The Spider Dress from “Cave of the Heart”: Graham and Noguchi’s Medea

At the 2024 Annual Symposium of the Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts featuring the projects of its Dance Research Fellows, Alexa West, dancer and sculptor, presented on “Dramatic Objects: Set and Prop Design of Martha Graham.” In 2019, Jonathan Zong published “Unruly Cyborgs: The Relational Set Designs of Isamu Noguchi” in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. These two scholars are part of a recent move in Martha Graham studies to recognize and foreground more fully the contribution to Graham’s work of sculptor and set designer Isamu Noguchi (Ancona, Apostolos-Cappadona, Eilber, and Library of Congress [Eilber and Hart]). Noguchi’s sets, costumes, and props inhabit and animate space on the stage as bodies do. They are not merely static backdrops or appendages. This paper will discuss one such object, the Spider Dress from “Cave of the Heart,” Martha Graham’s 1947 dance based on the Medea story, as an example of how the creation of meaning in the dance depends on an almost uncanny interaction of objects and bodies.

For “Cave of the Heart,” Noguchi designed a stunning set piece made of brass wire, called the Spider Dress, that functions as a stable set piece, as a costume, and as an object in motion, all in one. It resembles a tree with branches and/or the sun with rays. Noguchi’s Spider Dress becomes an integral part of how the figure of Medea is created. She hangs out inside it as a kind of safe space, she wears it, that is, she gets inside it, and she moves with it as she presents a kind of magical witch-like side of herself, casting a spell on Jason and the Princess, and finally she flips it over 180 degrees and it ultimately becomes her vehicle of escape, her chariot of the sun.

Noguchi (1987: 214) called it her ‘transformation dress.’ Graham (1989: H6) says that Noguchi ‘devised a dress worked from vibrating brilliant pieces of bronze wire that became my garment as Medea and moved with me across the stage as my chariot of flames.’ Her description of the dress moving with her as her chariot expresses well the object’s separateness from her (it moved ‘with’ her) as well as its connection to her (it ‘became my garment’). Still further, the garment functions ‘as’ her chariot, suggesting an overlap of clothing and vehicle. Graham’s mention of “flames” connects the chariot to Helios, Medea’s grandfather (MG says ‘father’), bridging human and divine. The multiple layers of being and becoming inextricably bind together Medea and the Spider Dress and blur distinctions of person and object. The Medea of “Cave of the Heart” emerges from the interplay of plastic (sculpture) and performance (dance) arts, that is, the collaboration of Noguchi and Graham.