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Noguchi, no ‘Dark Meadow’

By Martha Ullman West
June 2, 2017
Dance

White Bird Presents closed its 2016-17 season about three weeks ago with a single, brilliantly danced performance by the Martha Graham Company at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. I was determined to make it to the Graham show because Dark Meadow, in a shortened version by company artistic director Janet Eilber titled Dark Meadow Suite, was on the program.

As often as I have seen the Graham troupe perform (three times here in Portland, thanks to White Bird; multiple times in New York), I had never seen this particular collaboration with Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, arguably the inventor of three-dimensional sets for dance. And while I have some qualms about the rearrangement of a choreographer’s work undertaken after she’s bourréed off the planet, and therefore has no say, surely a distilled version of Dark Meadow –described by Deborah Jowitt as a “Jungian adventure,” by Noguchi as about the “primordial time of the mind,” and by Senator Dale Bumpers as “about sex” – would be better than not seeing it at all.

Dark Meadow Suite opened the show and turned out to be a charming, seductive, lively demonstration of Graham’s vocabulary: the little jumps, the angled sideways leaps, the deep, second position pliés, the drumming feet. It was an ideal curtain-raiser showcasing the best dancers this company has had in many years. But, and it’s a big but: Just as Cave of the Heart would not be Medea’s story without Noguchi’s set pieces (the rocks that form Medea’s path, the spiky metal “dress” to which she returns again and again) and just as Night Journey (Oedipus Rex from Jocasta’s point of view) is inconceivable without the tilted “bed,” Dark Meadow minus the mildly phallic-looking stone shapes that Noguchi made to define the space and represent the movement of time becomes a very different dance. In Noguchi’s New York Times obituary, Graham made very clear how important his designs were to her dances: “The works he created for my ballets brought to me a new vision, a new world of space and the utilization of space,” she said. Noguchi brought that vision, as well as the idea of integrating dance, sculpture and props, to many other choreographers: In Portland, Jann Dryer, Mary Oslund, and Linda Austin come readily to mind.

Xin Ying as the Woman in Red in Graham’s 1948 “Diversion of Angels.” Photo: Hibbard Nash

Like the Limon Company, and now the Paul Taylor Company, the Graham Company has sought to keep itself alive by commissioning new work from today’s choreographers, who, ideally, have some connection with their founders’ aesthetic, and/or share their points of view. Nacho Duato is one such choreographer, and his Rust, created for the Graham Company in 2013 to an incredible score by Arvo Pärt, came next on the program. Stark, raw, with glaring lights, it begins with simple walking, and dancers soon descend to the floor of what looks like a basement prison. Several men are being tortured; one observes or directs, it’s unclear. I thought immediately of Franco’s Spain, in which Duato came of age, and to which Graham reacted in 1937 with an enraged, grief-stricken solo titled Deep Song. However, a program note states that Duato wanted to raise a seemingly indifferent world’s awareness of the torture taking place in our own time. And more power to him and the dancers who performed the tightly choreographed piece with grim, chilling stoicism.

Graham called dancers “acrobats of God,” titling a 1960 piece just that. In Mosaic, an engaging, if slightly too long piece by the Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui that premiered at the Joyce Theater in New York in February, backwards somersaults and other forms of tumbling are part of the choreography, as are a Graham-style angled-armed duet, and quite a lot of signature pelvic thrusts and contractions. Much of the movement is spiraling and fluid; certainly, as the French might put it, in the “manner of Martha Graham.” And, like her work, Mosaic (an art form that has long fascinated the choreographer, hence the arrangement and rearrangement of clusters of dancers) is extremely theatrical. It begins with dancers clustered on a darkened stage amid puffs of smoke, costumed in colorful patchwork costumes that make them look as if they’d been painted by Goya: not at all a bad thing. There is also considerable vocalizing on their part, along with indecipherable text mixed with a Middle Eastern-tinged sound track by Felix Buxton. It ends as it begins, in a cluster of dancers, reconfigured into a different mosaic, to what end I’m not sure.

Diversion of Angels, which Agnes de Mille in her lovely (if factually inaccurate) biography of Graham describes as a work of “pure beauty and joy,” closed the show. It was a truly glorious performance, particularly by Lorenzo Pagano, partnering Xin Ying, as the Woman in Red, whose heart-stopping leaps across the Schnitzer stage I’ll not soon forget. So Graham herself had the last word, with a piece about love (first love, mature love, erotic love, represented by couples costumed respectively in yellow, red and white) that she made in 1948, when she was about to marry Erick Hawkins.

And I still haven’t seen Dark Meadow.

 

 

 

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