43. Worlds: Balanchine and Graham on Video, reviewed by Cheryl S.
Sandy and I are deeply immersed in our Joan the Maid dance – titled Visions and set to Liszt’s “Consolations” – while outside our Ebersdorf Tower the world is turning more and more neo-medieval, what with the pandemic and violence in the streets. Safely indoors, I’ve watched on the internet the Lincoln Center at Home re-broadcast of a 1986 performance by New York City Ballet of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and I’ve visited the Martha Matinees internet presentation of Graham’s 1944 Herodiade. I’ve been reminded how a dance or ballet can create an alternative universe out of many highly specific details. Each work evokes a dance cosmos filled with poetic insights. Both videos are still available for viewing as of this posting
Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with a burst of energy; the fairy realm is buzzing, skimming, flying about the forest, when the lovelorn Helen enters, cutting across the action on a long diagonal. The fairy world stops to take note. Puck, invisible to the Athenian, suspends a vine in the air before her, hoping to delight, to distract her from grief, but so consumed is she in her sorrow, she merely pulls off a leaf to dab at her tears. It’s a very touching moment, but it is also much more. This “puckish” gesture aligns motivically with the far more potent poppy petals later in the work. The botanical axis from the touchingly ineffectual to the life-altering reveals the deepest themes of this work – seeing and not seeing, the relationship of love to mortality and immortality, and the various, surprising limitations endemic to one or another of the parallel and intermingling realms of this complicated story.
Helena couldn't see Puck in that opening moment, and yet neither did she not see him. Had she registered the strangeness of a detached vine hovering before her in midair, she'd have gleaned the “magic" all around her. Not seeing the magic is essential to the plot and the cosmoi of the ballet. Later, the lovers never see the magic at work, but the petal of the enchanted poppy which Oberon employs to confuse and then set things right allows them eventually to see their folly and to see each other and their love for one another more clearly. (The simple leaf that Puck offers at the start can't ameliorate the grief -- he's of a "magic" world, but the leaf isn't -- so Oberon has to intercede, employing a magic that even the Fairies can't resist, a device from a cosmos that perhaps envelops even the fairy world.)
The intermingling of the worlds brings the differences into relief and exposes the pathos that makes this play and ballet so much more than a farce. The lovers, because they are mortal, can be together if they, with the help of fairy magic, can figure out how; but, of course, their love will come to an end in death (if not sooner). Beyond brief couplings, the Fairies seem not to be able to be together because they are immortal. There's a sort of world-weariness as a result of their long, long existence, their powers, and knowledge. They have it all, and for this very reason little really matters to them, or little matters more than anything else. All is play. The mortal lovers join and invest so much in this joining – passion, despair, ruthlessness and murderous designs – perhaps because they know all is fleeting. Without mortality’s temporal press, the Fairies lack a sense of urgency. They merely distract themselves with delights, but there's a sadness at the core. None of their diversions, no matter how fantastic or decadent, can rival the sense of ardor that ephemeral existence engenders. The Fairies appear to be moved by the plight of these mortals, perhaps because they can have -- but seem to be throwing away -- something the Fairies can't. Oberon and Titania enjoy an amorous detente after their warring games but then retreat, inevitably, to their separate realms within the fairy kingdom. They bring the lovers together, but they, themselves, must part. Even the poppy, shot through by Cupid’s arrow, can bring Titania low but cannot forge a lasting union.
This conundrum even registers among the mortals, whether or not they realize it, in a compressed movement passage. At this moment in the plot, a great reversal of fortune is afoot; Helen is, or is about to be, the object of both men’s affections while Hermia has just discovered the depth of her sudden outcast state. On an undulating swell of music, Helena is lifted repeatedly in arabesque by Lysander, Hermia’s erstwhile swain. The lifts match the music beautifully. At the same time Hermia sinks to the floor sobbing into her hands, her body heaving on the very same swelling melody. It, too, catches the music’s ebb and flow. Helena soars, Hermia sinks. Neither woman is happy. Hermia has lost everything, but Helena, in receiving everything, gains nothing for she rightly mistrusts the sudden mania both men profess for her, this unaccountable, unfathomable embarrassment of riches. Like the Fairies who possess everything and, strangely, nothing, Helena experiences the fairy plight in that moment, a mortal version of the Fairies' dilemma in this most confused passage. She has everything but what she actually wants: a sober declaration of love from the one man she desires. Meanwhile, Hermia, the confident, coddled, adored and love-struck child, loses everything in this moment, suffering the mortal loss that will be her eventual fate. And as we often do when faced with great loss, she responds with utter miscomprehension -- her “Lost in the Woods” solo -- after the initial wave of grief. Helena soars, Hermia sobs, and in these fleet, simultaneous gestures Balanchine conveys a complicated but essential truth at the heart of this ballet and play: to have everything is to have nothing. Balanchine’s ability to subsume philosophical content into choreographic language with such seeming dispatch is breathtaking.
