A Choreography in One Photograph: Martha Graham’s Letter to the World

Martha Graham in Letter to the World, photo Barbara Morgan, 1940.

Torso placed in parallel position with the floor, one arm following its line, the other bent, its wrist on the dancer’s head. Her eyes are closed and the tension of her movement is visible through her exposed neck. The wide skirt of her white dress defines the movement of her legs, one being rooted on the floor and the other forcefully thrown behind her in a striking kick. Both the horizontal line of her torso and the vertical curve of her skirt contribute to the kinetic idea of her step.

The dancer in question is Martha Graham, the photographer Barbara Morgan. The former fundamentally contributed to the revolution operated by modern dance in the first half of the twentieth-century, the latter immortalised some of her most memorable dances in carefully constructed images. In particular, this photograph has become what I will call The Photograph, probably the most famous picture of Martha Graham. It relates to Letter to the World (1940-41), a choreography  she dedicated to poet Emily Dickinson, a complex work she was prticularly attached to. In the course of various decades, this image has undergone various transmutations.

First, its relation to the choreography is paradoxical. The Photograph has reached an iconic status, all those who know Graham, have seen it and if one googles her, this is most likely the first picture to come out. In spite of this, Letter to the World is almost unkown. Few scholars have dedicated a thorough analysis to it and the public is little aware of its existence.

Barbara Morgan's book, 1941.

Secondly, it shows how “technological intervention” changes “the representation of movement” (Salazar Sutil, 2015: 1). The art of photography has focused on the representation of movement, for example, with the work of Eadweard Muybridge who studied the locomotion of animals and individuals at the end of the nineteenth-century. Muybridge used many cameras to capture motion and contributed to the development of early cinema with his projector called zoopraxiscope.

Barbara Morgan’s photograph is taken from a celebrated volume, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, published in 1941 and republished in 1980. Morgan’s aim was to document dance, and make “possible the fuller portrayal of the dancer’s fugitive art” (Morgan,1980: 12) . She was aware of the fact that her medium could not convey movement per se, but she intended to highlight “the dance at its visual peak” (Morgan, 1980: 12) and chose the photographs of those gestures she better remembered and that came “to symbolize the whole dance” (Morgan, 1980: 150). In sum, those images are Morgan’s perspective on the dance and The Photograph a substantial part of its significance, in that it has frozen movement into a frame, erasing its kinetic component. Its enourmus diffusion has, in the course of the decades, altered “the perception” (Benjamin, 1999: 734) of the piece which is now condensed into this very frame.

What does The Photograph tell us of Graham’s choreography? What does it say of her approach to movement? It tells us a great deal, but it still represents a part, a glimpse of a highly layered work. Letter to the World is not a biographical account of Emily Dickinson’s life, but rather an incursion into the “inner landscape of her poetry” (Graham, 1991: 163). Structured into five episodes, it presents the poet’s identity through two figures, the One Who Dances, originally interpreted by Graham herself, and the One Who Speaks, danced by Jean Erdman, whose task was to move and utter lines from Dickinson’s poems and letters. The other characters are emanations of the poet, such as the Ancestress, portrayed by Jane Dudley, who exemplified the poet's Puritan heritage and death, and the Lover, danced by Erick Hawkins, who represented Love. The One Who Dances engages in a fight against the Ancestress and when the latter separates her from the Lover, she performs a long solo which consists of various sequences danced on the floor, on the bench present onstage and across space. During this part, the One Who Speaks utters numerous lines, following the protagonist in her path of rebirth (Simonari, 2015).

The Photograph comes from this final solo and sums up the One Who Dances’s inner struggle, with her bent torso and wrist on her head. It freezes the movement phrase transforming it into a profound pensive gesture. The back kick adds a dynamic element, a spatial opening that destabilises the rigor of her upper body position giving strength and stamina to the pose and to the character it pictures. It also expresses some crucial aspects of the Graham technique like gravity which is seen as a force to be explored and not contrasted. In The Photograph, even if it is hidden by the fabric of the skirt, the foot that carries the weight of the body is firmly planted on the floor and almost seems to be an attracting drive for the torso and its peripheral limbs.

