A Sculptor of Movement : ...

It seems as if the obituaries had hardly run before people were booting up their computers to produce books on Martha Graham, the most richly gifted and most personally vivid artist in the history of classical modern dance. In the course of her 96 years, Graham, who died last April, was first considered a renegade, then an acknowledged genius, and finally an institution; now she’s well on her way to becoming an industry. Actually, the most important entry in the first round of publications, Agnes de Mille’s “Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham,” was in the making for over two decades and circumspectly awaited the great lady’s passing.

With this big, ambitious book, De Mille, Graham’s near-contemporary, co-tiller in the fields, and friend, finally gets her own back. Successful as her own choreography has been on the concert stage (“Rodeo,” “Fall River Legend”) and on Broadway (“Oklahoma!,” “Carousel”), De Mille always has acknowledged openly that her talent was simply not in Graham’s class.

It can’t have been easy to live and work under that shadow. But there is something De Mille can do far better than Graham (whose own memoir is considered below)--write. Her writing shares the virtue of her dances: It is popular in its appeal and inviting to the general audience. From her 1951 “Dance to the Piper” to this volume, De Mille has kept her readers turning pages.

Of course she has a dazzling subject here. Even the landscape of Graham’s childhood was dramatic, divided between repressively gray Pittsburgh and sensuously lush Santa Barbara. Then, seized by dance in her late teens, Graham entered the legendary Denishawn school to absorb a blend of watered-down ballet, inaccurate ethnic dance, hokey if sincerely felt Eastern mysticism, and turbulent interpersonal conflicts. Striking out on her own, De Mille’s heroine then endured years of poverty, neglect and grueling labor as she forged her own language of expression, gathering unto her a band of devoted acolytes to create a blazingly innovative technique and repertory.

Recognition may have come late, but it came grandly, conferring godhead on Graham, who accepted it as her due. Then, as in any good morality play, the downhill slide began. The incapacities of age took their toll, exacerbated by emotional extravagance; supporters fell away to be replaced by people with cannier agendas; the taste of recent “cool” decades turned against Graham’s blood-and-guts aesthetic. Graham endured, and De Mille convincingly charts that endurance.

As I’ve suggested, the book is a lively read. Its chief flaw is that De Mille unwittingly tried to write two different books at once. The first is an account of an extraordinary life, which the author tends to oversimplify and overtheatricalize in her eagerness to sweep the reader along in the excitement of it all; sentiment is carelessly given precedence over fact. The other is a sober, solid documentation of the work and what went into its making. Try as she may, De Mille can do little more than picturesquely describe the process and the results. Objective, illuminating analysis of the dances, let alone of the imagination that created them, is beyond her; it may be beyond anyone.

De Mille paints some fine portraits--the warts-and-all one of Louis Horst, Graham’s most influential mentor, is unforgettable-- and she regularly comes up with astute psychological insights. Yet she cannot see beyond her own conventional concept of what constitutes a good life (for a woman), so we must endure her dogged insistence that Graham was somehow “deprived” by her “sacrificing” the roles of wife and mother to that of artist. Similarly, Graham is given too little credit for being self-engendering; for example, De Mille exaggerates the influence of Erick Hawkins, the first man to enter Graham’s staunchly female company, and, apparently, Graham’s greatest romantic and sexual attachment. The more likely scenario, it seems to me, is the standard behavior of genius: It takes what it needs when it needs it, from the material that happens to be at hand.

“Blood Memory,” Graham’s own memoir, illustrates De Mille’s contention that “Martha always wanted to leave behind a legend, not a biography.” Graham tells the story of her life, and her life in art, as she chose to rewrite it to suit the icon she had made of herself: “beautiful and wild, maybe a creature of another world,” etc. While one wants to know the probably unknowable--what forces brought her great work into being--the book is not just adamantly silent on the question, it seems not even to entertain it.

Graham seems most honest with and about herself in remembering the childhood and adolescence of Martha. On these subjects a kind of innocence and tenderness is allowed to prevail. She’s at her most egregious in a chunk of the text that exists largely to remind us that she hung out with a lot of gifted and/or famous folks and in her inflating and sentimentalizing instances of her liberalism. She’s at her most pathetic in offering up to today’s unshockable audience a skewed selection of tidbits from her sex life.

Although Graham’s narrative style has the same rambling, disjunctive quality as the dangerously long, seemingly shapeless pre-curtain speeches she insisted upon making once she could no longer dance her own repertoire, it hangs together in its own peculiar way. When she mentions in passing, for instance, that her father was in the habit of recounting the classical myths to his young daughter, one immediately realizes this was the seed of the magnificent Greek cycle of dances that crowned her choreographic career.

Besides revealing, in a singularly atmospheric passage, the genesis of the exquisite gown Graham fashioned for her role in “Primitive Mysteries”--a view, by candle flame, of a night-blooming cereus --the book has its uses and charms. For one thing, it collects in a single, slight volume nearly all the evocative phrases and fable-like anecdotes Graham enjoyed reiterating, such as: “Movement never lies,” “The theater was a verb before it was a noun,” the tale of the tree that sought the light, embedding in its trunk the barrier of a metal fence. They hypnotized both the receptive hearer and herself into a belief in her original, crazy-quilt mythology. It’s a hard soul indeed that can resist posting one of Graham’s one-liners in his work space, to provoke or sustain.

Marian Horosko’s “Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training” focuses on the celebrated technique, though the stuff of memoir naturally seeps in as well. The book consists largely of reminiscences from people who worked with Graham, culled in a one-day public seminar held in New York City in 1988. As a method of gathering information, this was hardly exhaustive, but the testimony of these witnesses (as Horosko calls them), each speaking from his singular experience and temperament, has a particular flavor and value.

As a group, though, these reporters essentially confirm what the dance world already knows: In a single lifetime Graham forged a vocabulary whose equivalent, classical academic ballet, has been the communal product of innumerable practitioners inheriting and furthering a tradition, over several centuries. Add to this achievement Graham’s way with choreography and its adjunct arts (costume design, lighting), her catalytic teaching, her flair for elementary philosophy, and her seductive, commanding glamour, and you’ve got an incomparable one-woman show.

The speakers remind us that the creation of the technique itself was an evolutionary process and symbiotically connected to the creation of the dances. It was also, inevitably, influenced by the performers who gravitated to Graham, generation after generation--by their anatomy and their previous training. Down the decades, the technique also was affected, via the dances, by the tenor of the times: by protests from oppressed groups, by the popularization of Freudian and Jungian ideas, and so on, even to the age of rampant narcissism and lust for luxury.

As it was shaped and reshaped, Graham’s technique moved from being sternly restrictive, percussive, angular (and, at first, almost two-dimensional) to become more inclusive, sculptural, lyric and (as Bessie Schonberg puts it) voluptuous. Where it once vehemently repulsed ballet, it came to embrace it. Even in its evolved form, taught today by teachers bred by Graham, it remains savagely visceral, though in Graham’s own latter-day choreography, worked out on (sometimes, in part, by) bodies other than her own, it became superficially decorative.

Graham’s heirs insist, rightly, that Graham dance is a matter of consummate physical capability welded to passionate feeling. The technique always was a means to an end: the theatrical expression of aspects of the human condition. It was no accident that Graham often taught actors.

Horosko’s book also includes a syllabus of the training system as it exists today. Its terse directions will be most interesting--and most comprehensible--to people with some direct experience of the technique. The illuminating, aphoristic comments appended to specific exercises recall the rich verbal imagery Graham employed, famously, in her teaching, and will ignite even a clumsy lay person, if he’s susceptible to poetic suggestion.