Martha Graham Dance Company performs at UNCG

The ghosts of a dead generation danced for the hundreds of people attending last Saturday's performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company in Aycock Auditorium. Unlike writing, painting or sculpture, dance is a very ephemeral art form - nothing is left of each dance except an empty stage when it is over. This made the performance of pieces which first debuted between a century and 60 years ago all the more uncanny. Beginning with examples of how dance was conceived of and produced over a hundred years ago, when Martha Graham was a student, the audience can see just how much the art form has evolved in the last century. Incense was first premiered in 1906 by Ruth St. Denis.

Dance has grown to be a very sparse and raw art - there is very little for the viewer to see but the body and its motions. It was not always this way, as in Incense employed a variety of props that would seem more in place with theater, including one female role who was draped in shrouds and wielding a hand-fan, a male with bronze ringlets and the principle role, a kind of priestess, who was ritually burning incense at an altar, despite how nervous the people who manage the theater must have been at the notion of a real fire on the wooden stage.

Being a harem-slave to a Sultan is not the type of subject matter you'd expect to see as the basis of a dance today, but in the performance of one of Graham's oldest pieces Tanagra we see the playful but clearly seductive motions of just such a dancing slave. Wearing bells on her ankles and very little else, Jacquelyn Elder swayed and teased the audience all while retaining some feisty independence. The critics of 1926 may well have found this scandalous. Unfortunately, this was merely an excerpt from a longer choreography, and this audience was not able to see how she ultimately expresses or resolves her captivity.

Martha Graham is considered to be the woman who put the "Modern" in Modern Dance and this was made evident during her ground-breaking piece Lamentation. A person who is drawn to creating dance as an art form is someone who revels in the possibilities of the human body, its freedom and grace. Lamentation is not only disturbing in its own right, but must be even more repugnant to a dancer. Sitting on a public-style bench for nearly the entire piece, the dancer struggled and writhed beneath a purple tube of cloth that left only her fingers and face exposed. Stretching the prison around her, she is ultimately unable to escape but does succeed in showing the audience her agony and create an emotional bond. A stationary and frustrated piece like this did clearly break with the notion of dance as a work of mere beauty or entertainment.

As Fascism spread across Europe and the world readied once more for war, Graham's Steps in the Street captured the pessimistic attitude that all freedom-loving people must have felt at the time. Specific to the history of the art, in this piece Graham has over a dozen identically black-clad female dancers perform like a single mechanized unit. Some individuals would fall out of maneuvers and the rest would follow as blindly as a good soldier. Strings of women carrying out the same sharp and at times violent motions created quite a scene and is important to note because while not rejecting aesthetics, Graham here rejected the notion that female's bodies must be employed to make weak movements.

Earlier this decade, three young choreographers were commissioned by the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance to create an artistic response to the attacks of September 11th in the style of Graham's work. The first of these entitled Lamentation Variations were presented to the audience beneath an audio clip of Graham herself musing on suffering and loss. The Pagarlava Variation seemed to have more to say about sex than suffering. Three perfectly sculpted men and a single woman pushed and pulled each other from the first moment, with the tension between violence and attraction clear. For no longer than a few seconds did the female have her body not being held, touched or moved by one of the males, between whom she passed freely and with the sort of relaxed body one would expect to see in a opium den and not in front of a full theater. This was a riveting and seductive piece, but this reviewer did not make the connection to the calamities of terror and war.

New York is easily argued as the capital of Modern Dance and as such, this art community suffered more from the hijackers of September 11th than did other art forms. Instead of trying to capture the gigantic ramifications or emotional impact of the event, the Move Variation employed a single dancer in black as she signaled her pain with a brief but sincere path across the stage. This was an understated and tasteful form of response. Taking the other track, the Keigwin Variation used the entire full company, dressed in the clothes of varied economic classes. With the dancers spread out in a grid, you could see the news of the event move across the stage followed by the subsequent waves of awe, fear, panic and grief, all leading to a poignant ending where a single couple is left standing until the woman falls away from her lover's hands who remainss motionless as he watches her and the curtains fall.

The next piece, Errand into the Maze, was quite possibly the best dance this reviewer has ever seen. Loosely based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, here Graham substituted Theseus for the lover he ultimately abandons, Ariadne. With an evocative but simple set of what could be termed German Expressionist props, we find our protagonist trying to trace a string which led into the maze. Suddenly and terrifyingly, the minotaur explodes onto the stag with violence. A set of horns and a ghastly painted face served to keep the creature menacing, but just as the master of a prison is still a prisoner himself, the minotaur had his arms bound with a stick, reducing his range of motion. Not once but three times the creature came to her, and at first overpowered her with his raw strength. At times she seemed to give into him, as when she kept only the tiniest space between her and his heaving chest. Other times she tried to hide, and the minotaur reveled in this by mocking and intimidating her. Ultimately in this allegory of inner-exploration, she is able to conquer the beastly creature we all have inside of us.