Back to the Barre

Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins
at Bennington College, 1938. Silver gelatin print.
Haggerty Museum, Marquette University, Milwaukee

 

The Bunhead has been on ballet vacation for three weeks and it is just about killing her. Okay, she did a little home-cooked version of barre and lots of stretching and sit ups over the holidays, but the number of cookies, slices of tart, and second helpings of all-too-delicious dinners far outstrips the number of pliés and tendus, I fear. Most winters, I have turned to my sizeable collection of workout videos, but because we recently moved our television into a room with a large picture window that faces the street, I no longer feel comfortable working out in front of it. And, let me be frank, I hate workout videos. There, I said it.

Monday, however, signals the resumption of ballet normality, and it simply cannot come soon enough. Somehow, shopping for leotards online does not give the same satisfaction as sweating through grand allegro in the studio.

In the interim, I have tried to do some reading about dance. Joan Acocella has an article in this week’s New Yorker about talent, new and old, choreographic and performative, at the Alvin Ailey Company (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/dancing/2014/01/06/140106crda_dancing_acocella ).  And I just pre-ordered CarlosAcosta’s first novel, called Pig’s Foot from Amazon for my Kindle (makes reading while husband sensibly sleeps feasible). We shall see! 

Also, I bookmarked both Dance Magazine and Pointe, and started reading articles there. Three things I have learned are:

 1.      Rolling on one of those foam cylinders before you stretch can really help break up adhesions and loosen fascia, making one more limber. 

2.      Wendy Wheelan is only a year younger than I am (!) 

3.      These are not really very profound sources of information or criticism about the dance world; while more substantial than say, People, they are a little on the fluffy side.

 # 3 sent me looking (on JSTOR, Project Muse and farther afield) for better, more in-depth things to read. I found that Carol Lee’s Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution  was oft-cited, so I think I will find a copy of that to plow through at some point.  

Inspired by a free copy of Dance Research Journal that I acquired at a publisher’s bookstand at a conference last year, I also browsed through back issues. My favorite is Volume 42, number 1, Summer 2010, a special issue dedicated to “States of the Body.” In it, an article by Henrietta Bannerman (whose author biography states that she “is head of research at London Contemporary Dance School” and has a PhD in Contemporary Dance… wow, they actually take dance seriously over there in the UK) entitled “Martha Graham’s House of the Pelvic Truth: The Figuration of Sexual Identities and Female Empowerment,” really caught my attention. 

Evidently, Martha Graham’s company members and students facetiously called her studio “the House of the Pelvic Truth,” a phrase coined by Graham, more seriously, to describe the way in which she conceptualized the “seed” of her movement vocabulary. Bannerman relates her own experience as a Graham student of coming to terms with the floor exercises that emphasized contraction and release. I remember feeling so embarrassed when we were instructed to do those pelvic thrusts in modern dance class when I was an adolescent. I wish someone had explained the purpose of the drills to me then as lucidly as she does. She writes, “Within the neutralized context of the dance studio, one aim of the contraction during the floor work is to sensitize the body for emotional expression—the acts of laughing, sobbing, anger, fear, but not necessarily sex.”

And sometimes a pelvic thrust is just comical.

One thread that runs through the scholarship  in DRJ is iconology, that is, the assumption that the forms of dance are symbolic, meaning rich, socially embedded, and (probably also) unstable. Bannerman’s ultimate argument, it seems to me, is that while there is something distinctly louche about the phrase “house of the pelvic truth,” in fact Graham’s modernist project is far more sophisticated than much of the reductive reportage tying her sexuality and her libidinous activities to her choreography and her technique might indicate. Sometimes a pelvic thrust is erotic, indeed, but just as often, it alludes to grief, to budding self-awareness, to determination in the face of adversity, all depending on context.

Ballet, of course, has an entirely different relationship to the pelvis, which is less engine than fulcrum of movement. I like to think that in classical ballet the pelvis is the point of caesura between the dense and complicated prose of the legs and the lyric verse of the torso, arms, neck, and head. Its stillness is not passive, but purposeful, and in its way just as expressive and allusive as the dynamism of the Graham pelvis. 

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

As for me and my pelvis, I fully expect those first pliés on Monday night to be crepitous, as I contemplate whether I ought to have rolled on my foam cylinder some more before class and marvel that Wendy Wheelan, at nearly my age, gets up and does this every single morning, and all day long. I doubt very much I will be thinking of the emotive, expressive potential of my hips, sacrum, or any other body part. Instead, I will be ruefully remembering all those second helpings and gingerbread biscuits and slices of Brie, and wondering if just maybe that leotard I ordered online will arrive by Wednesday night’s class.