Jocasta's Last Hours in Martha Graham's Night Journey: Identity, Responsibility, and Violence through the Dancing Body

This paper aims to show how Martha Graham’s Night Journey captivates us by drawing on its primary model, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and on Ancient Greek sculpture and vase painting. Graham’s engagement with classical literature has recently been the topic of a number of studies by both classicists and historians of dance (Papathanasopoulou 2021; Ancona 2020; Bannerman 2010; Yaari 2003), but Night Journey has received comparatively little attention (Zajko 2010), and my paper uses questions about gender to shed new light on this fascinating production.

I discuss the dance’s narrative technique (Franko 2012 and Zajko 2010) in relation to the narrative in Sophocles’ play (Segal 1993) and then analyse three themes that Graham reveals as central to Sophocles’ play – questions of identity (Dugdale 2015; Vlassopoulos 2007; Segal 1993); responsibility (Kovacs 2019; Dodds 1966); and the deep-seated human urge toward violence in the face of anxiety (Segal 1999). I show that both Sophocles and Graham centre on these themes but whereas Sophocles focuses on Oedipus, Graham focuses on Jocasta and views these issues from the perspective of the play’s female characters. In doing so Graham helps us understand the character of Jocasta more deeply and imagine more vividly the last hours of Jocasta's life, filling the blank left by Sophocles around the moment of her death; in Sophocles’ play, the messenger declares his ignorance on the way Jocasta died (OT 1251).

More specifically, I argue that Graham’s dance shows us visually – through the dancing body – that what leads Jocasta to her death is the struggle to come to terms with her identity, her sense of responsibility for the life she has led and that she now chooses to end, and the human tendency to seek release through violence. For example, I propose that the human tendency towards violence is explored through the character of Jocasta herself and the inclusion of a chorus, the “Daughters of the Night.” The chorus represents, on the one hand, the collective reaction to the horror confronting Jocasta and Oedipus and, on the other, Jocasta’s inner thoughts and fears, by using the iconography of figures in ancient Greek vases and sculpture and taking on the role of the Furies of Greek mythology. Similar to the descriptions of the Furies in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the “Daughters of the Night” move aggressively and with a sense of attack. They have clawed hands and flexed feet and show aggression by producing percussive sounds, often gaining strength from their contact with the ground, reminding us of their chthonic nature and of the poison that they spread wherever they go, contaminating everything they touch. Graham’s rendition of how we envision Jocasta’s last hours in Night Journey draws on the extraordinary powers of the human body to explore the workings of Jocasta’s mind and heart, and to further illuminate our understanding of Sophocles’ play.