Angels’ Pastime

“Humors of innocence, garlands, evangels, Joy on the Wilderness Stairs, diversion of angels…” are the verses by Ben Belitt that inspired Martha Graham in the first of the works featured at La Fenice, Diversion of Angels, whose original title was Wilderness Stairs – Passatempo degli Angeli, Le Scale del Deserto. As she writes in her autobiography Blood Memory, however, the colors came from her uncontainable astonishment when looking at the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky: white for mature love, yellow for adolescent love, red for erotic passion.
The choreography dates from 1948, following the celebrated cycle she devoted to Greek mythology – Cave of the Heart, Errand into the Maze and Night Journey. Martha Graham, with her idea that “dance is the language of the soul,” became an icon of modern dance, even though she always maintained that it had been invented by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. In truth, her work traversed the entire course of twentieth-century history, reinterpreting it through her art.

From her beginnings with the Denishawn company, to the Inca melodrama Xochitl (1920), with its paratactic movements derived from Vaslav Nijinsky, she went on to develop her technique of contraction and release and the famous spiral, in open rebellion against the conventions of classical dance during the Great Depression – as seen in Heretic (1929). From this phase comes the second piece on the program, Lamentation (1930). Seated on a bench, her body entirely wrapped in a purple tube of fabric, only hands and feet visible, her face expressionless, the dancer stages a solitary suffering that strives, unsuccessfully, for release – an embodiment of pain without qualification. The work would later be echoed by Alwin Nikolais in Noumenon (1953).
From the period of protest, but also of great hope during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, comes the third work, Chronicle (1936). Conceived in the year when fascism showed its most overt face, Chronicle stems from a precise political stance: at the beginning of that same year, Graham had refused an invitation to participate in the Berlin Olympics, publicly declaring that she could not identify with a regime that persecuted artists – and that many members of her company would not have been welcome in Germany. The choreography does not depict war directly, but evokes its fatal prelude and the spiritual devastation it leaves behind.

The evening closes with En Masse, a new creation by Hope Boykin, trained and long active with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Commissioned to mark the centenary, the work revisits an unrealized collaboration between Graham and Leonard Bernstein dating back to the late 1980s. During archival research, the Leonard Bernstein Organization uncovered a short, previously unknown piece, Vivace, believed to have been composed by Bernstein for Graham. On this basis, Christopher Rountree constructed the score for En Masse, expanding it and interweaving it with excerpts from Bernstein’s MASS. In the same autobiography, Graham writes: “There is a quotation from Genesis that I recite to the dancers: ‘The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair.’ You are sons of God – I tell them – all of you are angels. Dance has followed the path of modern painting and architecture, rejecting pure decoration. Dance must not be pretty, but true.”

Featured image: Leslie Andrea Williams in “Chronicle.” Photo by Melissa Sherwood