NEW YORK, April 22 (UPI) -- Now that the Martha Graham Dance Company is back in business as usual, it is commissioning new works for its repertory, notably a theater piece by Martha Clarke titled "Sueno" inspired by Francisco Goya's etchings of the horrors of political and religious abuses in Spain at the turn of the 19th century.
The Graham company recently completed an engagement at City Center that was remarkable for its reconstitution of classics by the company's founder, who died in1991 at the age of 96. After Graham's decease, the company went through years of financial difficulties and a protracted legal battle over the rights to her works, resulting in suspension of the company in 2000.
Revived in 2002, the 24-dancer company is headed by Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, veteran Graham dancers who are keeping alive the unique Graham style of modern dance. In commissioning Clarke to do a new work for the company they have honored a choreographer named for Martha Graham who had studied with Graham's musical director, Louis Horst.
"Sueno," which translates as "Dream," is really a 20-minute nightmare of a dance drawn from images in the 1799 "Los Caprichos" series of etchings and from another series, "Los Desastres de la Guerra" depicting the horrors of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, not published until 1863. Clarke transforms the etchings into vignettes designed to illustrate the cruelty and hypocrisy of Goya's world.
Unfortunately, the episodic form given "Sueno" does not allow for sustained dance patterns, except for a brief movement of couples in whirling patterns, the women held high, that suggest the winged harpies of Goya's imagination. Otherwise there is little choreographic focus, no matter how dramatic the vignette is visually, reducing the work to little more than a collection of "living pictures" evoking Goya's grotesque caricatures.
That this work is not up to Clarke's previous theater triumphs such as "The Garden of Earthly Delights," "Vienna: Lusthaus" and especially "Belle Epoque," an evocation of painter Henri de Toulouse Lautrec's Paris, performed last winter at Lincoln Center, is disappointing.
But "Sueno" does offer some unforgettable imagery including a gallows corpse with clanging bells in each hand, other corpses being robbed of their valuables by thieves, prostitutes and soldiers engaged in a street orgy and men engaged in a nasty recreation of a bullfight. The dancers shout epithets and cackle like banshees and the musical score commissioned of Franco Piersanti is violent and punctuated by the nervous click of castanets.
The scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez suggests a corroding metallic wall leading to a shadowy alley, lighted spookily by Christopher Akerlind, and Donna Zakowska's costumes are suitable to the urban underworld denizens for whom they are designed, picking up again on the period garb depicted in Goya's etchings with some additions of flamenco finery.
"Sueno" engages the talents of half the Graham company, and among those giving outstanding performances were Elizabeth Auclair, David Zurak, Miki Orihara, Tadej Brdnik, Katherine Crockett and Blakely White-McGuire.
The rest of the programming for the 12 performances at City Center consisted of works choreographed by Graham from 1931 to 1958 and includes a revival of "Deaths and Entrances" with costumes by fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who has reconceived Graham's original costumes for the work based on the lives of the literary Bronte sisters. Also performed was an edited-down version of "Chronicle," Graham's dance response to the menace of fascism in Europe that was premiered in 1936.
For a short course in Graham dance technique there was "Errand into the Maze" (1947). It was danced beautifully at the performance seen by this critic by Alessandra Prosperi, as the maiden Ariadne, and Christopher Jeannot, as the Minotaur, to Gian-Carlo Menotti's wonderfully energized score using sculptural stage props by Isamu Noguchi.
The maiden's contorted dance movements reflect perfectly Graham's attention to muscular and neuromuscular responses of the body to inner and outer stimuli, resulting in violent abdominal contractions and equally intense releases combined with angular arm and leg movements. Influence of the Graham style is still prevalent throughout the modern dance world today.
Another fine performance was of "El Penitente," Graham's 1940 salute to the southwestern American religious sect that believe in purification through penance, often by flogging themselves with knotted ropes. Set to music by Louis Horst, this work full of Christian symbolism, was impressively danced by Christophe Jeannot as the penitent, Maurizio Nardi as the Christ figure, and Alessandra Prosperi doubling as the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen.
--
(Please send comments to [email protected].)
