International Festival of Arts and  Ideas: Shubert Theater, New Haven, Connecticut June 21.6.2007 (CA)

Martha Graham Dance Company (80th Anniversary Season)

Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring (Ballet for Martha)
Alan Hovhaness: Ardent Song (Redux), World Premiere
Wallingford Riegger: Sketches from ‘Chronicle’

The 12th Annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, a two-week multi-venue, cross-cultural series of events, recently featured an irresistible headline presentation by the Martha Graham Dance Company—a premiere performance! That America’s oldest extant dance troupe should premier more than a decade after its founder and creative leader’s death may seem strange, but is easily explained.

Graham’s collaboration with Alan Hovhaness, Ardent Song, which premiered in London in 1954 and was performed for several years, has been a so-called “lost-work” since then. So this premier at New Haven’s Shubert Theatre was dubbed Ardent Song (Redux) because it is a re-interpretation of the work created by former Graham principal dancer, Susan McLain, from photographs and memories of the surviving dancers who performed it originally. As stated in the program, “It is a re-envisioning of the work for the new generation of Graham dancers and audience,” adapted to a “more athletic” aesthetic.

For the evening, the Graham Company was accompanied by a group of 16 musicians from the Yale School of Music, Yale being one of the major sponsors of the festival. This not-easily-seen group in the pit at the Shubert brought as much life to the performances as the dancers themselves. Hovhaness’s score is a mostly dark, nocturnal affair, comprised of five sections entitled Nightfall, Moon Rise, Moon High, Moon Set, and Dawn. While it has its lusher moments, the music was obviously intended more as a backdrop for the dance. Nonetheless, the young performers brought energy and precision to their supporting role, enough so that one could have wished to hear the piece again in concert form.

On the other hand, athleticism, and more than a touch of near-naked sexuality seemed at a disconnect with the music, and the “re-envisioning” lacked the stark angularity and vivid poses that characterized the Graham revolution in dance. So while the piece was ably danced by a dozen men and women cartwheeling and leaping across the stage, the effect was more somnambulistic than intriguing.

The main attraction of the evening for me was a performance of Graham’s seminal collaboration with Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring. The two great American artists of the twentieth century, both born in 1900, were brought together by a commission from the Library of Congress. Graham envisioned a pioneer story of a couple on their wedding day, settling in the frontier of western Pennsylvania (where Graham was born). The cast of characters includes a preacher with his four female followers and an elder pioneer woman. Copland’s composition was limited by the small size of the pit at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium, thus the spare score for 13 wind and string instruments, plus piano.

Like many revolutionary works, Appalachian Spring has become familiar and comfortable, but mostly as the orchestral suite, an abbreviated concert piece based on the 1944 version. I suspect that, like me, many regular concert-goers have never heard, much less seen, the original—a gritty, yet romanticized vision of American can-do spirit. This was important to the concept for the work, which both Graham and Copland felt was their contribution to the American war effort. 

While the Graham soloists ably portrayed their parts, it was, again, the musicians who brought a sense of urgency to the piece. What felt like a museum piece on-stage, had real life, with pluck and gumption, from the pit. There’s a story here, one told with care, precision, and a sense of poetry. One feels this, watching and listening to the work performed. It’s a nostalgic work, but full of hope.

An older work from the Graham repertoire was also presented, Sketches from ‘Chronicle,’ a collaboration with Wallingford Riegger first performed in 1936. Where Appalachian Spring retains a timeless, yearning quality, Sketches feels drained of its original intent. It is an unabashed political work, both anti-war and anti-fascist, that one feels has been revived—with good reason—to remind us that art can play an important political role. 

The work is in three movements, Spectre-1914, Steps in the Street, and Prelude to Action. All three were resurrected and recreated in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, while Graham was still alive, and the Graham dance vocabulary is vivid. The piece is choreographed for 10 women who move about dressed in black and red in various groups, striking what one suspects are poses of protest and despair.

It’s not Riegger’s fault. His music has sufficient depth to allow for a level of ambiguity in the meaning. Again, the musicians seemed to get this and played alternating strident force with perhaps a shade of mocking irony, something we now understand is present in almost all of Shostakovich’s great works. Graham’s interpretation comes across as literal and, finally, dated. 

But despite the difficulties in keeping the worthy and important Graham repertoire alive, the music of the evening felt fresh and even worth hearing again. Hats off to the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and let’s have more dance recitals with a live interplay between dancers and musicians!

Clay Andres