BWW Reviews: Legacy of the Myth: Martha Graham Dance Company

Martha Graham Dance Company embraced "Myth and Transformation" as its rallying theme and looked to Greece to fulfill that charge at their New York City Center gala performance on March 19th. The company took great care, as it has in recent seasons, to engage and educate their audience throughout the performance. Extensive program notes, accompanied by Artistic Director Janet Eilber's narrative interludes and projected text in the opening piece, Graham's Clytemnestra, strongly guided that aim. Eilber reminded the audience that Graham considered herself "doom eager," seeking to reside in a state of free fall, much like Clytemnestra. Graham's greatest triumphs often reside in her heroines' fall from grace.

Reworked from a three-act ballet into one, Katherine Crockett's regal Clytemnestra dueled with the underworld--and Ben Schultz' branch-wielding King Hades--over the injustice of her homicide-manic family. The inciting incident? Her husband Agamemnon (Tadej Brdnik) sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The family unit turned on itself, lamented and aggravated by murderous children, furies, soldiers, mistresses, watchmen, and a grieved Helen of Troy (Natasha White-McGuire). Crockett reflected her torment through swift grand battements in which she seemed to strike herself. As her leg reached the apex of its arc, she contracted as though wounded, partly by her own efforts for revenge. In gentler moments, Lloyd Knight's Messenger of Death trolled the stage and paused in releve to lift a flexed foot. Perhaps to suggest hesitancy at the unknown but foreseeable tragedy? Conflict manifested itself in Crockett's body through a twisted torso as she alternately pleaded with and berated those ensnaring her. The supporting characters swooped throughout, casting judgment as their mouths widened in silent screams.

The company hosted visiting artists from the Hellenic Dance Company, accompanied by Graham 2 in Graham's Panorama. With its 1935 premiere, Graham endorsed social activism in the name of modernism. Sheathed in red, the groupings constantly shifted, flocking into one unit before unfurling in varying formations. Their focus alternated between gazing upwards in devotion to confronting the audience with their stare. They lightly shuffled and stamped their feet, creating a soft pulse as they sprinted. Their palms frequently turned up as in quiet supplication before taking an abstracted power gesture. A fist to their heart, the elbow extended upwards rather than by their side as in patriotic submission.

Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis' world premiere, Echo, closed the evening. Foniadakis found inspiration in the Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo, in which Narcissus (Lloyd Mayor) fell in love with his own reflection (Lorenzo Pagano), yet failed to see a nymph (PeiJu Chien-Pott) actually in love with him. The dancers accompanied their own pulsing rush with percussive clapping and stomping. The speed with which the dancers attacked Foniadakis' heavily layered movement astounded. Anastasios Sofroniou's flowing costumes highlighted the pace as the fabric swirled around the dancers. Mayor and Pagano's pas de deux entwined them over and around each other. Their legs splayed open and closed as they "splashed" in the pool (indicated by glimmering light). They intimately gazed at each other while alternating straddling plank positions. Chien-Pott interrupted the self-reflection and provoked frenzied threesome. She danced with both as she sought the "original." Additional dancers galloped through Narcissus' self-possessed tableaus and joined Chien-Pott in perhaps the most stunning movement of the piece: a whirling cannon of grace and fluidity. Consumed by desire, Echo set the punishing cannon into motion, continually driving the movement faster, harder, and deeper. Her desire liberated her and became greater than her cause as she whipped her hair round and round. Narcissus' reflection became his possessive alter ego, caught in his own chokehold and dragged away.

Foniadakis' movement captivated with the scariest illusion of all: suicide of the mind. It succeeded in the company's juxtaposition of Grecian myths to transform the Graham legacy as "Thoroughly Modern Martha."

Photo by COSTAS

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