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. Though 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 Hawkins 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 Wallingford 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.