UMS Concert Program, October 31, 1981: International Presentations Of Music & Dance -- Martha Graham Dance Company

Season: 103rd
Concert: Fifteenth
Power Center For The Performing Arts Ann Arbor, Michigan

THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Martha Graham Dance Company
MARTHA GRAHAM, Artistic Director
RON PROTAS, General Director and Associate Artistic Director LINDA HODES, Associate Artistic Director
Set Designer: Isamu Noguchi Lighting: Jean Rosenthal, Gilbert V. Hemsley, jr.
Costumes: Martha Graham, Halston Regisseurs: Linda Hodes, Carol Fried, Diane Gray, Bert Terborgh
The Dancers:
Takako Asakawa Christine Dakin Donlin Foreman
David Hatch Walker Yuriko Kimura Peggy Lyman
Susan McLain Elisa Monte Bert Terborgh
Tim Wengerd George White, Jr.
Thea Nerissa Barnes David Hochoy
Charles Brown Kevin Keenan
David Brown Jean-Louis Morin
Jacqulyn Buglisi Steve Rooks
Terese Capucilli Jeanne Ruddy
Judith Garay Philip Salvatori
Sophie Giovanola Andrea Smith
Joyce Herring Larry White
Saturday Evening, October 31, 1981, at 8:00
Power Center for the Performing Arts
Ann Arbor, Michigan
This performance is one of three in Ann Arbor by the Martha Graham Dance Company comprising a dance residency with support from the National Endow?ment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts.
The Board of Trustees of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance wishes to express gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund, Phelps Dodge, Mrs. Evelyn Sharp, and Halston for their support which has made possible these performances by the Martha Graham Dance Company.
Fifteenth Concert of the 103 rd Season Eleventh Annual Choice Series
DIVERSION OF ANGELS
Music by Norman Dello Joio Choreography and Costumes
Original Lighting by Jean Rosenthal by Martha Graham
Premiere: August 13, 1948
"The city seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in Heaven. . . . The dust and stones of the streets were as precious as gold. . . . Eternity was manifested in the light of day and something infinite beyond everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. . . .The Men! Immortal Cherubim! And young men glittering, and sparkling angels, and maids seraphic pieces of life and beauty. Boys and girls tumbling in the streets and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. . . . The streets were mine ... the temple was mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it."
Thomas Traherne
Diversion of Angels is a lyric dance about the loveliness of youth, the pleasure and playfulness, quick joy and quick sadness of being in love for the first time.
The Couple in White...............Susan McLain, Donlin Foreman
The Couple in Red.................Christine Dakin, Charles Brown
The Couple in Yellow.............Terese Capucilli, Bert Terborgh
4th Man..........................................David Brown
Girls ......................... Judith Garay, Sophie Giovanola,
Joyce Herring, Andrea Smith
"Used by arrangement with Carl Fischer, Inc., publisher and copyright owner. Choreography copyright 1976 by Martha Graham
(pause)
ERRAND INTO THE MAZE
Music by Gian-Carlo Menotti Original Lighting by Jean Rosenthal
Set by Isamu Noguchi Choreography and Costumes
by Martha Graham
Premiere: February 28, 1947
This is an errand into the maze of the heart's darkness in order to face and do battle with the Creature of Fear. There is the accomplishment of the errand, the instant of triumph, and the emergence from the dark.
Yuriko Kimura George White, Jr.
?Used by arrangement with G. Schirmer, Inc., publisher and copyright owner. Choreography copyright 1976 by Martha Graham
INTERMISSION
CAVE OF THE HEART
Music by Samuel Barber Original Lighting by Jean Rosenthal
Set by Isamu Noguchi Choreography and Costumes
by Martha Graham
Premiere: May 10, 1946
In Greek legend, Medea was a Princess of Colchis, renowned as a sorceress. She fled from her home with the hero Jason to Corinth, where she lived with him as wife and bore him two children. But Jason was ambitious, and when King Creon offered him the hand of his daughter in marriage, he abandoned Medea. Maddened with jealousy, Medea sent the Princess a wedding gift: an enchanted crown. When the Princess placed the crown upon her head, it brought down upon her a terrifying death. Medea then murdered her own children, and fled Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons, returning to her father, the Sun.
Cave of the Heart is Martha Graham's dramatization of the legend of Medea. The action is focused directly on the legend's central theme: the terrible destruc-tiveness of jealousy and the alliance with the dark powers of humanity as symbolized by magic. There are only four characters: Medea, Jason, the Princess, and the Chorus, who, foreseeing the tragedy about to be enacted, vainly tries to prevent it, and suffers its deepest meaning.
The Sorceress, Medea............................Takako Asakawa
Jason ........................................... Tim Wengerd
The Victim, Creon's Daughter.......................Christine Dakin
The Chorus.......................................Jeanne Ruddy
Originally commissioned by the Alice N. Ditson Fund, Columbia University. "Used by arrangement with G. Schirmer, Inc. Choreography copyright 1976 by Martha Graham
INTERMISSION
FRESCOES
Music by Samuel Barber Lighting by Gilbert V. Hemsley, Jr.
Soprano: Leontyne Price Choreography by Martha Graham
Costumes by Halston
Premiere: December 9, 1978
First Fresco
Isis........................................... Christine Dakin
Osiris..........................................Charles Brown
Second Fresco, "Give me some music . . ."
