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MINDY ALOFF ON DANCE
The phrase "Appalachian Spring" was conceived by Hart Crane, but most people today associate it with the ballet of that name by Martha Graham--who chose Crane's words for her title--and its music by Aaron Copland, who modestly called his score "Ballet for Martha." Although both the choreography and the music of "Appalachian Spring" are considered masterpieces of their respective arts, the beloved music is much better known, enjoying an independent life as a staple of the recording studio and the concert hall, where it is regularly programmed and performed with distinction. Indeed, some references ignore its theatrical premiere altogether and date its birth to its first audition in a purely musical context. Copland made two versions of the score: one for small orchestra, as it was played in October of 1944, when Graham and her company first danced to it, and one for enlarged orchestral forces, as it was first played by the New York Philharmonic in September 1945, in the company of works by Bach and Beethoven, on a program assembled to mark the end of World War II. Although Copland's achievement certainly stands on its own, its character as a theatrical creation, in the service of a ballet, contributes to its wide appeal. The music suggests various actions and scenes, and its central melody--the traditional Quaker song "'Tis a gift to be simple"--lends an element of frontier aspiration that still stirs the heart. Copland knew that this beautiful song, directly presented, is a treasure, and he carefully prepares for the full statement of it as if he were presenting a great sea pearl. Sometimes, listening, I try to imagine how the tune would strike an audience that does not know the words ("'Tis a gift to be simple/'Tis a gift to be free/'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be") and has no sense of their significance as Americana, learned by generations of grade-schoolers and sung by amateur choruses of all ages in contexts both secular and sacred. Its hymnlike quality, at least, would remain. Graham's choreography gives that hymn a local habitation and a name: a nineteenth-century wedding of homesteaders and sanctification of the couple's newly built house, somewhere in the American interior. The dramatis personae consists of The Bride, The Husbandman (both young), The Pioneering Woman (an older maternal figure), a charismatic Revivalist preacher, The Followers--four girls in poke bonnets who daisy-chain themselves together. The "story" is spare: they enter, they celebrate, the couple dances together and each member dances for one another. The Bride performs several dance monologues anticipating the future (including fearful anticipations), The Revivalist delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon on the future's perils, the wedding takes place, the visitors leave, and the couple are left alone in their house to face whatever the future may bring. Well over half a century later, both the music and the dance have lost their wartime associations for the general public; their dark anxieties and tense optimism now seem entirely issues of composition and performance. It takes an act of imagination, and perhaps a little reading, to appreciate the extratheatrical plangency for original audiences of that Quaker song, with its implications of communal salvation in unadorned faith, and of Graham's staging to it of a wedding and a house-raising in a frontier wilderness, witnessed only by an expanse of impassive sky, untilled land as far as the eye can envision, and a handful of celebrants--among them, a Preacher, who delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon on the future's perils. Both Copland and Graham discovered veins of joy, even ecstasy, in the subject of their collaboration; but these passages of emotional splendor are fireworks in a sobering context. There is nothing cozy about the young couple's prospects: as the Revivalist would have it, in the score and in the dance steps, they are on the verge of the purgatorial state about to be suffered, say, by the young couple entering into marriage at the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Maypole of Merry Mount." Without that darkness, the spring in "Appalachian Spring" has no significance, a point made by both the music and the dance. And by the stage. Isamu Noguchi's landmark set--so charming in its design, so horrifying in its practical applications--consistently reminds us of how vulnerable the characters are, and of the discomforts in store for them: the skeletal outline and one clapboard exterior wall of a newly built house, which clinically, even mercilessly, exposes the interior to the audience; a small swatch of open fencing, which wouldn't keep a single cow from wandering off or a single intruder from crashing in; a rude bench by the wall, perfectly fashioned for an individual to grieve or repent at leisure; an unforgivingly hard wooden chair with a slanting back in the house's parlor, which, when revolved, proves brilliantly to be little more than the mean profile of a plow (a chair on which The Bride, at various moments in the staging, looks forward to birthing a baby and imagines distressing over The Husbandman's absence); and a slanting boulder in the yard, sufficiently obdurate to support The Revivalist's entire weight and to break the back of The Husbandman who will have to clear it. What Noguchi did not expressly provide in the way of modernist misery, Graham meticulously filled in. Here is Noguchi: two steps to the house's front door, an architectural expression of aspiration and hope that is both humble and elegant. Here is Graham: The Bride, her body stiffened with multiple forebodings, rolls up and down the steps in turmoil, like a log in a tempest. The message is more encompassing than The Revivalist's caution that marriage (at least this marriage) is not going to be a picnic: it is that life itself is inevitably fraught with pain--so much that the moments of animal sweetness enjoyed by two people who momentarily forget themselves while kicking up their heels in a square dance to a lovely song, nakedly articulated, are tantamount to a blessing on an entire society. My own dancegoing experience of "Appalachian Spring"--which, from its creation until the past year or two, was performed exclusively by the Martha Graham Dance Company--began in the 1970s. Over the years, I have seen perhaps a dozen sets of Brides, Husbandmen, Pioneering Women, and Revivalists, including one gala performance, when Graham was still alive, in which The Husbandman was danced by Mikhail Baryshnikov and The Revivalist by Rudolph Nureyev. I have also seen the 1959 film (it is available for commercial rental) with Graham herself as The Bride, and Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Revivalist, and Matt Turney as The Pioneering Woman--a frustrating experience, as the space looks cramped and Graham (then sixty-five) is too old to give the part a fully legible urgency. And once, at a seminar where the original