Intellectual Dance

Unlike other arts, ballet dancing never gets deep into psychological whys & wherefores. Ballet seldom expresses tragic ideas or describes serious situations. Its dancers are graceful athletes; its subjects usually fairy tales, quaint boy-&-girl situations, gentle vaudevillian satires. Some rebellious dancers, pining for more significant footwork, have balked at ballet's limitations. First of the rebels was the late great U. S. Dancer Isadora Duncan, who took to stage dancing like a Baptist to water, discarded ballet's fouettes and entrechats for natural movements, its powder-puff skirts for Greek robes.

Today's most prominent serious-minded U. S. dancer is a slim, dark-haired woman named Martha Graham, who 15 years ago left a job with the Greenwich Village Follies to try her foot at higher-browed steps. Ex-Showgirl Graham's first serious show was given in 1926 in Manhattan's 48th Street Theatre, backed by $11.25 which she had saved. A deficit of more than that would have sent her back to the Follies. The box office made a profit ($2) and Martha went on.

Her dancing was as severe, economical and prim as her New England ancestry, as unintoxicating as ice water, but something new. Today, though it does not compete with the box office of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Martha Graham's glamorless dance counts a big audience from coast to coast, a huge following of high-minded, earnest, mop-haired disciples who treat their art as if it were the successor of the Greek or Elizabethan drama.

Last week hundreds of these dancing intellectuals gathered in Bennington, Vt. to attend the annual Bennington Festival, No. 1 U. S. summer dance event. Climax of the festival was a brand-new Graham ballet, Letter to the World, danced by 16 Grahamites. For it U. S. Composer Hunter Johnson had written a substantial, lengthy musical score; U. S. Scenic Designer Arch Lauterer had built an unprecedented stage load of secret panels, revolving doors and trick modernistic lighting effects. The ballet's subject: Poet Emily Dickinson, the New England spinster who never went out of her Amherst, Mass, house for 24 years, got all her excitement in her own head. Choregrapher Graham divided her ballet in half, gave the Dr. Jekyll half to a pleasant, domestic-looking chorine who recited excerpts from Emily Dickinson's hard-bitten verse. The frustrated, poetic, aspiring, cockeyed half she reserved for herself, danced it with a bevy of bouncing males that would have driven prim Poetess Dickinson to a sanatorium. When she was through, her intellectual audience broke into sobs and cheers. Whether or not any dancer's exterior can plausibly represent a poet's interior, Martha Graham had put on a good show.

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