At the conclusion of the work, Balanchine evokes a pathos that also pervades the fairy realm as a result of this same equation. In dance terms, it’s remarkably simple; but the staging is magnificent. As the forest supplants the Athenian court, Oberon and Titania reenter from opposite sides of the stage with their retinues in tow and meet in the center to dance together for the first and only time in this ballet. Two circles form around them. The children — Fireflies of the forest — buzz about them clockwise while their adult courtiers -- Butterflies, Dragonflies and Fairy-Nymphs -- proceed in a stately arc immediately around their coupled sovereigns. At the quiet center of this now unified realm, Oberon and Titania perform a version of one of the ballet’s central motifs: held hands forming overhead arcs under which the dancers pass while turning or pivoting. When the Athenian lovers are at equilibrium in their affairs, this ribbon of movement flows unencumbered while it knots tensely (if ingeniously) in moments of imbalance and strife. The Fairies’ version of this dance is so simple one can overlook it as a development of the motif. Titania merely wafts through like a breeze; the two drop and retake hand-holds suggesting the ease but also the impermanence of their coupling. The dance itself is very short. Everything about it suggests a delight which does not permit the possibility of strife. Notable, too, there’s no partnering in the traditional sense; no supports, no lifts, no off-balance leans, no compensation and resultant amplification of scale.
Mere measures later, on the assertion of a minor chord, they’ve retreated to their opposite sides of the stage, each now encircled by his or her own cluster of seated children, delighting in a brief game of coaxing one, then another child to rise and lower, before dispersing them. Their retinues return to reattach their capes, and the fairy monarchs come centerstage meeting one last time, proceeding ceremonially downstage, hands held, before a final parting. Sovereignty reasserted, they cannot complement one another, so parting is inevitable. The lovers connect — perhaps unwittingly -- as a gambit for immortality, while the Fairies part as a consequence of it. The lovers labor under the conception that joining incomplete halves assuages life’s grief. The Fairies see more clearly. Resignation reigns.
Strangely, I seem to have focused on the pathos beneath the comic surface though it is the twining of the two registers that makes this work -- the ballet and the play -- so innovative and rich. And we are offered a final balm, after all; there is one mortal who has been permitted to see the magic. Bottom’s turn as an ass in the fairy realm has given him vision which he tries to impart to the Athenian court. Though in the play the nobles mock his efforts (and in the ballet Balanchine creates a most sublime pas de deux in place of the weaver’s attempted soliloquy), Bottom has become a conduit between realms, which is to say, an artist. The alchemy of art is a form of magic, and it is in that alchemy that we can glean something “beyond”.
Martha Graham’s Herodiade transports the audience to the chamber of a princess in a lone tower of a palace in ancient Judea or Assyria. Stéphane Mallarmé’s combination of aspects of the Biblical Salome and her mother Herodias into a unique poetic figure of his own served Graham and her composer Paul Hindemith as inspiration for a theatrical masterpiece. I had seen the film of the work with its original cast of Graham and May O’Donnell once before at a High School of Performing Arts screening – an initial encounter that left me baffled. But Florian gave me the relevant Mallarmé texts to read beforehand, and this time I was able to find my own interpretive way through the dance and to admire Graham’s performance genius as never before.
Here is what I was able to discover on a second viewing. I assume that Graham used the “Scène” from the 1871 Les Noces d’Hérodiade -- Mystère as the main source for her dance-tragedy. When the curtain rises, Graham’s princess has been walking alone in the gardens of her father’s palace where, in Eastern custom, old lions – vieux lions – are allowed to roam free when not kept in a dungeon below-ground. We learn in the poem that, instead of attacking the girl, the animals have magically bowed before her feet. All of this I take from the initial setting of the main Mallarmé scene between the princess and her nurse. On Graham’s stage, the solitary princess stares at herself in her chamber’s mirror and is frozen there when her nurse arrives. Graham’s version of the elderly attendant, whose costume has a Minoan silhouette, treats the princess as a near-deity and as a child, one whom she has raised from infancy. The nurse registers that the princess is both ego-inflated and in deep despair. (As a line from the poem’s dialogue puts it, “But who would dare touch one whom the lions had left alone?”) Each time the nurse tries to approach her charge to comfort her, the old woman is repulsed. This happens three times during the course of the ballet. The nurse is guilty of three “impieties” or improprieties in showing condescension, pity, or even brief intimacy with the young woman. The princess is in no mood to be sweet-talked.
