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| Letter to the World. Drawing by Charlotte Trowbridge, 1945. |
Her drawings are neither figurative nor faithful representations of Letter to the World, but rather an insightful and stylised glance at “the frenzy which animates the dancer’s body frame from within,” as Graham noted in the Foreword. They are black-and-white minimal shade-less drawings, where perspective and proportions are replaced by the artist’s sensitive touch. Some of the spoken lines are printed with the drawings.
Unlike Morgan’s powerful photographs, Trowbridge’s drawings are feeble presences on the page, and do not necessarily follow the chronological development of the piece. The third drawing presents, in fact, the One Who Dances and the Lover at the bench (in the actual piece, the One Who Dances and the Lover are not seated at the bench in this moment) with the Ancestress at their back, ready to separate them, a crucial moment which takes place in the fourth section of the piece. On a couple of occasions, Trowbridge seems to have taken inspiration from Morgan’s photographs, as in a drawing of March, who is depicted doing his famous entrance jumps. Of particular interest, is the way Trowbridge portrays the One Who Dances in one drawing inspired by the final section, when she is desperate for the loss of the Lover: her face is lifted upwards, but her body is filled with hand drawings, that convey her inner turmoil. It is very evocative of the dancing protagonist’s state in that phrase.
Charlotte Trowbridge was my mother. She majored in Dance at the University of Washington, Seattle, when Martha Graham visited and picked promising students to train further. She went to Bennington, VT where the Company was having a summer program. She was invited to join the Martha Graham Dance Company and continued to train there in New York City until an unfortunate bad landing in a jump caused her ankle to lose strength and the ability to support her. It was the major heartbreak of her life. Since she adored Martha, she continued to be present and did some costume design, as you mentioned, but also was an excellent seamstress and made and maintained many costumes. Whether the pose you mentioned she drew was not staged in the final version but explored in the choreography will be an unanswered question since everyone involved is deceased. However, I can tell you I very much doubt it was invented by my mother. That is not likely, and Martha would probably have questioned the artistic license. Therefore that particular drawing would probably not have been included in the dance publication. I suggest the drawing rather shows a moment in the creation of the choreography. There is no reason to suppose there were no edits to the final version of Appalachian Spring 1944.
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