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The Goddess Graham
| Article
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20307 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
1,236 Words |
| Author
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Gary Parks
Gary Parks is the news editor of Dance Magazine. |
Not just any choreographer can leave behind a "posthumous premiere," but then Martha Graham was never just any choreographer. On the opening night of the Martha Graham Dance Company's sixty-fifth anniversary season last fall at New York's City Center Theater, the modern dance matriarch's 181st work was officially unveiled. A sixteen-minute section of a dance originally planned to be about a half hour in length, The Eyes of the Goddess survives Graham herself. She died April 1, 1991, at the age of ninety-six.
With a pedigree like that--and considering the fact that there will never be any other premiers--this was not an opening the Graham company was likely to treat casually. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who edited Graham's autobiography, Blood Memory, for Doubleday last year and who is a recent addition to the troupe's board of directors, was the gala's honorary chairman. Ballet kingpin Mikhail Baryshnikov, long one of Graham's supporters, danced in El Penitente, which she choreographed in 1940. Among the evening's patrons were such charity circuit staples as Alice Tully, Calvin and Kelly Klein, Doris Duke, Ralph Lauren, Laurence Tisch, and Lily Auchincloss.
The evening marked the start of Chase Manhattan Bank's tenure as the sponsor of the anniversary season, a new financial relationship the Graham company undoubtedly hopes will flower. And the season also saw the public debut of Ronald Protas and Linda Hodes as the new artistic directors of the company.
A dancer who evolved into a choreographer who evolved into a living legend, Graham created, within the span of the nine and a half decades on this earth, a body of dramatic dances that are unequaled for their psychological insight and erotic power. As part of her effort in begetting that body of work, Graham developed a technique of training dancers that some observers rank alongside that of ballet, which matured over four centuries. Many choreographers have created novel dances; Graham also pioneered a novel method of generating them.
Health No Obstacle
Though in failing health for some years, Graham never stopped work, In 1990 she started a dance commissioned by the Spain '91 Foundation as part of that country's commemoration of the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America. Graham approached the opportunity in the characteristically idiosyncratic fashion. Working with the support of a $500,000 grant to the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance,
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