I am, I’m afraid, a little late with my second annual book gift guide for Dance Watchers, but just in time for some last-minute shopping (and reading on your own). As in last year’s column, a couple of these books were published recently; the others earlier in the century. All, in one way or another, are about dancing and dance, the people who make it, practice it, teach it, and, no small thing, the passion that drives them.
Errand Into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham
By Deborah Jowitt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2024, 465 pp, $35
None more so than Deborah Jowitt’s Errand Into the Maze, published last May, shortly before the author’s 90th birthday. I loved this book for its conversational yet authoritative tone, the meticulous and eloquent descriptions of its subject Martha Graham’s work, the cultural and intellectual context in which she made that work, and the humor. And holiday gifts aside, the book is excellent preparation for watching the Martha Graham Company’s upcoming performance at Portland’s Newmark Theatre, presented by White Bird on January 22, 2025.
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Jowitt’s own involvement in Graham’s story began when she moved to New York from her native California in the early 1960s. She studied at Graham’s school, and until fairly recently danced and choreographed professionally. But beginning in 1967, her main focus was writing about dancing, principally for The Village Voice, which she did from 1967 to 2011.
In the same period she published two collections of her reviews, Dance Beat and The Dance in Mind, and the superb Time and the Dancing Image, putting dance into historical and cultural context and linking it to visual art. She’s an experienced biographer, too: Jerome Robbins: His Life in Theater and Dance, issued in 2004, synthesizes vast amounts of information into a highly readable account of a giant of American dance and theater.
Jowitt is a friend and mentor. I am listed in the acknowledgments, I guess because during the isolation imposed by Covid, Jowitt and I had a number of email exchanges, primarily about the place that Graham held in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and ’50s when I was growing up there, and her collaborations with sculptor Isamu Noguchi, which I’ve written a fair amount about over the years for several publications.
Errand into the Maze is an excellent read, and a fast one. It’s meticulously researched over a long period of time (the author contributed the entry on Graham to the International Encyclopedia of the Dance, which was published in 1998, well before she began writing this book), and Jowitt’s conversational tone and vivid imagery kept me engaged the way a good novel does. The material, most of it, is not unfamiliar to me: There are many books about Graham, one of the founders of American modern dance, and arguably the most influential.
Many dancers who performed in her company went on to break new ground themselves, as they rebelled against her, including Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham, who originated the role of the Preacher in “Appalachian Spring,” excerpts from which will be performed by the Graham company here in January. Paul Taylor’s company we’ve seen Portland many times over the past 23 years: His was the first company White Bird presented here. The post-modernists rebelled against her theatricality—I hate to think of a dance world without the work of the late Trisha Brown, or Douglas Dunn, and the list, along with the beat, goes on.
Academic studies of Graham’s choreography, the development of her technique, and her teaching methods abound, and she also figures heavily in any number of memoirs: Stuart Hodes, for example, who danced in her company before becoming an important presenter of modern and postmodern dance on the East Coast, in his Onstage with Martha Graham is highly illuminating and quite amusing about the trials of learning her woman-centered technique.
In Agnes de Mille’s Martha, widely criticized for factual inaccuracy when it was issued in 1991, the choreographer of “Rodeo,” “Fall River Legend,” “Oklahoma,” “Brigadoon,” and many other ballets and musicals, and the author of numerous dance history books and a multi-volume autobiography, pays generous tribute to a friend and colleague whose achievements as a performer, teacher, choreographer, and collaborator with visual artists and composers had a much broader and more lasting impact than her own.
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Graham’s own memoir, Blood Memory, published the year she died, in 1991, reveals a woman of many passions and intellectual interests, all of which fed her work; and Robert Tracey’s Goddess, a collection of interviews with Graham company members and collaborators, provides the reader with many insights into her personality, her choreographic process and both her personal and professional life.
Jowitt drew on all these sources and many more for Errand into the Maze, telling in a little over 400 pages the story of Graham’s long and highly productive (if turbulent) life, giving the reader meticulous descriptions of her body of work, and clarifying the impact that work has had not only on dance, but also on theater, visual art, and dance education. Note that Graham codified the technique she developed and, in 1926, the same year she founded her company, established a school in New York that continues to train professional dancers.
Jowitt writes briefly of Graham’s childhood — mostly spent in Santa Barbara, California, where the family moved from Pennsylvania when she was eight years old — focusing primarily on Graham’s training and early performances with Denishawn, the company formed by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and mentions only in passing that Graham’s family didn’t want her to dance professionally.
