by Henry Alford
You might call Isadora racist, but you wouldn’t call her shy. In My Life, her perfumed and at times hilariously melodramatic memoir, she writes about how, in 1896, at age nineteen, she stood outside a Chicago theater and pestered a stage manager into introducing her to director and promoter Augustin Daly, to whom she would gush, “I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years.” Later, after Daly had cast her in unsatisfyingly small parts in some of his shows, Duncan asked him, “What’s the good of having me here, with my genius, when you make no use of me?”
To proclaim oneself possessed of genius is to vault over the barriers of modesty and decorum that so many of us others struggle with. But Duncan kept vaulting. Her force of will has been an inspiration for countless others, even if this inspiration has at times been a mixed blessing: Agnes de Mille maintained that the publication of My Life “proved dreadfully unnerving to the young. Several virgins of my acquaintance went conscientiously astray in the hope of becoming great dancers.”
Impassioned, willful, unashamed. Isadora Duncan made the world safe for talking about yourself in the third person while smoking a clove cigarette.
* * *
Duncan shares some characteristics with another important dance pioneer. Martha Graham (1894–1991), too, was highly opinionated and anxious to plant her flag in opposition to ballet. Her work, too, unsettled audiences. Her work, too, condemned intolerance. Like Duncan, she hailed from California (though she’d been raised in Pennsylvania). She shared with Duncan the paradox of having a personality big enough for drag queens of future generations to emulate, while simultaneously (and ironically) disliking being filmed. And, as with Duncan, she’s sometimes called the Mother of Modern Dance.
But if Duncan’s work was billowy and attenuated and partly improvised, Graham’s was spikey and angular and set. While ballet typically conceals effort, Graham’s choreography, built on the principles of “contraction” and “release,” often highlighted it, because Graham thought dance should mirror life, which is full of effort. As she once put it, “Life today is nervous, sharp, and zig-zag. This is what I aim for in my dances.” She wanted to dance like a Kandinsky painting. Think bent arms with weirdly crooked fingers, or dancers collapsing to the floor behind them. In her most celebrated work, Lamentation, a seated dancer, wrapped in jersey such that only her hands, face, and feet are visible, writhes and undulates for four minutes: Graham was seventy years ahead of the rest of the world in seeing the potential horror of being trapped in a Slanket.
Graham’s parents, strict Presbyterians, didn’t want her to become a dancer. She studied at the Denishawn School, started in Los Angeles by modern dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and then joined the Denishawn Dancers. She started her own company in 1926; early company members included Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Anna Sokolow, who would choreograph for Broadway and cofound the Actors Studio. (Given that these three then went on themselves to rear a younger generation of dancers and choreographers, maybe Graham is better called the grandmother of modern dance.) She gave prominent roles to dancers of color during a time when such dancers were under-utilized because they were considered “exotics.”
Graham drew from a wide variety of sources for inspiration for her choreography—classical mythology, Noh, Kabuki, Chinese opera—but the net result is less universal than deeply personal: she considered her dances to be “a graph of the heart.” She used spastic movements, falls, and trembling to chart themes that she thought dance usually neglected. Some of the work is explicitly sexual; audiences were sometimes shocked to see Medea or Jocasta or Phaedra or Clytemnestra venting their libido. To prepare dancers for such heights, Graham was not afraid to give her female dancers the correction “You are simply not moving your vagina.” Paul Taylor wrote, “Sometimes I think she views us men onstage as giant dildos.” She once said, “I won’t have virgins in my company”; another time she told her company, “By the time you have left, I will know everything about your sex lives.” Her school became known among dancers as the House of the Pelvic Truth.
Over the course of her career, she would clash with both the NEA and Congress. You need only glance at the titles of some of Graham’s works to get the sense that she wasn’t afraid of the proverbial dark: Revolt, Deaths and Entrances, Lucifer, Immediate Tragedy, Heretic. In Cave of the Heart (1946), one of Graham’s many modern adaptations of Greek myth, a rageaholic Medea eats her own entrails. In her uncompromising study of sexual exploitation Phaedra’s Dream, Hippolytus’s explicit homoerotic duet gave a new reason for his romantic rejection of his stepmother.
In person, Graham had titanic charisma—even when she wasn’t in the room, she was in the room. A vegetarian who would eat “placid fish” like sole but not “valiant” ones like salmon, she lived with dancer Erick Hawkins for nine years before marrying him.
She was not without a temper. As she once told dancer Robert Cohan, “I’m a tiger and I love to use my claws.” To this end, she had a number of wonderfully vivid expressions in her arsenal, chief among them “I am just frantic, absolutely a boiled owl!” and “I’m being nibbled to death by ducks!” She critiqued one dancer with “Oh, Sophie, you are so agricultural”; one of Sophie’s colleagues was told, “I am thankful for just one thing about you. That you are not twins.” After seeing her friend Agnes de Mille’s performance of Three Virgins and a Devil at Ballet Theatre in the early 1940s, Graham delivered what is among the best damning-with-faint-praise compliments ever uttered: “In a small, in a tiny obscure way, this is a classic of its kind.”