Husbandman, Erick Hawkins, was present, a fragment of film containing the original 1944 cast--Graham, Hawkins, May O'Donnell, and, as The Revivalist, Merce Cunningham--was furtively screened, with the caution that the Graham estate did not countenance its public viewing. That fragment, which shows barely more than the processional entrance of the cast, has, for me, best represented the ballet as the masterpiece that its early audiences claimed it to be. The dancers in it were classicized instruments, with a light, dry step, a noble carriage, and faces that did not leak expression. My sense of the work, then, has been synthetic, made up of bits and pieces from various performances, from reading, and from speculation. Performances of it by the Graham company over the past decade or so have been particularly agonizing, with The Bride becoming a gooey dependent and The Revivalist a cartoon. It never occurred to me that I would ever have the chance to see a full rendering of the "Appalachian Spring" I suspected Graham had made. Until this year. In February, at The Boston Conservatory, the ballet was performed by two casts of student dancers, all in their early twenties, to live music by a student orchestra; and one cast and with set and costumes borrowed from the Graham company. One cast was ideal: urgent, unforced, various in their attack, austere in their mien, classicized instruments who did not act the choreography but rather served as transparent conduits through which the dance unfolded. It turns out, moreover, that none of the dancers was primarily trained in Graham technique: they were ballet dancers who had been given an intensive month of Graham training just prior to rehearsals. I have never seen a more touching and excitingly danced Bride (Liyin Chen) and Husbandman (Kurt Douglas), or a Pioneering Woman (Shannon Andrews) with more generous amplitude of movement and finer understanding of her healing role. The Revivalist, Vietnamese-born Dam Huynh, was a particular revelation, whose furious dance oration--wickedly light and mysteriously terrorizing, with jumps that seemed to lack any preparatory plie--convinced me I had come as close as I ever would in life to the young Merce Cunningham. What did these students do that other casts of professional dancers, with decades of dedicated experience in Graham technique, did not? The short answer is that they were in sharp focus at every moment. What this means is, first, that each dancer knew exactly why he or she was on that stage, that each carried an individual story about his or her character into the common playing field. The second cast did this, too; but the stories of the first cast were more persuasive. By seeing two casts, one also understood that the dancers' stories were quite individual--that they were not slavishly following the details of a literary blueprint. There were stark differences in character between the two Brides: Li Yin Chen of the first cast showed vulnerability within reserve, which seemed true to the Graham of the 1944 film; her Bride did not expect to control the future that she dwelt upon, and her passion was not a breaking loose but an implosion, an italicizing of her characteristic reserve, which lent depth to her portrayal. In terms of movement, the dancers of both casts were also attentive to transitions between sections or scenes, so that a walk far upstage, out of the limelight, was performed as if in a larger limelight of natural transcendence. More, the way the dancers met the music was not predictable. Sometimes they would ride the melody, other times they would pick up the harmony or excavate an interior pulse rather than the rhythmic time signature. The soloists, especially, tailored their dancing to the musical phrase as it was being played at that moment--quite a challenge, since the conductor (Ronald Feldman) changed the tempi frequently, in a concert-hall fashion. That is, the dancers expended themselves to marry the music; they did not expect it to follow them. The result was thrilling--an experience equally attuned to the concerns of dance and the concerns of music. Yuriko--or more precisely, Yuriko Kikuchi, the Graham star who goes by her first name and who was a member of the original "Appalachian Spring" cast as one of the four Townswomen--was celebrating her eightieth birthday by coaching this production with Susan Kikuchi, her daughter, and another Graham company veteran, Elizabeth Auclair. Two weeks after the Boston performances, I sat in Yuriko's living room, watching a videotape of what I had seen live, and realized, to my astonishment, that I had not caught even half the brilliant details of performance the first time around. What on earth had she done to draw such performances out of these students? As we studied the tape, stopping and rewinding for her explanations of how this or that transfiguring effect had been achieved, it became clear that she had operated to cleanse the choreography of disfiguring accretions over decades within certain concrete conditions. Although Yuriko and her daughter had not themselves chosen the casts (they were selected by Janet Eilber, the Graham company's recently appointed director), they were permitted complete freedom to coach them, and the dancers permitted themselves to absorb the direction. The students had also been carefully prepared by Susan for the possibility that the tempi might vary dramatically in performance. By Yuriko's own account, she was a demanding taskmaster who refused to accept inferior or superficial performance solutions and who, on occasion, reduced at least one dancer to tears. "But they got used to me," she added. Specifically, what they seem to have gotten used to was Yuriko and Susan's requirements for the soloists to "stretch" the movement organically to achieve "a conversation with the music." Putting on a videotape of the same cast in a different performance, she made it possible for me to recognize the subtlest changes in attack and phrasing, the success of slight delay in a pitch turn here, the slight failure of a gesture to embrace the music fully there. At one point, I exclaimed over a particularly wonderful passage in the couple's dances for each other, and Yuriko, bemused, commented: "This is what happens when you release them from being slaves to the counts." She observed also that the dancers had understood that "the transitions between sections are what make this dance." When we had finished watching all the tapes, she sat back and was silent for a while. Then she said, "I was coaching them from what I remembered, from the physical and mental sensations." (She had also danced the part of The Bride, under Graham's direction, during her performing career.) "Now, though, I see this dance from the choreographic point of view. It's pretty great, isn't it?" Yes, indeed. As the tapes unquestionably demonstrate, this cast, coached by these individuals, is pretty great. It would be a restorative gift to the memory of Martha Graham if they could dance Boston's "Appalachian Spring" again in several cities, including New York. |