This was new to me, but scarcely surprising: To this day middle-class American families for the most part do their best to prevent their children from dancing professionally.
The Denishawn repertory was painfully orientalist and “exotic” in today’s terms, but the theatricality of the costumes, lighting design and much of the movement itself certainly had a profound influence on Graham, as did composer and accompanist Louis Horst, her choreography teacher, and first lover.
It was he who whetted an appetite for making dances that Jowitt describes, in Chapter 4, thus: “Working toward her debut as a concert choreographer, Graham at 32 manifested the focused energy of a tiger stalking a potential meal.”
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That hunger never left her: The last chapter is titled “Choreography as meat and drink,” and tells of a time when Graham, now in her 80s, struggled mightily with alcoholism, a body that failed her, and the business of running a company and a school. In this period, she made a couple of pieces to the music of her friend the electronic composer Edgard Varese. In the 1950s, Jowitt reports, Graham and Varese had some intense discussions about what made a genius a genius, which Graham defined as “… the animal quality. It’s the sense of wonder, it’s the curiosity, the avidity for experience, for life.”
“Ecuatorial” was one of the last pieces Graham made. “It was set,” Jowitt writes, “to a remarkable score: “Edgard Varese’s thundering piece of the same name featuring two Ondes Martenots and a male voice. The artist Marisol created separate dwellings—a jagged golden platform for the Celebrant of the Sun (Maria Delano) and a coiled structure that harbored the Celebrant of the Moon (Kimura). In their skimpy gold costumes and headdresses, the solar entities briefly invaded each other’s territories and swirled a dark cloak to hide each other’s light.”
This doesn’t sound like Graham’s best work (I’d put “Cave of the Heart,” “Lamentation,” “Errand into the Maze,” “Primitive Mysteries,” and “Letter to the World” in that column) but I love the music and I wish I’d seen it.
Jowitt doesn’t gloss over Graham’s death in 1991, officially of pneumonia; nor does she dwell on her decline. Graham, trying to kill the pain of osteoarthritis, began drinking heavily when she was in her seventies and as a result, lost control of her assets and the company’s to photographer Ron Protas. After her death there were some hard-fought legal battles which the company’s board ultimately won, but readers will have to look elsewhere for a detailed account of this.
As I’ve implied above, I wish Errand into the Maze contained a chronology of Graham’s life and work, and I also wish it had many more photographs. But at this point those are quibbles. For the clarity and wit of her prose, her thoughtful descriptions of the work, the depth of her research, her focus on Graham’s professional life rather than the personal, as intertwined as they were, I am ever grateful to Jowitt for producing this highly readable, frequently entertaining, and informative book.
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Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi
By Hayden Herrera
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015, $35
Addendum: What would Graham’s “Cave of the Heart,” “Night Journey,” “Appalachian Spring” and about 28 others be without Isamu Noguchi’s set pieces? Art historian Hayden Herrera reports in Listening to Stone that Noguchi considered his collaborations with Graham to be “commercial work” and secondary to the abstract stone sculptures that are now all over the world, including in the courtyard of the Portland Art Museum.
His first set for Graham, made in 1935 for “Frontier,” couldn’t have been simpler: It consisted of a wooden fence that was suspended from each side of the flies with two long ropes. Graham, in the long dress of a pioneer woman, moved—danced—on and against the fence, isolated, lonely, and hopeful. Over the years, Noguchi’s sets became far more complex; the last one he made was for “Clytemnestra” in the late 1950s. It’s interesting that his first set design was for a dance about a pioneer woman: Before 1935, painted backdrops were the sets for dance, and played no part in the choreography. Today, there are the ubiquitous chair dances, and three-dimensional “environments” that are essential parts of choreographers’ visions.
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***
Black Tap Dance and Its Women Pioneers
By Cheryl M. Willis
McFarland & Company, Inc, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2023, 282 pp, $39.95
Speaking of pioneers, Cheryl Willis’s Black Tap Dancers and Its Women Pioneers contains many, many photos as well as images of vaudeville posters. There are also a glossary of dance and music, and an exhaustive list of trail-blazing tap dancers.
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This is actually the prequel to Tappin’ at the Apollo: The African American Female Tap Dance Duo Salt and Pepper, which I reviewed last year for this column. It was Willis’s doctoral dissertation, and while it contains a great deal of truly fascinating information about the lives, both personal and professional, of many women tap dancers, it’s quite repetitious and could have done with some pruning.