Loath to relinquish roles that she had created for herself, Graham—who liked to tell students, “Remember, one day you will all die”—danced well into her seventies, long after her Kabuki looks and high dudgeon had devolved into unwitting camp. This attests to the highly personal nature of her work. “It wasn’t until years after I had relinquished a ballet that I could watch someone else dance it,” she writes in her memoir, Blood Memory. “I believe in never looking back, never indulging in nostalgia, or reminiscing. Yet how can you avoid it when you look on stage and see a dancer made up to look as you did 30 years ago, dancing a ballet you created with someone you were then deeply in love with, your husband? I think that is a circle of hell Dante omitted.”
Even her ideas about talent seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. In her gold-standard memoir Dance to the Piper, Agnes de Mille writes about going to see a latter-day production of her own cowboy ballet Rodeo and being hugely disappointed in it: “There was no way of ensuring lasting beauty.” Outside of Schrafft’s restaurant, she runs into her pal Graham, who, speaking “from a life’s effort,” counsels de Mille: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is . . . it is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. . . . No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. And at times I think I could kick you until you can’t stand.”
* * *
Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham paved the way for yet a third troublemaker.
At this point in my choreo-investigation, I reached out to Twyla Tharp. I’d just finished reading her memoir, Push Comes to Shove, a juicy account of how a dancer and choreographer who started out in the kooky, experimental avant-garde in New York in the 1960s (in her first work, Tank Dive, she wore bedroom slippers and put a yo-yo to sleep) figured out a way to parlay her dazzling eccentricity into mainstream popularity.
Fifty years is
a really long time for a choreographer to remain active and relevant. Twyla has created more than 160 dances for her own company as well as New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, and London’s Royal Ballet, among others; an enviable number of her works are now included in the classical repertory (In the Upper Room, Bach Partita, and Nine Sinatra Songs among them).
In Tharp’s hands, rebellion is mostly about rubbing up against, and abrading, the canon. She created the first crossover work to mix modern and classical dance (1973’s Deuce Coupe, commissioned by the Joffrey Ballet and set to the music of the Beach Boys). Three years later she made what some consider the best-ever example of the crossover ballet, Push Comes to Shove, a high-energy vaudevillian romp which starred Mikhail Baryshnikov. These works fanned the flames of the animosity that ballet purists feel toward modern dance, an antagonism maybe best captured by Russian ballet reformer Michel Fokine’s comment, “Ugly mother standing in wings watching ugly daughter perform ugly movements on stage as ugly son makes ugly sounds on drum, is modern dance.” (True to form, Twyla’s critics contend that her sometimes intentionally awkward choreography doesn’t mix well with pointe work.)
You see her rebelliousness in how she conducts herself, too. A shrewd and sometimes ruthless businesswoman—in 1985 she was one of the first choreographers ever to stoop to making dancers pay to audition—Twyla is unusual in the dance world for having seized the reins of commerce by presenting some of her works in Broadway theaters: the first was 1980’s When We Were Very Young, followed by her 1981 collaboration with David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel. Her other Broadway offerings have seen her interpreting Frank Sinatra (Come Fly Away), Billy Joel (Movin’ Out), and Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin’).
* * *
I met her work via film. The movie Hair came out just as I was falling in love with New York City. I saw it at the soaring and cavernous Ziegfeld with a friend. When we came out of the theater at the end, elated, I spun in a circle with my arms outstretched and then simulated my favorite part of the film, the cop-mounted horses sashaying sideways. (The horses are Lipizanners. Twyla taught the horses’ moves to the dancers, not the other way around.) To see horses dance like that was to be confronted head-on with the strange charm of surprise; I felt like I’d found a new room in my house.
But now, thirty-six years later, I find myself fascinated by the explicit way Twyla wrote in her memoir about the various motivations that wafted her along her flight path. In the back of my copy of the book I wrote in pencil nine of those she specified: to understand life through movement; to unite jazz, modern, and ballet; to continue a tradition of women dance pioneers (Twyla’s first company, like Martha Graham’s, started out all-female); to find music’s equivalent in movement; to see dancing recognized as part of one’s everyday life; to demystify the elitist, museum-quality of dance; to investigate the boundaries of classical technique; to achieve financial independence; to revenge and repair the past.
I sent her office an e-mail. Alas, Twyla’s assistant wrote me back to say that, what with writing her fourth book and teaching at Barnard and readying a tour to celebrate her fiftieth anniversary in the field, Twyla was too busy to sit down with the likes of me. However, they suggested I join them in an upcoming performance of Twyla’s 1970 community dance piece The One Hundreds.
A product of her avant-garde beginnings, when Twyla was still unearthing beauty from bedroom slippers and yo-yos, The One Hundreds was inspired by baseball. She’d been living in the woods one summer and watching a lot of the all-American pastime when she realized that most baseball plays last about eleven seconds. So she made a dance in which two people simultaneously perform the same one hundred sporty movement sequences, each of which lasts just that long; then five dancers each simultaneously perform twenty of the sequences; then one hundred volunteers who are not professional dancers—this is where I was to come in—each simultaneously perform one of the eleven-second-long sequences. The new performance was to take place on a Saturday night, in lower Manhattan’s Rockefeller Park.
