After 17 really good years as executive and artistic director, Ella Baff is leaving Jacob’s Pillow. To honor her tenure, the Martha Graham Dance Company was chosen for the season’s final program; Graham (1894-1991) had been a student of Denishawn, before becoming an American superstar dancer and choreographer. Unfortunately, the concept proved more attractive than what was seen on stage.
The company, directed since 2005 by Janet Eilber, who danced with Graham, brought a program that raised a red flag: “Embattled Garden,” a second-ring work in which Graham never danced, and three recent dances by choreographers from other countries, inspired by impressions of Graham’s work. And these didn’t translate well.
What apparently happened is that Graham, aged and drinking, was cozied up to by a non-dancer, Ron Protas, to whom she left the dances. Whether they were hers to give was argued in court, during which time dancers were fired and Protas ran through the company’s money. Crucially, dances went unperformed, and dancers who would have passed them on gave up, and drifted off.
The program note by Norton Owen, Pillow librarian and archivist, sheds some light: “Much of the legal haggling which played out publicly in the past two decades could have been averted if she had properly copyrighted her dances. But instead she left behind a tangle of opposing forces.”
“Embattled Garden,” from 1958, is turned into a soap opera, the garden being Eden. Adam (Lloyd Mayor) tussles with a “stranger” representing the serpent, while Eve (Mariya Dashkina Maddux) tussles with Lilith, Adam’s first wife (Carrie Ellmore- Tallitsch). Lilith was done up to suggest Graham herself, with dark upswept hair, yellow dress with swirling skirt and red dot on the chest, and angular, almost Egyptian gestures. Her leg motions and kicks were incomplete. The program note called her a “comforting mother as well as an erotic playmate.”
This program had more props than previous ones this season. Poles were stylized trees and branches, for the stranger/serpent to scale. After the battles, the dance ends in the opening poses. The chaotic score was composed for Graham by Carlos Surinach, who is no Aaron Copland. This was not our garden. Why call it that?
During Graham’s long career, her music choices went from sublime--“Appalachian Spring”--to ridiculous. Arsenije Jovanovic’s score to “Depak Ine,” by the Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, was in category two. Drones, crickets and forest noises made Graham seem hokey. Why copy her misjudgments? Carrying on her material requires savvy choosing.
In “Depak Ine,” PeiJu Chien-Pott, a fluid, edgy dancer with waist-length hair, lay corpse-like, spotlighted on a dark stage. Several men showed sexual interest in her but, getting nowhere, left the stage. She came to life after they were gone, in a passionate fling, returning to the floor when they came back.
She was on stage again in “Axe;” Mats Ek’s version of a film, commissioned by the Pillow. Ben Schultz calmly splits rails while she tries, more and more flamboyantly, to get his attention. She gets it, fills his arms with rails, and he walks off. She follows with the axe, to the accompaniment of Albinoni’s Adagio.
In “Echo,” Andonis Foniadakis’s distortion of the Narcissus-and-reflection myth, all dancers were in full or partial Martha skirts. The center was a love duet by Abdiel Jacobsen and Lloyd Knight, featuring wrestling and miles of skirt--fabric had a central role in Graham’s dances.
This program was not enough to keep Martha Graham’s legacy alive. It implied that it had been tarnished by the forced hiatus. Successors had best sift through her groundbreaking ideas and then chart their own course.
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