Dance: Rites in the Cave of the Heart

To avant-gardists of the modern dance, Martha Graham has long been the Holy Acrobat. But when the State Department began sending her off on tour as an official U.S. dancer, the old esoterica was sadly diminished. Offended by the bourgeois applause, ultras in the Graham cult started casting about for a new and comfortably obscure enthusiasm. Last week Graham and her modern dance troupe returned to Broadway for their annual two-week season, and there in their tennis shoes were the strayed believers. Thanks to a congressional challenge to the wholesomeness of Graham’s art, she now seemed a martyr to the Philistines and the cult again rallied around.

Tangle of Doom. The fuss began over a German performance of Phaedra, Graham’s “phantasmagoria of desire” (TIME, March 16, 1962), that Congresswoman Edna Kelly from Brooklyn found “distasteful.” One morning’s hearing in Washington was enough to establish Graham’s artistic merit, and she dismissed the affair with a sharp coup de grâce: “I feel as if I had been pawed by dirty hands.” But the pawing paid off. Despite a repertory program that included two newer and better works last week, it was Phaedra that drew the loudest cheers.

The two American premieres alone were enough to prove the strength of Graham’s charismatic grip on her art as well as her audience. In Legend of Judith, an extension of her recent cycle of mystic studies of heroines seeking reconciliation with their pasts, Graham, now 70, dances Judith, aging and melancholy; with a dream’s logic, Judith recalls her patriotic seduction and murder of Holofernes, while real and imagined forms confront her to weave with their dance the tangle of her quiet doom. In Circe, Graham turns Ulysses’ odyssey into an inner event, a flight of the imagination in which enchantment is only a prelude to bestiality, and anguish is the only alternative to evil.

Oracular Instincts. Graham’s dancing today is a grace remembered. She has become fragile and precarious onstage. The mute eloquence of her gestures is now as terse as it is cryptic; her dances are only sketches of her intent. But the 19 other dancers—nine male, ten female—in her company are all masters of the “virile gestures” that, she says, “are evocative of the only true beauty.” Movement is full of the strain and pain academic ballet attempts to conceal, and each step is meant as a metaphor that tells of the life of the heart. Barefoot and poised in an artificial balance achieved by great feats of technique, the dancers rarely touch except to depict conflict or lust. Each dance seems a ritual from the infernal rites Graham sees in the cave of the heart, spoken in “the cosmic language” of movement.

Such oracular instincts bring a muscular moral to most Graham ballets, but she tempers her preachments with ironic wit and a healthy interest in all circumstances that cause the hips to quiver. Her choreography is full of strangely natural distortions of movements from life—leaps and spread-eagle stretches, fluttering fingers, crawls, great sweeps of outstretched legs, pelvic rolls and caresses.* Her open-air approach to sex makes her company more masculine than most—though the soft little scrimmage in her new Secular Games manages to make even her strong male dancers look disturbingly dainty.

Cargo of Silence. Graham’s first concern remains with the anxieties of women, and in portraying them, none of the young dancers can approach her. Behind her ashen makeup, she looks as if some private sorrow is on her lips. She seems just at the point of disclosing it as the dance ends. Then she curtsies and casts a desperate eye at the falling curtain as if it is sealing her in a cage of silence. The applause brings the curtain up again and again. And each time it rises, the audience’s first glimpse of her is of a woman reprieved.

* In New York Supreme Court last week, Irene Eskin, 33, a former Graham student, won $49,000 in damages for having “lost the mobility” in her back when Graham tried to perfect her lotus-pose-with-fingers-fluttering. “Don’t look at me with vacant eyes,” Graham told her. “Then she started pulling me back by the arms,” said Eskin. “After she released me I felt something lock.”