazing heavenward. With the introduction of the heartbeat-drumbeat, an austere tribalism pervades the group. The Eldress points at an angle upward, and heavy stomping begins, alternating with prancing on toes, and hops, leaps, and skips accompanied by clapping in unison, heads tilted up and down to the airy, soaring voice of the soprano and with “the wheeling of ranks…strait [sic], not only to the right and left, but also forward and back.”
After a pause, a hoarse cry emerges from the ensemble—Eleanor King, in the role of “Man 1” in the original production—“My life! My carnal life! I shall lay it down—because it is depraved!” This is the cue for the Eldress, mounting a box upstage center, to issue her impassioned declamation: “It hath been revealed—ye shall be saved when ye are shaken free of sin!” Bending at the waist, hands dangling from wrists, she delves into paroxysms. Brothers and sisters follow her lead, hands flopping as if sprinkling water from fingertips; they lunge, crouch, and pound on the floor with their hands.
The two facing groups approach the edge of the barrier line in bounding hops and deafening percussion, thrusting forward and writhing back with effortful expulsions of breath. They lean in, then out, in a tug-of-war. The singer’s chants welling up again, the Eldress reaches a dizzy ecstasy of twirling, pivoting on her planted left foot as her right foot propels her. The ensemble falls to the ground. She alone remains upright, exhaling a final “Amen!”
* * *
• • •
I have seen few things ever in the theatre more beautiful than the first number in the Mysteries as it went this year, the Indian forms, solid in drawing and in composition as Diego Rivera at his best, the figure in white of the chief dancer, the motives of those groups and salutations, the foot above the shielding hands, the motives of worship and celebration.
—Stark Young
Primitive Mysteries, Martha Graham’s newborn masterpiece, premiered on the evening of February 2, 1931, and was repeated on February 6. In service to Louis Horst’s ideal of music aspiring to purity—“the dance comes first !”—twelve women, including Martha Hill, under the name “Martha Todd…because stage dancing was still not seen [in some circles] as a ‘proper’ activity,” and Georgia “Geordie” Graham, Martha’s younger sister, had been rehearsing with Graham, in silence, every night for three months. When the “rhythmic patterns and tempos [had been] set, [and] before the music [was] written,” Graham allowed Horst into the studio in January to see what they had made: “You must not fit what you are doing to the music,” she warned the dancers, “but let the music show what you are doing.” Ever the mischievous accompanist who loved to keep the women on their toes, Horst would divert into Bach chorales or “hints of Gregorian chants” during Graham’s warm-up exercises.
Martha Graham Dance Composition, with impressions of Primitive Mysteries, by Lucy Brown L’Engle, oil on board, 1931.
To the counts Graham had laid down, Horst brought a score with silences between phrases, so that, he said, it would “have the transparency of primitive music, so you can look through it and see the dance…The music is the frame to the picture.” His chord-driven piano conjured the pounding feet of the Taos Pueblo, above which floated in unison Hugo Bergamasco’s flute and William Sargeant’s oboe, as if wafting through mountain air. Horst insisted that, while the evocative framework of Primitive Mysteries “welded…tone and movement,” he was not aiming to replicate native melodies. “Martha didn’t like music that had a melodic line,” said Sophie Maslow. “It had to be percussive and bare.”
Observing from a discreet distance, and en passant—defying the gospel that “Miss Graham would not tolerate being watched from the wings”—José Limón “was struck by the sacerdotal authority with which she rehearsed” Primitive Mysteries, “and by the hushed, almost religious atmosphere” in the room. May O’Donnell, cast in the piece the following year, said that Graham—in order to listen properly, waiting to formulate new sensations—“needed a lot of quietness…You could sense by the movement the direction she was going in. She wasn’t a person who talked much.”
The dancers were aware that Graham had recently made a trip with Horst to the New Mexico desert, where “he stimulated Martha into trying to capture some of that feeling,” and that “the Indian rituals…had had a deep effect on her whole vision.” Bessie Schonberg, a company member in 1930–1931, was asked over the years if Graham “ever told [her] what she had seen out there [in New Mexico]…. Well,” came Schonberg’s vague reply, “she saw people in her own country living in ways which I think she had had no conception of. She was seeing them in many ways through Louis’s eyes.” Sophie Maslow was ambiguous about the roots for the dance when she recalled decades later that “Martha didn’t say very much about the source of [Primitive Mysteries]…. She never did much explaining…. It was a combination of American Indian life and rituals [and] the Catholicism that the Spaniards had brought to the United States…That was about the only thing she spoke about.” A brief program note for a performance at Bennington College in the spring of 1933 reenforced Graham’s Neoplatonic perspective, framing it as a work of religious fusion, “embodying in dance form the Aboriginal [sic] and Christian rituals.”
