Martha Graham Dance Company

Newman Center Presents

Seen 10/7/2017

The Martha Graham Dance Company presented five pieces in their program.  Three of these were by Martha Graham and two were by other choreographers.  The program was a mixed bag with the second half being better than the first.  The program opened with Dark Meadow Suite by Martha Graham.  This was a dance created from parts of a much longer piece.   This piece was influenced by the rituals of American Indian and native Mexican peoples.    The costuming and unison dancing very much captured the feel of what one would expect of Native American ritualistic dancing.  The movement was strong and sharp with tension carried throughout the body.   Thus, it did indeed feel architectural, as described in the program notes.   I enjoyed this work. It definitely left me wanting more, to see what the entirety of Dark Meadow would have been like.

The second piece on the program was a solo by Martha Graham called Exstasis.   This was a piece thought lost as no video of it being performed exists.   It was reimagined based on what little documentation there was including a few photos.  It was interesting as an artifact of a choreographer exploring new forms of movement, not so much as a dance.    The genesis of the piece was of the discovery of the connection between the hip and shoulder.   We get a piece that explores the distortion of the body through very extended pelvic thrusts and shoulder thrusts in opposing directions.    These types of movement are repeated throughout in various ways.   Because the focus is so much on the hip shoulder connection the vocabulary of movement is limited.   That the piece is short is a good thing because the static nature of the movement does not keep ones attention for long.

The first half ended with a piece titled Woodland by Pontus Lidberg.   This piece was mystifying.   Nothing about the piece matched in any way with the title.  Visually, what we saw was a group of dancers clothed in various shades of grey with the exception of the lead dancer dressed in dark blue.    The piece was clearly intended to show a young girl wandering lost while surrounded by others working together.   There was little to suggest woodland or wandering creatures except for the brief moment when all but the lead dancer donned grey masks that resembled wolves.   The choreography itself was undistinguished.   It did nothing to evoke the sense of woodland, moonlight and wandering creatures as described in the program notes.   It seems like the choreographer took these as departure points and then abstracted them out of existence.   What we were left with was a girl in blue moving in and out of groups of grey dancers in not very interesting ways.  

The second act opened with Errand Into The Maze by Martha Graham.   This was the best piece on the program.  It is Graham’s retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.  She retells it as the psychological drama of a woman confronting her fear.    The piece was riveting from beginning to end.    The original sets and costumes for this piece were damaged by hurricane Sandy.   What we are left with is laying bare of the journey through the maze.  The dancing is powerful and the lead female dancer shows us the fear and ultimate power of her character in every movement.     The choreography takes her from trembling in fear to, confronting her fear and defeating it in strength. The male dancer playing the Minotaur is yoked to a wooden bar.  Imagine the way a milk made holds the wooden bar holding her milk pails across her shoulders to understand how the male dancer held the pole.   This device echoed the horns of the beast as well as his power.  The choreography for the male dancer effectively showed this device as a danger to the woman as the dancer moved around her with head and shoulders thrust forward as well as his ultimate undoing as the limitation that she would use to ultimately defeat him.   Both dancers gave their all to the choreography in a powerful performance. 

The last piece on the program was Mosaic by Sidi Larbi Cherjaoui.  I found this piece to be a strong ending to the evening.  The choreography was very reflective of Indian dancing as in the country of India.     It was dynamic and full of energy even in the softer areas.   The piece began with the dancers forming a sort of mosaic.  They would return to this unified picture many times across the dance.  Each time one or more dancers would be thrown off the mosaic leading to the mosaic splintering into pieces.   The piece had many moods as reflected in the colors of a mosaic.  There were bright, fast, upbeat movements reflecting the energy of reds, yellows and oranges.   There were also softer more elegiac movements reflecting the serenity of the blues and greens.   Ultimately all the individual pieces of this mosaic as represented by the dancers came together to create a unified feeling of joy.