Andy Warhol, The Kick, 1986.

Thirdly, there is the afterlife of The Photograph as it has been reinvented in unusual manners. One of its most famous interpretations is Andy Warhol’s screenprints. Warhol had been drawn into dance in general on various occasions. At the beginning of the 1960s, he created the Dance Diagram paintings, where he showed some steps of the Charleston or Foxtrot as seen from above, focusing on the dancer’s feet. He also attended the performances of the Judson Dance Theatre where he met dancer Fred Herko who subsequently starred in some of his earliest films. In 1979 he shot a few polaroid photographs of Graham, focusing on her head and shoulders. She is not in a dancing pose, but shows her face or her profile. Between 1981 and 1986, Warhol made some drawings of Graham dancing, drawings inspired by Barbara Morgan’s photographs of, among other works, Frontier (1935), Satyric Festival Song (1932) and Letter to the World. In 1986 he produced a series of screenprints based on Morgan’s photographs of Graham in different dances, among whose there was The Photograph. He transformed it using colour, highlighting the perimeter of the figure and juxtaposing more than one image of The Photograph into one single picture. The title given to these works is The Kick which metonymically paraphrases Graham’s movement [1].

In 2007 illustrator Vladimir Radunsky published the children’s book Because… in collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who wrote the story. Centred on a dancing grandmother, among the dancing poses she assumes, there is her 'interpretation' of the The Photograph. In this case, then, Graham is not the protagonist of the image, but her move is. The dancing grandmother wears a white top and a black wide and long polka dots decorated skirt which draws the same curve of the original, one arm bent with her wrist on her hatted head and the other kept straight along her torso. The tension of The Photograph is not the same but the construction of the lines are. This tells us that The Photograph has become a consistent part of North American culture and that Graham’s pose has gained a life of its own.

In 2015 The Photograph has once again been reinvented in two shots by the New York Dance Project. Created by fashion photographer Ken Browar and photo editor with a dance background, Deborah Ory, the project is about celebrating the New York based dance world with quality artistic photographs. The two shots in question show the same movement but with a different, more airborne nuance. One portrays Peiju Chien-Pott, who has been a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company from 2011 to 2016, wearing a Diane Von Furstenberg floral dress, while the other shows American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Isabella Boylston, whose weight-carrying leg stands on pointe.

Peiju Chien-Pott stands on half point and her weight-carrying leg is partly revealed as the skirt of the dress, which is wide and long, moves upward redefining the curve of Morgan’s photograph into fabric ondulations. The sense of gravity from Morgan’s photograph is changed into an upward drive only partially contrasted by the dancer’s horizontally placed torso. This drive becomes a vertical pattern in Isabella Boylston’s version where we have a double kinetic retake, one that relates to Graham’s so called kick movement, and the other stemming from a different technique from Graham’s, that is ballet. The ballerina’s torso is no longer in parallel position with the floor, but in a slightly tilted posture that creates a diagonal line. Her pointed foot is well grounded on the floor but it is pointed nevertheless, thus placing her on a higher plane with respect to Graham. Her bent arm and wrist are almost in the same position and this, together with her lifted leg, expresses a melancholic mood that in part erases the dramatic force in Graham’s version.
 

NOTE
[1] In an article about Morgan, The Photograph is also referred to as The Kick.


NOT LINKED REFERENCES 

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Film Theory and Criticism. Introductory Readings, Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen, edited by (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 731-751.

Frontier, chor. Martha Graham, music Louis Horst, set Isamu Noguchi, costume Martha Graham, feat. Martha Graham (New York, Guild Theatre, 28 April 1935).

Letter to the World, chor. Martha Graham, texts Emily Dickinson, music Hunter Johnson, set Arch Lauterer, costumes Edythe Gilfond, feat. Martha Graham, Margareth Meredith, Jane Dudley, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham and Company (Bennington, Bennington College Theatre, 11 August 1940).

