Nina Papathanasapoulou, College Year in Athens/SCS
The analysis of modern dance is an exciting and growing new field in classical reception studies. This paper analyzes the reception of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra (1958). Graham’s engagement with Greek tragedy has attracted much attention in recent years (Papathanasopoulou 2023 and 2021; Ancona 2020; Bannerman 2010; Yaari 2003). However, Clytemnestra has not been examined in close comparison to the ancient sources that formed the inspiration for her work. My paper focuses on the dance’s interest in gender and sexuality and on its response to the patriarchal views found in Aeschylus’ trilogy (Zeitlin 1978, Hall 2015), and offers new interpretations of this dance.
I first examine how Graham places Clytemnestra’s perspective at the center of her work. Notably, Orestes’ trial in the Eumenides focuses not on whether Orestes killed his mother but on whether the killing was justified. The justification is closely tied to the murderer’s reasons for action and comes in strongly gendered terms: a father is more important than a mother; a king than a queen; a man than a woman. This paper suggests that Graham applies this same lens to the case of Clytemnestra herself. The heroine’s reflections on her own life constitute a kind of self-imposed trial, asking – as Aeschylus did for Orestes – whether her crime was justified, and redrawing the larger narrative in markedly gendered terms, just as boldly but quite differently from Aeschylus. Graham’s Clytemnestra thereby draws our attention to the queen’s motives and emotions and to the social context within which she operates.
In addition, I argue that Graham contextualizes Clytemnestra’s experience in terms of a larger gender conflict that the choreographer sees behind human violence: Graham begins her work by presenting the Trojan war not as a military conflict between Greeks and Trojans but as a rape scene between men and women, marking men’s sexual desires and hunger for dominance as fundamental to their behavior and relationship to women. The audience is thus invited to see the scenes that immediately follow within this context of gender violence: Iphigeneia’s sacrifice calls attention to the vulnerability of women and their mistreatment by men, while Orestes and Electra’s unification to plan their mother’s murder should also be seen through the lens of the gender dynamics that drive the action of the dance. Within this context, I suggest that we are invited to interpret each of the siblings differently because of their gender: Orestes operates as part of a legacy of male heroes who display their strength, achievements, and dominance, resembling Agamemnon and driven by a desire for power; Electra, on the other hand, is spurred by her emotions, her attachment to her father, and desire for revenge. Moreover, I propose that Graham highlights the contrast between Orestes and Electra by incorporating the Furies and reimagining them not as a form of punishment, haunting the murderer Orestes, as Aeschylus depicts them in the Oresteia, but as divinities that constitute an aid to women, protecting women’s honor, and goading them into action.