Tom's communication blog
current blog | Fr. Tom Rochford SJ: bio | previous entries | contact him | jescom

Posted: February 24

Grace in Lent: modern dance

(Rome) I welcomed Lent this year by going to see the Martha Graham Dance Company perform a wonderful program of modern dance. It was certainly not a penance, but it was a very graceful way to start Lent which is the time when the Church calls us to leave behind sinful ways and find anew God's beauty in our lives. Sinfulness shows itself so much in conflict and contempt for each other, while grace shows itself in harmony, beauty and inter-relating with each other. The Martha Graham dancers were certainly a grace. They presented a program which began slowly with a duet and then moved on to the final piece which featured all eleven women dancers in a vibrant series of scenes called Sketches from 'Chronicle'. It is one of the few pieces Graham choreographed that has an explicit political theme, in this case the threat that Fascism raised in Europe. There was a certain delicious irony in watching the piece in a performance hall on the Via di Conciliazione, the grand boulevard that Mussolini pushed through the neighborhood between the Tiber River and St. Peter's to give an over-dramatic, fascist-style entry to the piazza.

One of the other dances, Diversion of Angels, was choreographed as a homage to the painter Vassily Kandinsky, but I was reminded throughout the evening of the Matisse, whose paintings I saw in an exhibit a few weeks ago. Both Graham and Matisse come from the same epoch of modern art that was sloughing off the conventions of ballet and academic painting, respectively. In some ways their work is so clearly tied to that period and style, yet it remains fresh. I was a bit afraid that the Graham Company might be presenting an evening of reverent, but stale works from a choreographer who founded the company in 1926 and died 16 years ago. The artful skill of the dancers and the beauty of the choreography itself made that fear moot. Graham's vocabulary of movement immediately reminds you of the period in which she worked, but what she says is still wonderful.

Even as the dancers moved around, highlighted by banks of floodlights low on either side of the stage, I was struck by the sense that Graham was creating an endless succession of images, rather like painting with her dancers. "Oh, I could do a painting with that composition, and that one, and that one...," I kept thinking. I have always been fond of graham's use of spare stage sets or objects. In Embattled Garden a stylized tree takes one side of the stage while flexible rods set in an angled platform suggest a forest. Photographers always loved the long, flowing dresses that Graham herself wore and that her dancers still do, creating beautiful poses with the cloth hanging from an extended leg.

In 1953 Martha Graham wrote an essay on dance in which she described the training necessary to form a mature dancer, all of the physical skills and discipline. Then she pushed her analysis further: "Then there is the cultivation of the being. It is through this that the legends of the soul's journey are re-told with all their gaiety and their tragedy and the bitterness and sweetness of living. It is at this point that the sweep of life catches up the mere personality of the performer and while the individual (the undivided one), becomes greater, the personal becomes less personal. And there is grace. I mean the grace resulting from faith: faith in life, in love, in people and in the act of dancing. All this is necessary to any performance in life which is magnetic, powerful, rich in meaning.

"In a dancer there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength. In a thinker there is a reverence for the beauty of the alert and directed and lucid mind. In all of us who perform there is an awareness of the smile which is part of the equipment, or gift, of the acrobat. We have all walked the high wire of circumstance at times. We recognize the gravity pull of the earth as he does. The smile is there because he is practicing living at that instant of danger. He does not choose to fall."

back to previous entries