Letter to the World, chor. Martha Graham, texts Emily Dickinson, music Hunter Johnson, set Arch Lauterer CHECK, costumes Edythe Gilfond, feat. Martha Graham, Jean Erdman, Jane Dudley, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham and Company (New York, Guild Theatre, 7 April 1941).

Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (New York, Morgan & Morgan, 1980).

Nicholás Salazar Sutil, Motion and Representation. The Language of Human Movement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).

Satyric Festival Song, chor. Martha Graham, music Imre Weisshaus, costume Martha Graham, feat. Martha Graham (New York, Guild Theatre, 20 November 1932).

Rosella Simonari, Letter to the World. Martha Graham danza Emily Dickinson (Rome, Aracne, 2015).

The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World

Fiona MacKintosh, edited by, The Ancient Dancerin the Modern World – Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Greek and Roman cultures represented a constant reference point in the history of dance. Jean-Georges Noverre drew inspiration from “ancient pantomime” in the development of his ballet d’action. Noverre was often inspired by Greek tragedies for the theme of his work, like Medée et Jason (1763) and Alceste (1767). As is known, Isadora Duncan elaborated Greek culture in her vision, included her famous loose tunics and bare feet. Editor Fiona MacKintosh has highlighted that, “this dependence on ancestry also occurs because ‘looking back’ is a sure way of acknowledging both debt and position within a tradition”.

The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World – Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, is the first meticulous attempt to investigate the fertile relationship between dance in general and Greek and Roman dance with a focus on numerous aspects. The volume is organized into five parts, each of which unveils a valuable perspective: Dance and the Ancient Sources, Dance and Decadence, Dance and Myth, Ancient Dance and the Modern Mind, and the Ancient Chorus in Contemporary Performance.

The first part is crucial because of its critical understanding of sources, the first step to map out this relantionship. Ann Cooper Albright, in her essay, “The Tanagra Effect: Wrapping the Modern Body in the Folds of Ancient Greece”, delineates the interest in ancient Greece of four performers, Duncan herself, Loïe Fuller, Eva Palmer and Colette. The expression ‘Tanagra Effect’ refers to the Tanagra sculptures, also known as the Tanagra figurines (so called for the place where many of them were found) of ancient Greece, “whose draping clothes and folded scarves brilliantly capture the underlying movement of their bodies”. It symbolizes a dress style typical of the modern woman, one whose lifestyle literally incorporated choices (…) with a mobility unheard of twenty years earlier”. Duncan, Fuller, Palmer and Colette all engaged with this kind of choices in their own approach to performance.

The last chapter of this part, “A Pylades for the twentieth century: Fred Astaire and the aesthetic of bodily eloquence” by Kathleen Riley, is quite fascinating with regards to the North American tap dancer, but perhaps a bit overstated in drawing a comparison between his style and that of “the art of ancient pantomime”. Pylades was a renown virtuoso, but Astaire does not convincingly look as his “twentieth-century heir”.

The third part deals with the meat of the matter, i.e. myth. Barbara Ravelhofer’s study, “Ancient Greece, Dance, and the English Masque” reflects on the sixteenth and seventeenth century English “distinctive kind of dramatic entertainment” which “involved music, dancing, fanciful costumes and settings”. The masques by Thomas Campion were an “intriguing example of how classical antiquity materialized onstage”. The role of masque designers is also taken into account, with the example of Inigo Jones who attempted a kind of historical accuracy in his work. 
Heniretta Bannerman’s “Ancient Myths and Modern Moves: The Greek-Inspired Dance Theatre of Martha Graham”, offers an insightful analysis of Graham’s long lasting interest in Greek tragedies and myths. She also exemplifies Graham's “principles that underpins these works”, such as Jungian psychoanalysis and the archetype concept, the dramatic element set to stage her heroine’s inner struggle, as it happens with her 1947 reworking of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth, Errand into the Maze. She then focuses on the cycle motif “of death and renewal” present in works such as Cave of the Heart (1946), where Graham powerfully retells the Medea myth. According to Bannerman, “Graham understood the relationship between Greek myth and the innermost reaches of the mind and heart” and “grasped the principles that underpin Greek tragic theatre”. The chapter closes with a notable investigation of Graham’s influence on Frederick Ashton’s Persephone, starring Svetlana Beriosova.

