On the essays shelf:
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Acocella’s 2002 essay ‘The Flame’, about modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, is both a profile of the artist (who was dead at the time of the writing), and also a detailed explanation of the veritable war that broke out amongst her followers, the board of directors, the trustee of her will, and everyone else involved with Martha Graham’s work, following her death. It is a very interesting and somewhat dismaying look at who OWNS dances, can a dance be copyrighted, how are dances “passed on”? What is a legacy and who owns it? Keeping the “purity” of the original is a lofty goal but it can also mean that the dances no longer grow, are no longer relevant. The eruptions in the Martha Graham Dance Company in the late 90s, early 2000s, were front-page news. I am not sure where the situation stands now, but the article ends with a postscript that seemed hopeful.
Martha Graham lived a long life (after all, Madonna took dance classes from her in the 80s), and seemed to have a very difficult time in the last, say, 40 years of her life. She was an alcoholic. She was devastated when she got too old to dance. She started getting sloppy and almost pornographic in her choreography (there was always a sexual element in her work, but it became blatant). She had always had dancers who understood her technique work out their own steps and movements, a common thing with a good choreographer and a good troupe, but that situation became even more extreme by the end. What, exactly, was Martha Graham creating? Were they just living on her name, made famous in the 20s and 30s? She surrounded herself with acolytes, and sometimes chose partners who would trail around behind her. She would hook up with men 40 years her junior (no judgment, go Martha!) but the issue with these men (two in particular) is that they often felt that they were more important/closer to Martha than the hard-working dancers in the company, and it would cause a lot of tension. Dancers would walk out, quit. I’m not taking direction from that pipsqueak who’s never had a dance class. NO.
All of this took on legal ramifications when Martha Graham changed her will and left everything, her dances, her money, her legacy, to her current male companion, a guy who had already caused problems in the company, Ron Protas. He was not a dancer. But he was obsessed with Martha and devoted his life to hers. He felt they were spiritually connected. Martha seemed to agree. There are rumors that she had second thoughts about him and tried to change her will, again, before she died, but never got around to it. Hence, when she died, all control of her legacy went into this hated man’s hands. The inevitable followed. It’s somewhat similar to the iron-fist that James Joyce’s grandson holds over Joyce’s copyright (or did, until recently), although this is different in that this guy was not a relative, and he was also someone who had already caused so many problems in the company, and was generally hated by everyone. He began to run the Martha Graham Center, and would license out her dances (which is the only way dances will survive. Did the legacy die with Martha Graham? One would hope not.) But he would behave so imperiously towards those he licensed out to, that many companies vowed never to work with the Martha Graham people again. Then there was a re-shuffling of the Board, and a new director was hired, and they were millions of dollars in debt, and her studio had to be closed, and all of this, again, was front-page news. To those who care about and love dance, it was a tragedy.
What matters is the choreography, and Martha’s philosophy of dance, not to mention the specific ballets that she created. Would these be lost to future generations because of a business squabble?
There is some evidence that Martha actually did not care whether or not her legacy survived, and that may have been her reasoning for leaving everything to this problematic guy, whom she knew would cause problems. Dance is different than writing, or music – which leave behind a text that future generations can look at. Dance must be written down, or recorded. But so much of dance is not in the steps, but in the feeling behind the steps, in the subtleties and details of HOW the steps are done. I suppose this is an ongoing problem with choreographers, and it’s certainly an issue with Martha.
Acocella’s essay goes into all of that. At the heart of it is the journey of this pioneering woman who changed everything. She changed dance, and while there were pioneers before her, she became famous for it, famous on a much higher level, and through her hard work and breathtaking ingenuity actually created modern dance. Her stuff was avant-garde, and often looked into the far past, to Greek myths, for its inspiration. She was openly sexual, and mythic and archetypal in her approach. When she was at her height, a ticket to see Martha Graham was one of THE things to see in town. She brought out that which had been buried, and danced from that. If you think about the upheaval in art across the board in the 20s, and the influence of Freud on all aspects of life, it is obvious that Martha Graham was to dance what James Joyce was to literature. Her technique was incredible, and she came out of the ballet tradition, but her work was intensely personal, and she created an atmosphere of excitement and energy that only great stars can achieve.
Here is an excerpt.
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Like many female artists, Graham had a late start. She decided to become a dancer at the age of seventeen, after seeing a concert by Ruth St. Denis – who, with Isadora Duncan, is considered one of the mothers of modern dance – and it was at Denishawn, the famous Los Angeles school headed by St. Denis and Ted Shawn, that she received her training. But she didn’t take her first dance class until she was twentytwp, and she didn’t found her own company until 1929, when she was thirty-five. (Dr. Graham had died in 1914, and Martha spend her early professional years in Broadway shows to help support the family.) She caught up fast, though, and soon she had created America’s first modernist dance style. Early Graham dances such as Heretic (1929) and Primitive Mysteries (1931) are remarkable, first of all, for their abstractions. They are an enactment, not a narrative. Other choreographers were experimenting with abstractions at that time, but what is striking about Graham’s early work is its severity, what people then would have called its ugliness. (“She looks as though she were about to give birth to a cube,” the theater critic Stark Young wrote.) Graham was part of the New York avant-garde of the twenties and thirties. In Blood Memory, she tells of sitting with Alfred Stieglitz and reading with him Georgia O’Keeffe’s “glorious letters” from New Mexico, including one “about her waking just before dawn to bake bread in her adobe oven.” The Southwest, the dawn, bread, adobe, by now it’s a cliche, modernism’s embrace of the “primitive”, the non-European. But it wasn’t a cliche then, and Graham turned it into something tremendous. Heretic was about society’s persecution of the nonconformist. Any would-be artist in downtown Manhattan could have made a piece about that, but who except Graham could have imagined the ensemble groupings she ranged against the heretic: great slabs and walls of dancers, wedges and arcs and parabolas?
In creating such things, she was greatly helped by the composer Louis Horst. A gruff, lovable man who took his dachshunds to work with him, Horst had been the music director at Denishawn. When Graham left to go to New York, Horst followed her and became her music director and her lover. He was to be the leading composition teacher in American modern dance, but his most important student was the young Martha Graham. Horst was the only one who could criticize her, persuade her to redo her work. He taught her to be simple and trenchant. Until 1935, she used no sets and only the plainest costumes. She avoided music with melodies. Dance was a holy language, independent of all other arts: an act of pain and transfiguration.
The dozen or so women who formed her company in the thirties embraced her faith. They weren’t paid, and, according to one of them, Nelle Fisher, “we almost didn’t want to be, because … it was complete dedication, like a sisterhood.” The dancers had much to bear. Frequently, Graham got blocked, and then, Fisher said, she would “have a real breakdown, weeping and storming, with Louis trying to hold her head.” Agnes de Mille, in her biography Martha, writes that once, in the middle of creating a piece, Graham went into a depression for four days. “The company waited outside her bedroom, in a morbid stupor, as the clock ticked, and the performance date drew near. At the end of the ordeal … Martha rose from her bed and came forth. ‘Everything is clear now,’ she said placidly.” And she finished the piece. Graham told people that her dances had always existed. She only invoked them. Nor did she choose to; she was chosen. As she wrote in her Notebooks (1973), she had been given “lonely terrifying gifts.”
