Martha Graham Dance Company at Cal Performances

Like Pablo Picasso or Igor Stravinsky, the dancer/choreographer Martha Graham's name permeated the 20th century cultural landscape as an artist who fundamentally changed their art form. Tough there have been plenty of chances to see Picasso's work or listen to Stravinsky's compositions, I realized that I had never seen a Martha Graham dance performed live before a couple of weeks ago, when Cal Performances hosted the Martha Graham Dance Company on their national 100th anniversary tour.

Graham was born in Pennsylvania in 1894 to open-minded parents who moved the family to Southern California 14 years later. As a teenager, she studied with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts before decamping to New York and founding her own company in 1926. It was an all-female troupe until 1938 when Erick Hawkis joined the group. Graham and Hawkins married in 1948 after the New York premiere of Night Journey, starring the two of them in a dance depicting the Oedipus story from Jocasta's point of view after discovering that her son is her husband. Hawkins left the company three years later to start his own, and the marriage was over in 1954.

The 30-minute work features angular movement and Graham's famed contraction/expansion movement vocabulary. I loved the Chorus in their Graham-designed costumes looking like extras from a Cocteau film, and Ethan Palma hopping about on his walking stick as Tiresias the Seer, but overall I was a little underwhelmed. Part of it was that the William Schuman score was in a dull, mid-century academic style and it was played too loud over the speaker system. Also, sculptor Isamu Noguchi's original set looked a little lost on the very wide Zellerbach stage. Anne Souder as Jocasta and Lloyd Knight as Oedipus are fine dancers, but didn't project the complex passions required for the roles.

Though Graham famously refused to have her dances filmed, believing in the sanctity of live performance, there are a few exceptions, including an experimental 1956 film of Night Journey made by Alexander Hammid, with a 62-year-old Martha Graham as Jocasta and a young Bertram Ross as Oedipus, along with Paul Taylor as Tiresius. It is amazing (click here).

Graham underwent a personal crisis in the late 1960s after she left the stage. In her autobiography, Blood Memory, she wrote: "I believe in never looking back, never indulging in nostalgia, or reminiscing. Yet how can you avoid it when you look on stage and see a dancer made up to look as you did thirty years ago, dancing a ballet you created with someone you were then deeply in love with, your husband? I think that is a circle of hell Dante omitted...[When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded...Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma." But she survived, got sober in 1972, and proceeded to choreograph another dozen or so dances before her death in 1991. After her demise, there was a messy battle of succession that did not work out well, but the company has been revived under Janet Eilber, a former Graham dancer and teacher who has been the company's Artistic Director since 2005.

One of Eilber's achievements has been the commissioning of new dances over the last decade by a roster of some of the best young choreographers of our time. The second piece on the program was Cortege, created by Amadi "Baye" Washington and Sam "Asa" Pratt who have been playing with each other since they were six year olds in Brooklyn together.

The 2023 Cortege is Baye & Asa's riff on Graham's antiwar Cortege of Eagles with a dynamic musical score by Jack Grabow and dramatic lighting by Yi-Chung Chen. It starts off as a centipede of dancers is revealed and then reconfigures as duos, trios, quartets, and group scenes. What it has to do with war I have no clue but it was a great vehicle to demonstrate how accomplished all the company's dancers really are.

After intermission, there was a performance of the once-lost, politically charged 1936 Graham work, Chronicle. Two of the movements from the original piece are still missing but films of three of the other movements have turned up and been reconstructed. It started with Spectre--1914 (Drums, Red Shroud, Lament), a solo dance in a spellbinding performance by Leslie Andrea Williams. Using only the simple prop of a two-toned cape, she mesmerized us to extraordinary music by Willingford Riegger, a buddy of Henry Cowell who also wrote dance scores for Graham.

The all-female dances in Steps in the Street (Devastation, Homelessness, Exile) and Prelude to Action (Unity, Pledge to the Future) looked surprisingly contemporary, as if they could have been choreographed yesterday. Graham's legacy looks to be in good hands and I look forward to their Cal Performances return.

Weekly Resistance

The weekly protest against the U.S. fascist federal regime takes place at the intersection of O'Farrell Street and Van Ness Avenue every Saturday afternoon from noon to two.

