Word: grahams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...avant-gardists of the modern dance, Martha Graham has long been the Holy Acrobat. But when the State Department began sending her off on tour as an official U.S. dancer, the old esoterica was sadly diminished. Offended by the bourgeois applause, ultras in the Graham cult started casting about for a new and comfortably obscure enthusiasm. Last week Graham and her modern dance troupe returned to Broadway for their annual two-week season, and there in their tennis shoes were the strayed believers. Thanks to a congressional challenge to the wholesomeness of Graham's art, she now seemed...
Tangle of Doom. The fuss began over a German performance of Phaedra, Graham's "phantasmagoria of desire" (TIME, March 16, 1962), that Congresswoman Edna Kelly from Brooklyn found "distasteful." One morning's hearing in Washington was enough to establish Graham's artistic merit, and she dismissed the affair with a sharp coup de grâce: "I feel as if I had been pawed by dirty hands." But the pawing paid off. Despite a repertory program that included two newer and better works last week, it was Phaedra that drew the loudest cheers...
...American premieres alone were enough to prove the strength of Graham's charismatic grip on her art as well as her audience. In Legend of Judith, an extension of her recent cycle of mystic studies of heroines seeking reconciliation with their pasts, Graham, now 70, dances Judith, aging and melancholy; with a dream's logic, Judith recalls her patriotic seduction and murder of Holofernes, while real and imagined forms confront her to weave with their dance the tangle of her quiet doom. In Circe, Graham turns Ulysses' odyssey into an inner event, a flight of the imagination...
Oracular Instincts. Graham's dancing today is a grace remembered. She has become fragile and precarious onstage. The mute eloquence of her gestures is now as terse as it is cryptic; her dances are only sketches of her intent. But the 19 other dancers-nine male, ten female-in her company are all masters of the "virile gestures" that, she says, "are evocative of the only true beauty." Movement is full of the strain and pain academic ballet attempts to conceal, and each step is meant as a metaphor that tells of the life of the heart. Barefoot...
...Graham was invited here by the Harvard Christian Fellowship. Church groups affiliated with the United Ministry at Harvard-Radcliffe have been asked to join the sponsoring committee...