Part four is probably the most appealing in that it examines the connection between ancient dance and the modern mind. Daniel Albright’s essay, “Knowing the Dancer, Knowing the Dance: The Dancer as Décor” is quite thought-provoking: “A dance is a kind of art in which the performer’s physical presence constitutes the surround in which the dance takes place – as Yeats put it, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’” Dance and décor often intermingle echoing, for instance, the practice of classically inspired statue posing as devised by Emma Hamilton at the end of the eighteenth century. This is connected with dance and places too, dance and architecture and Rudolf Laban’s theories, “we became space through stillness”, Carol Brown wrote. Laban’s notion of kinesphere, the dancer’s “personal envelope of space”, perfectly illustrates this aspect. Various other examples are presented, like Oskar Schlemmer’s Tradic Ballet (1922) or Loïe Fuller’s groundbreaking metres-long costumes, where the dance-décor connection reaches its climax, as “a dancer (…) constitutes a place”.

Italy and the Classics

Tomorrow I will be in Oxford to take part to the one-day conference Italy and the Classics. My paper is about dancer painter Alberto Spadolini. Here is the programme. Here more details.

Spadolini, Ancona and the World

Italia Nostra, Teatrino San Cosma, Ancona, 14 April 2016, h 5.15 pm

An image of the audience.

Alberto Spadolini is still today an artist to be rediscovered, and the event, Alberto Spadolini, un anconetano nel mondo [Alberto Spadolini, a man from Ancona who got his way into the world], organised by Italia Nostra, has been a nice initiative that has remembered him from various perspectives. Marco Travaglini, Spadolini’s nephew and tireless promoter of his rediscovery, opened the ball. After him, Federica Bozzarelli, restorer of the artist’s work, followed and, in the end, I traced the path of his relationship with dance.

Marco Travaglini.

Travaglini spoke of Spadolini’s life, his illustrious friends, his work, and collaborations, underlining the fact that, in his investigation, many people and experts from all over the world, helped him. He showed numerous images of his extraordinary photographs and of his paintings, focusing, among other things, on the codes present in some of them, as his friend and main oral source of his rediscovery, Alex Wolfson, has noted. In this sense, Travaglini highlighted the importance of the sphere analyzing it in some paintings, as Tau, which seems to exemplify the history of the artist's soul. Spadolini, who was from Ancona, loved his town, he loved talking the Ancona dialect, and loved going back to Ancona to go to the market and eat the fish broth typical of the area. Before concluding his talk, Travaglini invited Mr. Mosconi, who knew Spadolini, to talk about his experience with him. He specified that he even knows where he was born, “in front of the barracks” in the ‘piano’ suburb, where the working class used to live.

Federica Bozzarelli.

Federica Bozzarelli focused on the restoration of Spadolini’s paintings, done, depending on each case, following different techniques, where she used scalpels to clear the canvas or colour paints to recreate the original luminosity and chromatism. She showed various paintings on which she worked both in their initial and final state. On a couple of occasions, she found other paintings under the canvas she was restoring, as the one they thought was a self-portrait and that instead they discovered was a portrait painted by Teodora Clerici Trmi, as is evident from an article published in Comoedia in 1933. 

I talked about Spadolini as a dancer with a particular attention to his primitivist dances in 1930s Paris next, but not only that, to Josephine Baker. In particular, I have analysed one of his most significant photographs and illustrated aspects of his dance from his solo in the film Marinella (1936) directed by Pierre Caron, starring Tino Rossi as the protagonist.

Thanks to Italia Nostra for the organization of the event and to Marco Travaglini for asking me to take part to it. The rediscovery of Spadò, as he was also called, proceeds and will certainly continue to surprise us.

Rosella Simonari and the audience.

Alberto Spadolini, un anconetano nel mondo

Tomorrow I will be in Ancona to deliver a brief talk on the relationship between Alberto Spadolini and dance, here an essay in Italian I wrote about it.