Modern Dancer

In a bare Manhattan studio last week ten very serious young women worked like demons night & day, flinging themselves into the air, jumping frogwise, stomping, crouching, twisting their torsos. All were barefoot, wore scant jersey tops, long trailing skirts. On a chaise longue sat their director, an alert, thin, ashen-faced woman who stopped them abruptly when Anita's arm was too high or Bonnie's feet too far apart. The Martha Graham dancers were rehearsing for one of their periodic Manhattan recitals. Their leader had more in store. This week she was to start on a transcontinental tour, as the foremost exponent of the modern U. S. dance.

The venture was scarcely expected to rival the success of the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe which, before its current tour is over, may well gross $1,000,000 (TIME, Oct. 21). But the fact that Martha Graham was courageous and confident enough to want to face audiences of plain people, unbiased by the adoring intellectuals who hail her as a priestess, gave a fresh importance to the dance she represents.

The modern movement began as a revolt against the conventional prettiness of the oldtime classical ballet. Isadora Duncan fought for freedom, seemed revolutionary when she appeared in soft Grecian costumes rather than stiffly-starched tarlatan, interpreted music according to her own personal reaction. The great Isadora had an influence on the Russian Choreographer Michel Fokine who did most to emancipate the ballet from its rigid routine, its stiff, old-fashioned patterns. But the classical technique persists, still holds claim to first importance wherever ballet is given.

A radically different dance took root first in Germany shortly before the War when Rudolf von Laban propounded his theory that the important thing was free, inspired movement regardless of its form, that music was unnecessary, at best a mere appendage to real dynamic feeling. Laban theorized down to the smallest detail, studied movements in relation to character and mental attitudes. First to give his ideas concrete expression was his pupil, Mary Wigman, a tense, rawboned woman who was 27 before she decided on a dancer's career. Wigman soon claimed that she could feel herself "as one of the primal things, unable to speak life, only to dance it." To drum & cymbal accompaniment she danced in 1919 before an audience of the sick and neurasthenic at a Swiss Kurhaus. She looked scrawny and underfed, but she had developed her muscular control almost to perfection, danced with a strange violence, twisted herself to make harsh angular patterns, staring into space as if she saw no audience. The neurasthenics liked her, and so did many a healthy German who saw her frequently thereafter. Some were baffled by her meaning, but her gymnastics appealed to all. prompted the vogue of Tanzgymnastik, the physical culture drive which swept Germany, made strenuous acrobatic dancing an exercise almost as common as a Sunday hike.

Martha Graham grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., daughter of a nerve specialist. One humiliating Sunday he saw his daughter, aged 2, spontaneously lift her skirts, flounce down a Presbyterian church aisle while her mother's head was bowed solemnly in prayer. As her legs grew longer, Martha Graham was more & more determined to dance, had to be reminded time & again that her mother was a Standish, ninth direct descendant of Pilgrim Miles. When she was 10, the family moved to California, where she saw Ruth St. Denis, then absorbed by the fluent Oriental postures inspired by a cigaret advertisement which she had seen posted in a drugstore window.

Martha Graham became a leading Denishawn dancer, a Denishawn teacher. Still she felt frustrated, broke from the California studio to teach at Rochester's Eastman School of Music, left Rochester determined to free-lance her way no matter what the odds. The way at first was vague. She had had no contact with Laban or Wigman. Yet she felt the same urge to escape from pretty dancing. Striving for a vital, spontaneous expression, she took to lunging and prancing, projected a sincerity almost severe. In 1926 with $11 to her name she gambled on her first Manhattan recital. Chronically pinched for funds she went on to hire a theatre whenever she could afford one, practiced until her feet were calloused, took pupils to pay for her meagre existence. Recognition came when she was chosen to dance with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1928, again two years later when she impersonated the primitive virgin in Le Sacre du Printemps in the performances conducted by Leopold Stokowski (TIME, April 28, 1930).

As other modern dancers appeared on the scene, Martha Graham seemed less of a freak. Mary Wigman visited the U. S. for three successive seasons, left pupils in her wake. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman are Denishawn products who have gone far on their own. Helen Becker, who calls herself Tamiris, dances with rare drive and energy, stomps her heels as does no one else. Harald Kreutzberg was hailed as a modern at first, partly because he was one of the early Wigman pupils. Now, despite his amazing virtuosity, purists consider him too theatrical, too obvious with his miming.

Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman have a following second only to Martha Graham's. Essentially they have the same credo, the same vigorous pace, the same inner urge to let the body speak for itself. Average theatre audiences can appreciate a Humphrey-Weidman recital, see frequent glimmers of a plot that can be translated into words. Though Martha Graham is intent on typifying the U. S. spirit, she is more consistently abstract. Her face is like a mask when she dances. For Frontiers her principal gesture is to raise one leg, rest it on a fence (see cut p. 53). Her intention is to give the effect of space, of peaceful contemplation. Jumps into the air mean joy, a collapse to the floor implies grief or destruction. In Horizons, her latest creation, her girls have a passage where they place their hands behind their necks, rotate their heads from side to side. They are supposed to be hesitating, wondering whether they should go to the right or the left.

Martha Graham's music is composed to fit her dances. Her musical collaborator is Pianist Louis Horst. When she uses an orchestra, it is composed of a flute, an oboe, a clarinet and a bass clarinet, a trumpet and drums. Strings are taboo because they sound too romantic.

On the stage Martha Graham's dancers appear as copies of their leader, have the same granite-white makeup, the same long, bobbed hair. All are high-minded. They patronize concerts and art galleries, frown on the theatre. Their feet give them most trouble. The soles seem like leather but, if the weather is dry and the dancer forgets to grease them, callouses will split and cause extreme pain. Like their leader the Graham dancers are grimly conscious of exploring a new field, go on indifferent to criticism, accept laughter and boos as equably as cheers. Critic John Martin of the New York Times is an ardent booster of Martha Graham and the cult she represents.

Said he last week: "When the definitive history of the dance comes to be written it will become evident that no other dancer has yet touched the borders to which she has extended the compass of movement."

Author Lincoln Kirstein, who favors the ballet, likens the whole modern movement to ''the epoch's loose-thinking on 'progressive' education." Said he in his recent book Dance: "Since adolescents have little to express that is new, they are delighted to be given a method of systematically expressing the soul of perennial adolescence.''

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