Amanda Kubic, University of Michigan
This paper explores the reception and reconfiguration of the ancient Greek chorus in three dances by Martha Graham: Cave of the Heart (1946), Clytemnestra (1958), and Acts of Light (1981). Each dance, I argue, enacts a particular (re)vision of the Greek lyric or tragic chorus, distinct not only in the number and gender of bodies choreographed but also in the chorus’s narrative function and its affective and kinesthetic expression. By reading these three very different choruses together, we can achieve a more complex understanding of Graham’s changing engagements with the myths, literary genres, and rituals of ancient Greece and a more nuanced perspective on the form of the chorus itself as an unstable, never-static, dynamic body that affords a variety of movement and storytelling possibilities.
Much of the scholarship on Graham’s Greek-inspired dances is dominated by analyses of her psychoanalytic identification with and feminist reimagining of mythic heroines like Jocasta, Medea, and Clytemnestra (see Yaari 2003, Zajko 2010). With this paper, I turn our attention to the often- overlooked role of the chorus in Graham’s work. Although scholars such as Papathanasopoulou (2019, 2023) and Bannerman (2010) comment on the role of the chorus in individual dances such as Night Journey, Clytemnestra, and Cave of the Heart, a comparative study of Graham’s choruses is lacking. I seek to contribute such a study and to include in my analysis a dance not often put into conversation with the works of Graham’s Greek Cycle: Acts of Light. I argue that Acts can be read as a kind of “new experimentation” within Graham’s own brand of classicism (see Kisselgoff 1981), particularly in its portrayal of the mourning and celebratory choruses in Acts One and Two (“Lament” and “Ritual to Sun”).
I begin my paper with the one-woman chorus of Cave of the Heart and argue that in this piece, Graham distills Euripides’ chorus down to a solitary figure who functions as an “unruly” (see Olsen 2020) double both to Medea and to the audience, mirroring and mediating our responses to the events on stage. The chorus becomes a relational body that resists discrete articulation, disrupting our understanding of what it means for Medea to be an individual or the chorus to be a collective. I then move to Clytemnestra and analyze how the male and female choruses attending Orestes and Electra act as oppositional, haunting forces within the dance. The chorus of Furies, in particular, embodies and emancipates suppressed female experiences of turmoil, pain, and anger, making material an eerie mythic memory of gendered violence. I end by examining Acts of Light’s all-male chorus of mourners in “Lament” and the celebratory mixed-gender chorus to the sun-god Helios in “Ritual to the Sun.” I argue that these ensembles act less like a typical tragic chorus and more like an archaic lyric chorus celebrating a rite of passage. This represents a distinct turn in Graham’s classicism, away from specific mythic narratives and toward a more “pantheistic” (Kisselgoff 1981), naturalistic, and ritualistic Mediterranean ethos.