The homemade signage is sincere...

...angry...

...and sometimes misspelled.

Mark your calendars for March 28th when there will be another mass protest across the country and the world against the sociopaths in charge of the U.S. government. Doing something rather than stewing in despair is good for your mental health.

Balanchine at the SF Ballet

An all-Balanchine program being performed this week at the San Francisco Ballet is all about big ballets with lots of dancers in each of the trio of works. It started with the 1967 Diamonds which is usually performed as the finale to Jewels, right after the dreamy Emeralds and the jazzy Rubies. (All production photos are by Lindsay Thomas.)

The ballet evokes the dazzling luxury of Imperial Russia to the music of Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony, minus the first movement. What stood out was the joy of simply watching Balanchine's use of bodies as architecture, and also how peerlessly he married music and movement. The dancing by everyone was first-rate and so was the orchestra under conductor Martin West.

Balanchine's first ballet created in the United States, the 1934 Serenade, is a calmer beauty for many women and a couple of men. Set to one of Tchaikovsky's loveliest set of tunes, the Serenade in C Major for Strings, the ballet started off with a large group of motionless women with their right arms outstretched to the horizon before moving into more abstract physical architecture and a yearning story that is not explicit.

The one male-female duet was danced by Wei Wang and Jasmine Jamison. Wang has become one of my favorite dancers in the company, and in this performance I realized he may be the best partner in the whole company, lifting women effortlessly in the air as if they were a delicate feather rather than visibly gearing up for a heft.

The final ballet was the 1958 Stars and Stripes, orchestrated by Hershey Kay to music by John Philip Sousa. Kay was an indespensable figure in New York City, orchestrating ballets and musicals, including Bernstein's On The Town and Candide.

The ballet is meant to be comic and lightly ironic, with one amusingly uniformed regiment after another taking the stage. However, with fascist politics presently dominating the country, presenting a United States flag-waving romp does feel a bit tone deaf, as does the company's continuing plans to perform at the Kennedy Center in May. Check out Rachel Howard's well-written review and discussion of the topic at the SF Chronicle.

When a black curtain was raised near the end of the piece, revealing a huge United States flag, for some in the audience it felt a bit like watching Springtime for Hitler. (The above photo is by Austin Newsom.)

An Homage to Sarah Cahill

The pianist Sarah Cahill has been thinking about grief over the death of loved ones and a sense of loss as the United States government dismantles its already threadbare support of the arts with the closing of the Kennedy Center, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other cultural institutions. For Monday's SF Conservatory of Music Faculty Artist recital on the 11th floor of the Bowes Center, she performed a recital entitled No Ordinary Light consisting of a series of homages to various dead people. Looking at the program, I feared it was going to be a succession of dirges, but instead the selections were extremely eclectic, ranging from the 17th century harpsichord piece Tombeau de Mr.de Chambonnieres by Jean-Henri d'Anglebert to the 2025 Prelude: Hammer the Sky Bright by Samuel Adams commemorating composer Ingram Marshall, complete with a recording of wind and foghorns nestled in the piano strings.

Also on the program: the 1972 Hommage à Fauré by Robert Helps (click here for the wonderful Robert Helps Web Monument created by adoring colleagues); the 1990 Homage to William Dawson by Zenobia Powell Perry, the evening's audience favorite with its jazzy rhythms; two pieces by Lou Harrison, the 1952 Fugue to David Tudor written in an uncharacteristic twelve-tone style and a lilting tune for the 1948 Hommage à Milhaud.

Cahill commissioned both the Samuel Adams piece and the 2001 Holding Pattern by composer Maggi Payne in honor of Ruth Crawford Seeger. It involved putting small battery-powered devices called e-bows to rest on the strings which are then somehow manipulated into strange tones operated through the pedals. "I can't believe they still work after all this time," Cahill told us. The piece was very strange but sort of fabulous.

The finale was Maurice Ravel's 1917 Le tombeau de Couperin, with each of its six movements dedicated to friends who had just perished in World War One. The orchestrated version seems to be on the program at the SF Symphony every other month, but this was the first time hearing the original piano version. Though I still don't quite get the work, it is obviously a favorite piece of music for Cahill and many others. Maybe one day I'll feel it.