When Graham died last week at 96, the American theater lost one of the leading revolutionaries of this century. Her great insight–“Movement never lies”–fueled an approach to dance that made classicists shudder at first, for it did away with the graceful illusions of ballet. Graham had no interest in ballet’s “let’s pretend”: dancing on one’s toes, denying gravity, forever working to surpass the merely physical. She pulled the art of dance right down to the floor, which was where her classes began. Seated on the floor with their legs stretched out, her dancers would draw their torsos into a gut-clenching grip known as a contraction, as if to proclaim in the starkest terms that they were expressing the truth of the body. Those fierce contractions and their ardent release, the upward spirals that propelled a dancer from kneeling to exulting, the leaps that ripped themselves from the ground, the spidery limbs that clutched their own body in anguish–Graham’s astonishing vocabulary seared the landscape of dance like a branding iron.
At the center of her best-known dances is a powerful and tormented female, often drawn from myth or literature. Like the master director she was, Graham used every element of stagecraft to make vivid these dramas of the feminine psyche. In one of her earliest important solos, “Lamentation,” she sat on a bench encased in a swath of jersey; as she lunged and slashed, the fabric became a visible howl of grief. But her huge output–she created 180 dances–included works of great charm as well as wrenching passion. In “El Penitente” she evoked a rustic passion play as offered by a trio of strolling players, and her “Appalachian Spring” was a soaring tribute to the American spirit.
“Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart,” Graham said once; her own career might have been described the same way. She insisted on dancing until she was 75, unknowing or uncaring that her faltering stage presence had become pitiable; she insisted on choreographing long past the point when her work deserved the honor of her name. Her last years were spent under the constant guard of her company’s associated artistic director, Ronald Protas, a controversial figure disliked for his erratic, autocratic ways. Yet Protas is also credited with keeping Graham productive into her 90s.
Just before turning 90, Graham spoke in an interview about Dylan Thomas’s famous lines, “Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” “You do rage against the dark,” she mused. “That’s why I dance.”
