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| 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.”
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| 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.