“The work is echt Graham,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote, when Primitive Mysteries, dormant since the Louis Horst Memorial Concert at the American Dance Festival in 1964, was revived in New York in the spring of 1977, despite the reluctance of the octogenarian creator, who stayed away from rehearsals—led by Sophie Maslow, assisted by Yuriko and by Takako Asakawa—until the last sessions. “Some people make a cocoon and weave a web of the past around themselves,” Graham said coolly. “I’ve never wanted to do that.” She did resuscitate a few oblique observations. The piece “was taken from the feeling the Southwest had about the Virgin,” she said. “She is very concrete to the people, a part of their lives.” The voluminously layered, pure-white organdy dress with petal-like shoulders Graham wore for her role as “the Virgin” was prompted by memories of “the white night-blooming Cereus flowers…by [her] window in Santa Barbara, when ‘it was very still…You could hear the leaves opening….’ ”
Rather than waste time in the studio belaboring the meaning of Primitive Mysteries, Martha Graham spoke of actions—what was to be done. In rehearsal, during quiet stretches, she would drape a shawl over her shoulders and survey the room, eagle eyes catching every detail, without taking notes. She saw into her dancers’ emotions, and induced them to reveal movements to her, appropriating their capabilities, quirks, and characteristics for the work in process. When she spotted something she liked during these exercises, Graham would shout, “We’ll keep that!”
A zen master, at one instant Graham singled out the smoothly coiffed Mary Rivoire, her hair concealed under a net and immobile, her masklike face exotically made up, as an example of the implacable persona she wanted. She praised the incremental qualities of Ailes Gilmour, now a full member of the group. Her “elongated throat,” the muscular neck viewed from the side, was so “eloquent,” Graham told the dancers. “See how Ailes presses the air down with her hands as she rises,” Graham said to the others. “It is as if she carves her own body’s shape out of the air, like a Rodin figure emerging from marble.”
Repeated “deep stretch” exercises were meant to build power for the “strength on the back leg” necessary to support the unsupported, gradual back fall and instigate the forward thrust so important to “the Walk,” weighted and unhurried, taken on a contraction, with “a step, a pause, and then a step again on the same foot.” At the Cornish School, Graham had likened this movement to the resistance one felt wading through surf; according to Dorothy Bird, in New York, although Graham could not swim, they had gone out to Jones Beach and she made the women practice in the chilly Atlantic.
During her mid- to late thirties, Graham wanted to create and set new work on a loyal cadre of dancers while continuing to maintain a dependable repertory. She came up against the irritations and exigencies of production—scarce stage time in the theatre to run music, adapt spacing, and fix tech cues, and trying on and rejecting lighting schemes in the same way she draped costumes, only to rip up and refashion them. The day before Primitive Mysteries opened, “Martha’s mood [was] like a bowstring drawn tight” and “she had developed the most frightful headache.”
Cluttered with props and scenery from the current play, the Craig Theatre set was not struck until midnight. When the group finally began a run-through, the dancers were “anxious [and] unsure,” trying harder than usual to do what they were told—to do their best for Martha. At one point, Graham as the Virgin, lifted by weary and fearful “Attendants,” slipped and stumbled. “Her nerves shattered. ‘That will do!’ she erupted, incensed. ‘That’s enough…. You don’t care…. Get out of the theatre. Get out of my sight. Go home!’ ” In disbelief, the women “dressed in silence.” Horst pursued Graham to her dressing room, where he sat with her, cajoled and calmed her, and eventually the two returned, whereupon rehearsal resumed, lasting until 3:00 a.m.
In the work of Martha Graham, impelled toward receding perfection, more was always expected. The only way for a dancer to conquer the anxiety that came with not-dancing (not-sculpting, not-writing, not-painting…) was to take class every day, then take class again; to rehearse, and rehearse again; to perform, and perform again.
* * *
• • •
[E]ach member of the [Primitive Mysteries] group seems to take the first step because it is timed to a beat, whereas Graham seems to step because the beat has forced her to move.
—Roy Hargrave
Behold yourself in me as I speak, and seeing what I do, keep silent about my mysteries. You who are dancing, know that this human suffering which I am about to bear is yours.