Cleopatra.........................................Peggy Lyman
Antony.......................................... Tim Wengerd
Third Fresco
Isis........................................... Christine Dakin
Osiris..........................................Charles Brown
Fourth Fresco, "Give me my robe, put on my crown . . ."
Cleopatra.........................................Peggy Lyman
Antony.......................................... Tim Wengerd
Iras..........................................Terese Capucilli
Charmian ..................................... Jacqulyn Buglisi
Chorus: Thea Nerissa Barnes, David Brown, Sophie Giovanola, David Hochoy, Joyce Herring, Kevin Keenan, Susan McLain, Steve Rooks, Jeanne Ruddy, Philip Salvatori, Andrea Smith, Larry White
?Two Arias from Antony and Cleopatra by courtesy of G. Schirmer, Inc., publisher and copy?right owner. Miss Graham wishes to express her gratitude to Leontyne Price for the permission to use her recorded voice for this season's performances of Frescoes.
Frescoes was commissioned by Drs. Arthur M. Sackler, Mortimer D. Sackler, and Raymond R. Sackler to mark the dedication of the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Martha Graham Dance Company expresses its deep appreciation to Halston for his con?tribution of the costumes for this production.
Anna Kisselgoff, Principal Dance Critic of the New York Times, wrote the following article for the Graham Company's February 1981 performances in Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts:
As the great image-maker of the dance, Martha Graham has passed into a new phase of creativity. She is, of course, actively supervising performances of the classics in her repertory and more recently, reviving even older classics that once seemed hopelessly if grandly stored away as legend.
But the theater of Martha Graham is also undergoing change and this is simply because her independent spirit, by definition, has never been content to remain in place. The new Graham dances testify to the same pioneering thrust that made her name synonymous with American modern dance in the first place. It is not the kind of pioneering congenial to fervent followers who live on their memories. Those comfortable with the stark and spare ritualism of the Graham of the 1930s and the tough-minded psychological excursions of the 1950s might find any change in her choreography disturbing. Like Picasso and Stravinsky, Martha Graham has nonetheless confounded her admirers by daring to move into an unpredictable, even neo-classic phase.
The crucial difference between the new pieces and older ones is, frankly, that she herself is rot dancing. The focus has shifted from the towering figure in crisis, painstakingly examined in closeup. There is no new Jocasta reliving a terrible truth, no Medea personifying jealousy and hatred, no Joan of Arc meditating upon multiple aspects of herself on the road to sainthood, no Bronte going mad before our eyes. The themes are more general, the statement more uni?versal, the structure more direct. And yet these new works are repeatedly replete with the most startling images just as in typical Graham manner, the surface tale continues to be subsumed with layers of meaning.
Martha Graham is no longer evolving first principles in her art. "The interest lies not so much in the experiments as in the beginning," she says today, "but in the use of material. I have always said, if the contemporary dance failed to live, it would be from within. The danger lies in those people in contemporary dance who become complacent, they tend to get into one area and stay in it. These are people so involved in their own work, they are not influenced so much by life itself. If you don't go along with the conditions of life, you are static. The absolute thing is now."
The change in dancers' bodies is an immediate reflection of the life around them and Martha Graham is quick to point out, too, how "ballet has changed" over the decades, its techniques adapted accordingly. Her own technically proficient dancers bear little resemblance to the Graham darcers of thirty years ago with their special raw power. Yet a dancer who keeps the perfect form of the Graham technique still makes the earlier masterworks speak eloquently through a new voice. This is not to say that Martha Graham would sanction a decorative approach or a pure-dance piece that, deep down, did not express inner emotion. That is not her style. Or as she says so rightly, "I am not a style."
At the same time she is convinced the revivals must not be staged as period pieces--per?formed as they would have been at the time of their creation. When the call goes out to the extended Graham family of former company members and rehearsal directors to aid on a revival, there is no assumption that today's dancers will perform it the way the veterans once did.
It is for this current group that the new dances have been created and it would be a mistake to equate the technical facility of the performers with a corresponding decorativeness in the choreography. Even the most straightforward Graham work is never superficial. Many of the newest pieces, in fact, are concerned with charting the difficult course of male-female relations. Ecuatorial, inspired by Mayan fertility prayers set to music by Edgard Varese, opposes "celebrants" of the sun and moon. In this duel between light and dark, the male-female relation?ship is extended into an eternal verity, as timeless as the sun-moon cycle itself.
Frescoes, to excerpts from Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, is an ode to undying love. Ingeniously, Antony and Cleopatra are lifted out of their historical period, the Roman era, and linked by Miss Graham to Isis and Osiris, the Egyptian gods associated with love, death, fertility and rebirth. Mortal and immortal love are defined in these alternating duets. The entire work is enriched by a series of wonderful images--Cleopatra mourning Antony in a red cape which then flies up as a canopy for the lovers to relive their idyll.
"There can be no present without the past. I don't believe in throwing away the past but in using it," Martha Graham observes. The archaic style in Frescoes appears related to her "Greek" masterpieces. Yet it is also different, typical of her increasing interest in breaking down her own idiom into the basic units of technique.
What remains is the underlying heroic cast of her art. Brought up on fairytales, she never wanted to dance a damsel in distress. "I have always been drawn to fighting the dragon," Martha Graham declares. "He is part of the stimulus of the world."
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