Victoria Hodges, Rutgers University
Lucian’s On the Dance, our primary source on ancient performance, theorizes that the dancing body often transfers meaning to its audience through non-narrative or non-symbolic “transitional” movements that connect gestures and poses (Schlapbach 2018, Caracciolo 2014, Lada-Richards 2004). In doing so, Lucian proposes, the performer can communicate contagiously by building upon each iterative gesture and contraction conveyed (cf. συγκίνησις in oral performance, Ps.-Longinus 20.1–2) ultimately expanding the commitment to narrative development. In this paper, I argue that Martha Graham’s adaptions of ancient Greek myth inhabit the space between non-discursive communication and compulsory narrative, reminiscent of Lucian’s model of the dancing body. In her autobiography, Graham speaks about her form of communication, stating that “movement never lies. The body is a very strange business” (Graham 1991). Her series of short, choreographed performances in the early 1930s, termed her “long woolen dances of revolt,” articulate her early attention to the ways in which costuming and staging serve to make the dancer and audience more aware of “the stretching of the body,” namely its erotic and mimetic potential (Graham). I suggest that it is this embodying of Lucian’s concepts of the performing body which form the foundation for Graham’s later eroticized choreography for “Phaedra” (1962).
Martha Graham’s exploration of articulated and choreographed eromania is especially apparent in the controversial ballet “Phaedra,” which reimagines the sympathetic female antagonist of Euripides’ Hippolytus as the dramatic protagonist of a nonverbal performance of gesture and body. A part of the dance company’s repertory during their international relations tour in the 1960s, the ballet generated intense international concern regarding how bodies (mis)communicate national values. In response to these critiques, Graham replied “I have always thought ‘eroticism’ to be a beautiful word…only hidden things are obscene.” According to NYT reports in 1969, Graham’s advancing age and her supposed neglect of the nation’s international reputation led to her stepping down as the lead in “Phaedra,” and, indeed, as a performer in her company, prompting complicated questions concerning age, desire, sex, nationalism, and bodily communication. Like the body of Graham herself, the set for this ballet also became an avenue for censorship and discomfort on an international scale, as its kinetic monumental sculptures of a phallus and uterus, designed by long-time collaborator Isamu Noguchi, forced a symbolic confrontation with the sexual body.
An exercise in bodily translation, Martha Graham’s “Phaedra” embodies ancient Greek dance theory by centering sensorial communication and dynamic eroticism. Censured for this elaboration, “Phaedra” provides an interesting window into the ways in which performing sex—its desire, refusal, enaction—incites an emotional response in the audience. Considering the manifold reasons for the ballet’s cancellation and its interaction with ancient Greek bodily ideals, this paper’s analysis of “Phaedra” addresses how we craft societal values, censure sex in the aging body, and translate eromania to modern audiences by looking closely at ancient Greek dance theory, Graham’s own creative process, and the source materials from the ballet itself.