Judith with Orchestra

Since the Louisville Orchestra decided two years ago to stop hiring expensive soloists and use its cash to commission original compositions instead (TIME, Dec. 20, 1948), Louisville audiences have had many an ear-popping musical surprise. Last week they got an eye-popper as well: Modernist Martha Graham in a brand-new 25-minute dance to the accompaniment of the 50-piece orchestra.

Last April, Orchestra Manager John R. Woolford commissioned Martha to compose the dance, with new music by a composer of her own choice. She picked her old collaborator, William Schuman, president of Manhattan's Juilliard School, who wrote the music for her Night Journey three years ago.

Then, intense little Dancer Graham, 47, set about pondering "why I should appear on a stage with a symphony orchestra in the background instead of in the pit." She decided to compose herself a solo on the story, from the fourth book of the Apocrypha, of Judith, who delivered the Israelites from the siege of Nebuchadnezzar by charming his chief general, Holofernes, and then lopping off his head. Composer Schuman set to work on a score.

When the big night came last week, a sell-out audience in Louisville's Columbia Auditorium warmed up on Wagner and Beethoven. After intermission, the musicians took their places upstage behind a translucent curtain. As the music began somberly, Dancer Graham was discovered standing motionless on the stage's apron.

Dressed in black, she began to dance in jerky, spastic movements--in anguish, as the program notes explained, for the besieged Israelites whose water supply had been cut off by Holofernes. When she got ready to visit the confident enemy, she stripped off her black "garments of mourning," decked herself with jewels and sidled forth clad in beige "garments of gladness." Composer Schuman's music took on a sinister cast, Dancer Graham a sinuous, Salome-ish look. The final victory dance, after Judith had whacked off the imaginary Holofernean head, was wildly exultant and percussive. So was the 15-minute applause that followed it.

Wrote one Louisville critic: "It opens an entirely new field for the contemporary dancer . . . and places him on a commercial and artistic footing with the piano, instrumental and vocal soloist." To sallow, dark-eyed Dancer Graham, it was "a great challenge . . . This must be a special work with a full symphony. It can't be reduced to anything I can take on tour. But other symphony orchestras may be interested in it."

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