Dancer Katherine Crockett arrived as a student at the
Martha Graham studios 18 years ago, just as the legendary choreographer was leaving for good. But she talks as if Martha (as she calls her) stopped choreographing only last week.
"I'm definitely sad Martha can't make another work," she says; Crockett is a sensual and enigmatic Amazon of a dancer, and now a principal member of the company. "I'd be so curious to see what she'd make."
"She showed me that it's beautiful to acknowledge onstage what you're feeling," she continues "And it's the movement itself that awakens this in you. If you soften your chest and let the sternum cave to the back of the rib cage and exhale" - a Graham contraction - "you feel a vulnerability and an emptiness. Then, when the breath comes in, the body fills up with the charge of air and life. The act of doing the work is a journey in itself."
No one who has ever danced Graham denies its vitality. The choreographer - who discovered her eccentric voice in the 1930s and birthed theatrical masterpieces for another two decades - was the first mother of modern dance to yoke its hallmark self-expression to a "language." (She invented one.) So, every new generation of Graham dancer finds the dance's life simply by doing the moves. But for audiences to be hit - and they'll get a chance at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts in Brookville Friday, when three major works and a recent revival light up the stage - the Martha Graham Dance Company has had to rethink modern dance.
"There's an issue in modern dance right now that is certainly part of the Martha Graham puzzle, but is much larger than that," explains Janet Eilber, artistic director since 2006. "The art form was birthed out of - and driven by - revolt. Every generation had to toss out what had gone before and create their own path. But we're about a hundred years old now. We're of a certain age. We now have a body of work; we have classics. And we need to grow up. It's a whole new path for dance: to institutionalize."
The art world offers an excellent model, Eilber says. While new galleries spring up each year to accommodate the buzzing market for contemporary art, museums not only introduce the best of the contemporaries to large audiences, they also shed new light on the masters. They present "Picasso and Matisse" and "Picasso and American Art." "When you think of the most wonderful museums," Eilber says, "they've got their core collection, which they rearrange to give context."
Graham is the Picasso of modern dance; her repertoire constitutes just such a collection. "But the dance world shudders at the museum metaphor," she says.
Eilber says she believes it can't afford to - and she should know. About eight years ago, the Graham Center's board of trustees fired the late choreographer's nurse and heir, Ron Protas, from his post as company artistic director. He retaliated by denying the company access to the dances, which Graham had bequeathed to him.
Debt doesn't become them
The troupe eventually won the rights to the work, but the legal costs plunged them millions of dollars into debt. And with Protas in charge for a decade after Graham's death, presenters and funders had grown leery of the company, Eilber says. "We hadn't toured in so long that most audiences didn't know who we were.
"We need to present these classics in a way that lets the audience in on them," she argues - and the post-crisis moment has been the perfect time to start.
The company now engages a dancer, actor or producer familiar with Graham - actress Blythe Danner, for example, or Harvey Lichtenstein, the man responsible for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's rebirth as a palace of performance - to introduce the evening. Many shows move chronologically, mapping Graham's progress from derivative exoticism to social protest to Jungian psychology and lethal romance. Mesmerizing archival footage alternates with the live dances. Works that have fallen out of use have been reconstructed and contemporary variations on iconic works commissioned.
"Audiences have loved getting this context," Eilber reports. Less than two years into her tenure, the New York troupe is solvent and touring, with a stable of 22 dancers employed about 30 weeks a year.
The human touch
At least as important to the company's recovery as an audience-friendly approach is what Eilber has done with the dances, which for years looked cartoonishly overwrought. She has returned them to the dancers, who have made them human again.
"Janet said from the beginning, 'You will become responsible for your own performance,'" says Tadej Brdnik, an actor-dancer in his 12th year with the troupe. "That was a big change. Finally the company is a group of actors being coached, instead of being told how to interpret the roles."
Crockett says, "Janet is very open to finding together what feels right and looks right. It's been a rebirth."
Eilber is willing to let the dancers fit the role to their instruments because, she says, "the bodies have changed, the energy has changed, and the Graham company has never tried to play Mozart on the original instruments, as it were." Case in point: ballet star Rudolf Nureyev's stints with the troupe. ("He was very witty, very gay-bitchy," she recalls. And in performance? "Sparks came off his body. I could have lit my hair on fire, and no one would have noticed.")
"Martha would look at me as Jocasta in 'Night Journey' - and I'd learned it off her in the film," she continues, "and she'd say, 'Well, lie back a little farther and lift the leg a little higher and pull it in quicker.' She'd start changing 'Night Journey'! She did not want me to mimic her performance. It was the furthest thing from her mind."
Crockett says: "It's important to maintain the intent she had - your decisions are guided by an understanding of the way Martha's work works. On the other hand, it's important to be an individual. As Grotowski says, the greater the piece, the more interpretations there are. That's where the life comes in."
The reel Martha Graham
To bone up on your Graham, check out the new Criterion double DVD "Martha Graham: Dance on Film," which includes three major films, beautifully restored, and interviews with dancers, the original film editors and composer Aaron Copland.
Dancers, on the dances
Katherine Crockett on the 1944 frontier ballet "Appalachian Spring":
You have the preacher, who is very vertical and explosive; the bride, who is young, nervous and light; the husbandman, who is grounded but also young and searching; and the four little followers, who are all sprightly and charged. So the whole stage would blow away without the pioneering woman to ground it. In Martha's words, this woman is the vision of the future. The horizon is right at her eye level. She's not striving, she's already there.
Tadej Brdnik on "Diversion of Angels" (1948), about three stages of love:
The yellow couple is naive love - when you're 15 or 16 and you think, this is it. It's giddy and flirtatious. By red, you know a little bit more. You know what you need. The red couple is the part of love where we could do anything - skydive! - for our love. It's very physical. The woman is always off-center, in tilts or jumps. She's never static, as the white one is.
Crockett on "Sketches from 'Chronicle,'" created in 1936 in the shadow of fascism:
In the first piece, the main figure is a phantom of war. She is monumental, iron, very cold. The sternum is pressed forward, the arm is pressed behind the head. The focus is very square. There's a defiance, but it's not personal. In the end, she's a Joan of Arc, called to lead the way to hope. And she generates the spirit of these women. You want to follow her. If Obama and Hillary were doing this piece, everyone would vote.
WHEN&WHERE: The Martha Graham Dance Company appears Friday at 8 p.m. at the Tilles Center on the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, Route 25A, Brookville. Tickets $40-$65. Pre-show talk by artistic director Janet Eilber, "Sculpting Space: The Collaboration Between Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi. " Call 516-299-3100 or visit tillescenter.org.