While the author does not specifically mention the hunger to dance and make dances, it’s implicit in her account of what these women— Alice Whitman, “Baby” Edwards Jones, Lois Bright and countless others–had to put up with in order to satisfy that hunger: Jim Crow laws that meant they often danced without much food or sleep; separation from their families as they traveled the vaudeville circuit; little or no recognition from a male-oriented press.
Willis, who comes from New Orleans, and is now based in Vancouver, Washington, did massive amounts of research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and other archives, and much of the text is based on interviews with her subjects. The vaudeville circuit, which included New York’s Apollo Theater, to which these women devoted their performing lives, was on the East Coast; few of these dancers seem to have performed in the Pacific Northwest. In Black Tap Dance and Its Women Pioneers Willis has created a valuable reference book for a dance form that until quite recently has been underserved by dance writers.
***
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City of Night Birds
By Juhea Kim
Ecco, 2024, 320 pp, $30
“On the night of the performance, I gave everything I had to dance. In the life of an artist, there comes a point when you are presented with a choice to preserve something of yourself, or give everything you have and you are to art. That moment had arrived for me and I said, Take all of me. It was wondrous and destructive and dark and luminous, like a star collapsing on itself in the vastness of the universe. Afterwards, I shed tears on stage, as flowers rained down from the mezzanine to endless shouts of Brava!” — P. 244
This quotation is not from the memoirs of Margot Fonteyn, or Maya Plisetskaya, ballerinas famous for their interpretations of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, but rather the fictitious Natalia Leonova, chief protagonist of Juhea Kim’s City of Night Birds. Kim, who was born in Korea and lived in Portland until she was nine, when the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, got her ballet training with the Princeton Youth Ballet, and wanted to be a ballerina, but, she said in an interview, realized she didn’t have the talent.
City of Night Birds, which was published a couple of months ago, is Kim’s second novel, and she certainly has a talent for moving words around the screen. The plot is nicely summarized in a cover blurb:
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“On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past. She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall. [It’s] a vivid portrait of the Russian ballet world, where cutthroat ambition, ever-shifting politics and sublime artistry collide.”
That it is. And other ballet worlds, too. The book also contains the elements of a romance novel, in Natalia’s flashbacks to her training at the Vaganova Academy and the start of her career at the Mariinsky (now called the Kirov). It is also an homage to Russian writers, and intensely political, as readers who are following the Russian-Ukraine war will recognize in this impassioned paragraph:
“We’d never talked about politics as students or as professionals. Most dancers were content to stay out of it, and some elite soloists said vague ‘stabilizing’ words for the benefit of the TV camera in election years. If things didn’t seem altogether right, they also didn’t seem altogether wrong, either, Russia—not her politics but her language, woodlands and meadows, rivers and lakes, centuries-old capitals, her poetry, her prayers, Tolstoy, Gogol, Bulgakov, Tchaikowsky, Prokofiev, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, the White Nights, summers and winters, families, dachas, and above everything else, her ballet—birthed us and gave us a reason for life. I loved this land, and my place in it was at the theater. And if some things weren’t as they should be, that was also the case in every other country. It hadn’t seemed necessary for me to engage with politics at all—until now. — P. 244
Kim is referring here to the 2014 Russian separatist conflict over Crimea, which was part of Ukraine. The current war prevented Kim from traveling to Russia to do the research for this novel, which makes her descriptions of theaters, dressing rooms, St. Petersburg, and the Russian countryside that much more impressive. I do have a couple of caveats: Natalia (also called Natasha) is the narrator, and I found some of her flashbacks to the past confusing. And while Kim’s descriptions of such ballets as “Swan Lake,” “Giselle,” “La Bayadere,” “Don Quixote,” and “Romeo and Juliet” are highly knowledgeable—I loved her assessment of Prokofiev’s music as “ironic”—the real-life lovers’ reconciliation while performing the lead roles in “Giselle” struck me as being more than a little over the top. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and now want to read her first book, Beasts of a Little Land, which is set in her native Korea.
Also worth seeking out:
- Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern, by Neil Baldwin, Knopf, New York, 2022, 576 pp, $40.
- What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, by Brian Siebert, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015, 612 pp, $35.
- Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker, by Arlene Croce, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2000, 765 pp, $40. (Note: Croce, longtime critic for The New Yorker magazine, died recently. She was one of a generation of dance critics who made writing about how well or badly people point their toes a profession worthy of respect.)
