Watched this tape of Martha Graham last night. It starts with a documentary (The Dancer's World or some similar title) of her putting on makeup and costume while addressing the viewer. She is making up for the role of Jocasta. Much of what she says doesn't make a great deal of sense or is completely incomprehensible. This is intercut with scenes of her dancers (circa 1957) in her studio, dancing around to some lovely piano music. She puts something on her head that looks like a cross between a fireplace poker and a futuristic ray gun. I wanted to tap it with a pencil to see what kind of ringing sound it would make.
This rather tedious documentary is followed by Graham's ballet, The Night Journey. The premise is that Jocasta, wife and mother of Oedipus, is hanging herself, and she is visited by Tiresias, Oedipus, and various others of the Greek legend. The dancing is peculiar, doesn't make a lot of sense even though I know the story of the legend well enough.
I'm nodding off, so I fast forward through this to get to the third piece, Appalachian Spring, the real reason I rented this video. I love the music utterly. Various characters in long dresses and vaguely early American costume come on and begin hopping about and gesticulating in the most incomprehensible and frustrating manner. After about fifteen minutes of puzzling through this, I turned it off and went to bed.
I am not a total beginner in ballet watching. I have some sympathy for groundbreaking and rebellion against old formulae and formalism. But Graham's work leaves me baffled and annoyed. It doesn't seem to tell a story, doesn't express any clear emotions (despite Graham's insistence on "clarity"), and it isn't pretty. What good is it, then? The moves are inventive and occasionally even astonishing, but seem to be guided by no overall purpose. At times the dancers move with the music, at other times seem as deaf as posts.
Can anyone enlighten me? Or should I just write her off as a symptom of a phase that all the arts seem to have gone through and have to get through to proceed: adolescent rebellion, Fauvist destruction, or whatever? Can anyone here defend what I see as indefensible?