—Anonymous, the Acts of John
From the opening instant of “Hymn to the Virgin,” the first part of the Primitive Mysteries triptych, the dancers emerge onto a soundless tabula rasa, a “phalanx” of maidens in dark wool jersey dresses of grayish blue, “the sacred color, celestial blue, the color of heaven.” With the white-clad Virgin in their midst, the sisterhood makes a solemn entrance from stage left with hushed, meted-out, glide-and-pause steps, summoned from some distant, secret place, out of sight and mind: called from the Pueblo kiva into the central square, to face awaiting villagers and visitors, or processing along the sacred way from the wellspring of dance’s origins at Eleusis. The three lines of “players” arrive at the public sphere and halt briefly, dresses swaying forward against the backs of their thighs. Only then does the music for the “ritual of adoration” begin.
Interrupting the primal silence come a mournful oboe and a flittering flute, the instrument borne by humpbacked Kokopelli, Pueblo deity of storytelling, agriculture, and childbirth. The dancers divide, two groups circling downstage and one group humbly seated “like carved stone figures of the ancestors” upstage, never taking their enraptured eyes off Martha Graham, chosen by God for the Annunciation. Hair loose and feet bare, with exuberant grand battements, she darts back and forth like a pollinating bee between two foregrounded clusters of dancers.
Martha Graham as “the Virgin,” and ensemble, in Primitive Mysteries, 1931. (Photograph by Paul Hansen)
The devotees encircle her in stilled obeisance. In response, she gestures with gentle, seductive benedictions, they embrace her delicately, haloing her head with bent arms and pyramided hands imitating the mandorla rays of grace framing the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and cherishingly envelop her, “catch her, and send her off.” In counterpoint, the seated back row of tall ladies rises to life, light leaps with heavy footfalls pounding silence into submission. Bodies are reconfigured into threes and fours before regaining the floor. Two kneeling rows form a passageway of laid-down cupped hands, an impression of water, as, “benign[ly] calm,” the Virgin weightlessly treads upon its surface, inclining with courtliness left and right, making her way forward.
The group convenes into a tribal circle, a living organism within which Mary, motionless, at the center, alone of all her sex, does not move. The choreia ring dance rotates one way, then the opposite, reversing and spinning, inside out and outside in. The Virgin sits, earthbound, arms akimbo over raised knees. The repressed energy she contains surpasses the energy expended by the group. They coalesce into silent lines around her and proceed offstage the way they came in, toward a timeless time, a placeless place.
After a pause, the quiet lines of dancers return for part two: “Crucifixus.” The “Handmaidens” arranged downstage left, the Virgin is upstage with two Attendants, one on either side. They arch over her, arms angled spear-like, pointing at the distant cross on the hill of Golgotha. The Mater Dolorosa covers her eyes, “knuckles bulging like carbuncles,” weeping before the agon of her only Son. Her steps maintain a flexed, tenacious grip on the earth, inching ahead, back indented, stomach flattened. Palms and extended fingers pressed to face and forehead in a crown of pain depict the Eleusinian rite of the mystai, “the initiates made worthy through suffering,” and myein, “closing the eyes or the mouth,” under a secret spell, sorrow and suffering engendering strength and power.
With an annunciatory piano chord, the Virgin flings her arms parallel to the floor and steps forward, unleashing the ensemble into animalistic action. They spring into a circle around Mary and her Attendants, and, half-crouching, prance clockwise, quick-footed, “stomping like bison,” arms extended straight behind their backs, hands locked together, scapulae protruding like angels’ wings, as “flintlike, the movement runs dangerously near the thin borderline where faith becomes fanaticism, and religion, madness.”
At first slow motion, their crashing lunges accelerate to a frenzy of “pitched-forward grands jetés,” the tempo of “the suspended bodies…cutting through space” accelerating to a vertiginous pace, before slowing down as prelude to the recessional that marked the conclusion of part one—in silence but for the heaving inhalations and exhalations of the dancers transformed by their cathartic “experience of a great rhythm.”
In part three, “Hosannah!” the dance shifts from circular to sprightly. Like Louis Horst’s distinctions between “earth primitive” and “air primitive,” the piece becomes asymmetrical, piccolo and oboe keeping a birdsong rhythm, with “brooding” piano chords between. Arranged in parallel lines again, the dancers calibrate into a tableau of two arcs framing Martha Graham and her single acolyte (“Disciple”) in a succession of slow plastiques. Legs splayed, feet flat, arms wide, the seated Virgin assumes the wide-open pose of the Great Mother. She supports the disciple’s backbend and fall, accepting her into her lap as a cradled pietà, and there is a suspended moment of eye contact.
