#MarthaGraham #dance..are remarkable...for their abstraction...its severity, what people then would have called ugliness.
"Early Graham dances such as "Heretic" (1929) and "Primitive Mysteries" (1931) are remarkable, first of all, for their abstraction. They are an enactment, not a narrative. Other choreographers were experimenting with abstraction at the time, but what is striking about Graham's early work is its severity, what people then would have called ugliness. ("She looks as though she were about to give birth to a cube," theatre critic Stark Young wrote.) Graham was part of the New York avant-guard of the twenties and thirties. In "Blood Memory," she tells of sitting with Alfred Stieglitz and reading with him Georgia O'Keefe's "glorious letters," from New Mexico, including one "about her waking just before dawn to bake bread in her adobe oven." The Southwest, dawn, bread, adobe: by now it's a cliche, modernism's embrace of the "primitive," the non European. But it wasn't a cliche then, and Graham turned it into something tremendous. "Heretic" was about society's persecution of the nonconformist. Any would-be artist downtown Manhattan could have made a piece about that, but who except Graham could have imagined the ensemble groupings she ranged against the heretic: great slabs and walls of dancers, wedges, and arcs and parabolas?"
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Vintage) [Paperback]
Joan Acocella
