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(Dance Review) Martha Graham at Jacob's Pillow
7.1.05
MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY
Jacob's Pillow Dance
Becket, Mass.
Ted Shawn Theatre
June 29-July 3, 2005
It's been said before and elsewhere, but it bears repeating, that Martha Graham was to dance what Picasso was to painting and Stravinsky to art music. She utterly changed the language and vocabulary of dance in the 20th century, and the program currently running at Jacob's Pillow is a fitting tribute to this pioneer of what we now call "modern dance."
What better way to inaugurate the summer season of dance at the Pillow than to begin at the beginning, with Graham's primal first steps, as seen in such minimalist solos as "The Incense," which kicks off the program by connecting to ancient offering rituals, and "Lamentation," in which a single dancer morphs into pure emotion with the aid of a costume of stretchable fabric -- one of several Graham signatures that are celebrated in this evening's program.
All the trademarks are in evidence -- the solidly planted feet on the ground, the relative absence of running around, leaping, and jumping, in favor of solidity of gesture, positions that are freeze-frame pictures of movement rather than movement-for-movement's sake.
Strong, clear arm movements, Gumby-like twisting of body shapes, and, when the program, which stretches historically from 1906 to 1981, moves forward, pointed, theatrical vignettes that make social and political statements, like "Steps in the Street"'s message of anti-conformity, are gloriously in evidence.
The first half of the program, featuring shorter, sometimes almost Beckett-like "dances" -- even to call them dances seems like a stretch -- is the stronger of the two. The second half kicks off with the baldly mythological "Errand Into the Maze" -- some swear by it, some were utterly bored with it. I counted myself in the latter group.
The evening concludes with "Acts of Light," which has been criticized as a re-tread or a sellout of Graham's core values. I actually found it a fitting conclusion to the evening, and to her career (it was one of her last dances, choreographed in 1981), and thought it made a stark contrast, both literally (in its yellowness) and figuratively (in its optimism), with the haunting blackness of "Steps in the Street."
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