E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spooky chunks Martha Graham and Chunky Move at the Pillow BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
	Related Links Martha Graham Dance Company's official Web site Chunky Move's official Web site Marcia B. Siegel remembers Martha Graham Marcia B. Siegel on Richard Move, the One-Man Martha. Marcia B. Siegel on the legal battle over "ownership " of Martha Graham’s dances. Marcia B. Siegel writes about the legacy and anti-legacy of Martha Graham.

The fortunes of the Martha Graham company have turned once again, or twice again, in the past few weeks. After a decade of legal calisthenics and on-again-off-again operations, the company staged two successful seasons at New York City Center, and it looked as if things were going to settle down. Having wrested title to most of Graham’s dances from Ron Protas, her last close associate and heir, the company could now perform them and devote its attention to preserving the Graham edifice. At the end of June, another court appeal was concluded, this one giving the rights to seven more dances back to the Martha Graham Center.

But by the time the company opened its five-performance series at Jacob’s Pillow last week, another administrative shake-up was in the works. Artistic directors Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, who’d been in the company when Graham died in 1991 and who pulled it together when the legal difficulties finally subsided, had been ousted during a process of financial retrenchment. They were replaced by Janet Eilber, a principal in the company of the 1970s who went on to an acting career.

I don’t know whether Capucilli and Dakin or someone else had the idea to package seven small, proto-Graham works and two big choreographies under the title "Prelude and Revolt" as a way of showing the connections between Graham and her forerunners, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, the household gods of Jacob’s Pillow. It was a rare and inspired notion. What was troubling about the program was the lack of agreement among the dancers about style and performing attitude. Their sense of what Graham "means" will affect the history of Martha Graham from here on.

No doubt it’s daunting to inhabit a legendary dance, especially a dance role originated by a famous persona. The basics of reconstructing a dance are problematic enough. Almost none of Graham’s works was filmed or notated in its original form. What are the steps? How do the steps go together with the music? What are the floor patterns and groupings of dancers supposed to be? Reconstructors strive to get these basics right.

But then, how should the dance be performed? Was the choreographer serious about her theme or making fun of it? Should the dancer be evoking the audience’s sympathy? Admiration? Lechery? Disgust? Anger? Should she try to imitate a bygone glamor or do something that reads as glamorous to the audience today? Graham dancers now seem quite uncertain about these matters. The ones who look most convincing to me do the least to portray the choreographer or telegraph an idea. The expressiveness of modern dance movement can convey everything if a dancer will trust it, but that means teaching the audience to trust it too.

The Pillow program began with Ruth St. Denis’s most famous dance, The Incense (1906). This iconic solo, from St. Denis’s investigations into Far Eastern mysticism, has gradually turned into kitsch. Pianist Pat Daugherty took the humdrum score by Henry Worthington Loomis at an excruciatingly slow pace, and Katherine Crockett represented St. Denis as self-absorbed and narcissistic, in love with her own movement rather than transfixed in prayer. St. Denis played down her physical allure in her spiritual pieces; photos and films show us that. Few contemporary dancers convey this mysterious duality.

Ted Shawn’s 1919 Gnossienne (music by Erik Satie), also played in plodding half-time, became a marathon of balancing and held poses. David Zurak visibly struggled to get through it. Shawn might have looked at the same Greek friezes Nijinsky did for the 1913 L’après-midi d’un faune. But Shawn’s agenda was to glorify the ideal male physique and repair the low status of male dancing. His Olympian types fathered the strutting butch heroes in Martha Graham’s Greek dance dramas decades later.

Graham was Shawn’s protegée more than St. Denis’s, and she danced his twirly, pseudo-Spanish skirt dance Serenata Morisca during the Denishawn vaudeville tours of the 1920s. In 1986, she put it back together, probably with the help of Terese Capucilli, who danced it into the 1990s. The Jacob’s Pillow program didn’t say whether Capucilli or someone else taught it for this round, but Blakely White-McGuire danced it in a sort of postmodern trance of neutrality. Again, the question is how to render a historical moment, in this case a popular number, without making it look cheap.

Three Gopi Maidens was another morsel of exotica, reconstructed from one of Graham’s early group dances, Flute of Krishna (1926). A three-line program note unnecessarily explained this flirtation between the god and three coy acolytes, but no one was credited with staging it.

After all this lush life, the 1930 Lamentation was a shock. Crockett again overacted the piece, as if the simple fact of her bowed and thrashing body inside a tube of stretch jersey wouldn’t convey the idea. Satyric Festival Song (1932) also deployed the body in distorted flourishes, perhaps caricaturing a street dancer’s routine. Graham wasn’t given to comedy, and Erica Dankmeyer couldn’t seem to find a way into the dance.

The choreographer was moving into abstract territory. Steps in the Street, two excerpts from the big 1936 social-commentary work Chronicle, flung a company of 12 women led by Miki Orihara into grave, silent walking patterns and furious repetitive jumping. Stark, relentless, it invariably gets a big ovation.

Despite the austere and clenched works of the ’30s, Graham is known today mainly as a choreographer of sexual encounters. Errand into the Maze (1947) was one of her best and still is. Alessandra Prosperi seemed a little shaky at first, but she gained strength and ended up a convincing match for Christophe Jeannot as the Minotaur-like creature she feared and eventually conquered.

With Acts of Light (1981) the program came full circle, back to beautiful bodies, objectified feelings, and a display of dance technique. Danced to taped post-Romantic music by Carl Nielsen, it shows the seductive surface gifts of Graham and none of the gnarly inner torment.

The Australian company Chunky Move, the Pillow’s other major attraction last week, performed a piece all about inner torment. Tense Dave exposed the hidden angst, rapacious desire, and violent longings of five tortured souls, in a cryptic series of sketches on a revolving stage. The totally integrated and brilliantly executed physical theater work was made by a large creative team under the artistic direction of Gideon Obatzanek.

The ingenious set — several high wooden panels that shifted to divide the space into rooms, corridors, and sinister alcoves, in front of a black-draped void — allowed the characters to appear and disappear in a landscape that seemed sturdy but proved slithery and unstable.

The denizens of this claustrophobic dream world, solitaries all at the beginning, gradually penetrate one another’s fantasies. One man, the emotionally paralyzed Dave, I guess, stumbles across a series of panicky individuals — a persistent suicide, a frightened woman, a man who might be planning sabotage, a Victorian maiden with a yen for sex. Dave gets involved with all of them, falls in with their games, and eventually becomes their victim.

At times the characters could have been cartoons; at others, they camped up a gothic romance. But the joking barely papered over the cruelty; they never ceased their stalking, manipulating, and mauling. One grisly scene simulated dismemberment by ax, broadsword, and chainsaw, with verismo sound effects. The whole thing was masterfully put together; the acting — by Kristy Ayre, Brian Carbee, Michelle Heaven, Brian Lucas, and Luke Smiles — was visceral, heartless.

At the end, Dave, beaten and dead, you’d think, wakes up to find the stage has stopped revolving. As he drags himself to his feet, it starts up again. He sets off in a counter-direction, as if to retrace his nightmare. I notice it’s the first time he walks like a relaxed person.