After blithely writing the assistant back to say I’d love to join, I went online and watched a few clips of the piece being performed. I was bowled over by how much choreography can be fit into eleven seconds. Only a few of The One Hundreds’s movements are baseball-specific; there are allusions to cheerleading, boxing, golf, rock and roll, and ballet. Some of the sequences are majestic (one is an homage to La Sylphide), some are hilarious and awkward (while running in place, the dancer repeatedly slaps her underarms). Unexpectedly, The One Hundreds is not the Twyla dance in which the dancers start casually to spit: that distinction belongs to The Bach Duet, her romantic pas de deux.
* * *
Anthropologists sometimes divide dances into three types: those done for the gods, those done for other people, and those done for oneself. It was not lost on me that, in my newfound interest in dance, all of my dancing had fallen into the third category, as it will when (a) you’re not especially interested in having people watch you dance and (b) all of your former experiences with following specific choreography have led you to believe that you’re more Isadora than you thought you were.
By the same token, however, it occurred to me that by avoiding choreographic routines, maybe I was denying myself some larger and more extroverted form of satisfaction or sublimity. When the Rockettes all hit their mark in unison, they produce a collective sigh.
Would I ever know such a feeling?
* * *
Aware that on the day of the performance I’d be randomly assigned a sequence, I was anxious to see how quickly I could pick up Twyla’s alternately slinky and jerky moves. So, standing at my desk in my office one day while watching a YouTube clip of five Dance Chicago dancers, I tried to pull off one of the bits: you outstretch your arms downward and bring them up over your head while lifting your right leg up and then slowly pushing the leg down to the ground. You do this three more times; then, arms straight down at your sides, you tilt forward and kick each of your legs backwards four times. Now the same thing, only you’re leaning backwards and kicking your legs forward; next make a big circle with your right leg, hop side to side from one leg to the other, swing your arms sideways and then up and to the front.
If you get it right, the effect is that of a stork with a trick knee trying to take flight.
On my first outing, I achieved only a 20 percent mastery. All trick knees. My stork could flap, but he was in no hurry to get airborne.
I kept flapping, working through the sequence five or six more times, gradually getting my mastery up to 60 percent.
The stork could fly, but only about three inches off the ground.
Meanwhile, during the six weeks before the performance, I did more Tharp research. In the script of a videotape called Scrapbook that she made in 1982, Twyla says, “The One Hundreds shows deterioration almost as a scientific matter. First, the highly trained, disciplined and rehearsed dancer performs a series of movements approaching an absolute in clarity. Passed down to dancers less well-rehearsed, the movement declines until, when executed by completely untrained bodies, the same movement is seen with no detail and little definition.” She concludes, “Thus, the original One Hundreds was an investigation of physical rigor and its deterioration.”
What a relief. Elaborate swan-simulating choreography, even in an eleven-second burst, is just far enough out of my grasp to rattle me.
But deterioration I can do.
* * *
With just days to go before the big day when I’d be assigned my sequence and given a few hours to hone it, I decided to visit the retired dancer and Tharp alumnus Jamie Bishton. Jamie is a longtime friend I’ve known, sort of, for twenty-five years. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband and two children.
Naturally, I was curious to know how he’d come to dance. A child gymnast in LA during the 1970s, Jamie broke his arm at age fourteen, thus ending his gymnastics career. His orthopedic surgeon, seeing that his patient had fallen into a depres
sion, encouraged Jamie to take a dance class as a way to start getting more endorphins back into his system. Jamie, whose appreciation of dance at the time was, as he said, “nonexistent,” signed up for a jazz class. And loved it. He then studied with Donald Byrd at UC Santa Cruz, went on to CalArts, and danced briefly for Bella Lewitzky. These achievements under his belt, he saw it was time to do what everyone had been encouraging him to do for a few years: go east, young man.
When his father learned that his son had bought a $99, one-way ticket to New York on People Express, the Greyhound Bus of air travel, Bishton senior “freaked out. He said, ‘I’m not gonna let this happen.’ He bought me a round-trip ticket on United. He said, ‘This round-trip ticket is open-ended, so whenever you need to come home, if it doesn’t work out, you have a ticket to come back.’ ”
Telling me this, Jamie—one of the more humble luminaries, in any field, that you could hope to meet—looked down at the ground. We were sitting on the back porch of his cozy, beautifully appointed house on a quiet street in LA, a slightly eerie silence having pervaded the backyard once Jamie’s husband had spirited off his and Jamie’s two kids to the grocery store.
Jamie looked up and finished the story: “Because my dad made me feel like it was okay to fail, I didn’t. I stayed in New York for twenty-five years.”
Jamie danced for Lar Lubovitch and, from 1985 to 1988, Twyla. He followed Twyla to American Ballet Theatre, and stayed there for two years, whereupon Mikhail Baryshnikov, who would become a mentor to Jamie, invited him to join the White Oak Dance Project, a company that Baryshnikov and Mark Morris formed in 1990. After eight years with White Oak, Bishton returned to Twyla’s fold in 1998 to perform for her again, and to be her assistant and the director of her dancers.