Graham thus sets up a situation in which the nurse must battle to wean her mistress from her mirror-obsession and to remain in the presence rather than herself suffering immediate banishment. The ensuing conflict inspires the princess to imagine or “dream” of entering into battle with the nurse and her own demons in the depths of the mirror, which she repeatedly returns to in fascination. Perhaps the private anger against her life-long intimate will equip her to face the dire destiny she accepts at the end of the drama. Graham’s dance language thus employs a military analogy to illuminate a conflicted psychological process. What I believe may have inspired the choreographer to this conceit is Mallarmé’s use of the phrase “old lions” (vieux lions) as a poetic reference to ancient warrior-kings (anciens rois). The princess’s own father (the equivalent of the Biblical “Herod”) is away in the mountain country waging war, and in the meantime his kingdom is falling into decadence. We learn something of this in the “Overture” provided by Mallarmé for the nurse to introduce his poetic anecdote. Perhaps this is one of the sources of the royal daughter’s current despair. And perhaps the leonine father has inspired his daughter now to militant emulation.
The other source for the idea may have come from Graham’s familiarity with Balinese dance dramas, in which Hindu warrior-kings – yet another variety of old lions -- engage in stylized epic battles. Over her career, Graham made use of Balinese and Javanese motifs in her movement vocabulary as well as in her scenic conceptions. Here, she is possibly responding to the sound of the piano in Hindemith’s score, the way its insistent accents evoke the percussive effects of gamelan orchestras. We are suddenly in the exotic Far East as well as the ancient Near.
After one of the several failed attempts to aid her charge, the nurse retreats upstage, and the princess flares her skirt by rocking in profile so that the dress, fully displayed forward and back, becomes the side barding on a battle steed. So armored, the warrior-princess again and again approaches her mirror in a steady joust toward its depths. There are various prancing movements for the princess’ dance throughout the work, as though she is mounted on a courser, eager for battle. The nurse even positions herself behind the mirror at one point, and as the princess approaches it, the young woman uses a darting movement of her right arm, as though brandishing a sword (or a dagger, like a Javanese kris), cleaving her way through an imagined clash of arms.
The climax of these sorties takes place after the nurse has fully abased herself before the princess, who is now inspired to attack her directly. Graham combines three movement motifs in one final, forward advance: she travels toward the nurse with tiny pattering steps beneath her skirt; simultaneously, she repeatedly darts her “sword”-arm toward the old woman; and, while so aiming, Graham bends deeply from the waist again and again to increase her propulsion. It is like glimpsing an ancient, immense war machine (a “harum-scarum”) meant to rout the enemy with the horror of its mechanical efficiency: a device that would impale and devour anything in its path. At such moments you can understand how audiences could find Graham’s own dance to be terrifying in her performances. As one veteran of Graham’s art put it, “At her most intense, Graham could make you wet your pants.” I can see such a power in the Herodiade film.
Graham was fifty years old when she created and performed the role of the princess. She dances it in the 1944 film record as though in her prime. We see the compact energy of her movement. Her limbs radiate outward, even beneath a costume with a brilliantly utilized train. She does not spare herself in either aerial and floor challenges. Her speed – as when she rushes past the nurse in a spin of dismissal – is evoked instantly. Her dance rhythms are produced with clarity against Hindemith’s complex score. Graham’s theatrical timing is exact. There are even brief touches of satirical humor which her princess indulges in the description of her plight: suggestions of an embittered exhaustion, with shoulders that rollick derisively. I was also fascinated to see how Graham’s mimetic details register within the context of the stylized movement. Each dismissal of the companion-nurse is like one of Marianne Moore’s real toads in an imaginary garden. Subsequent performers of this role must face the challenge of creating an equivalent dance context within which brief literalisms will be so richly foregrounded.
What also impressed me in the choreography is the way Graham suggests that the princess’ eventual “victory” over the nurse is finally a hollow one. Some psychological vacuum rushes in by the end of the work – perhaps like the “Void” that Mallarme posited as necessary before the arrival of the poetic “Idea”. Perhaps that is the event that the princess now awaits with deep skepticism as the curtain falls on Herodiade. This empty victory also humanizes the character of the princess before her final self-immolation. For it, she is once again alone.
I hope my Nekomata pas de deux registers with something like the effect of this Graham pas de deux. My editor has informed me that Mme Beach (now landlocked in Siberia under the pandemic) is expert on the French poet and that I should consult her for further ideas about Graham’s compositional magic. Luckily, I have had Florian for advice. With that, I’d better get back to work in our virtual studio with Sandy. I believe we’ve got some magic of our own to do.
Can I make my Jeanette recognizable and yet a figure from an authentic other-world? One as alchemized as Balanchine’s and Graham’s? This is the challenge.
C.S.
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