by Margo Jefferson
"No poet, no artist of any art has his meaning alone," T. S. Eliot declared in his celebrated essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It was his manifesto on how those artists who want to shape the future must absorb the past. Each artist must write with the history of European art in his bones, Eliot said, citing Homer, Shakespeare and anonymous Paleolithic draftsmen, and he must do the same with the art of his own country.
We can dispense with those masculine pronouns, turn to the performing arts and focus on the United States, the country of Eliot's birth, which went unnamed in that essay. We can say that American artists should take the stage with all the performing traditions of North America (and any other continent they choose) in their bones. And with the 1900's behind us, the artists of Eliot's generation, those modernists who turned every art form on its head, do matter as much as Homer and Shakespeare. They are our classics now, too, and they are what keep phrases like "the classical tradition" alive and on the move. That relatively new term postmodernism (how quickly it's becoming deadly) has its own prescriptions for how artists should work with the past: they should appropriate, parody, fracture and collage it. Fine. But why should there be just one proper (read ironic and hip) way? Seeing two dance companies in the last few weeks reminded me that artists can still meet the past with all-out passion as well as with critical intelligence. They can encounter it, inhabit it, partner and be partnered by it.
Take the fierce genius of modern dance, Martha Graham. Like Eliot or Louis Armstrong, Graham invented a language that molded some would even say branded generations of artists. Over the years some of her dancers left to choreograph and form their own companies. The best known, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, had to throw off her technique to find their own.
The young company Buglisi/Foreman Dance (this is its fifth season) renews the Graham technique in all its full-bodied glory. And not a moment too soon, since financial difficulties have just made the Graham Company suspend operations indefinitely. Everything is here: those potent torsos, contracting, releasing, spiraling; legs, arms and heads alert to every surge of emotion.
And this is not because they are in the first flush of discovering Graham. The choreographers, Jacqulyn Buglisi and Donlin Foreman, and their co-founders, Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin (magnificent dancers both), are all longtime Graham company members. But no one here is shadowed by Graham's overwhelming temperament, by that ruthless glory-driven as she used to say, doom-eager embrace of suffering, struggle and self-discovery.
They have inherited her theatrical mastery of lighting, costumes and stage space, her way of making us feet that each dance is an encounter with destiny. It's the Buglisi/Foreman sense of destiny or of our many destinies that's new. Ms. Buglisi and Mr. Foreman are drawn to the expressive nuances, the everyday emotions that bind and separate us even when desire or grief is most acute. They explore quiet (call it the action of contemplation) and the give and take between couples or groups. I'd call them both wise romantics.
Mr. Foreman's suite of dances, "Arms Around Me," is an elegy filled with the mood changes that are part of dying or of watching someone die. There are images of slow decline and debilitation (it is dedicated to friends "lost to AIDS and time"), and there are also moments of yearning, valor and a kind of sweet acceptance. There is a a lovely openness throughout the piece, technically and emotionally, as when Mr. Foreman performs a.solo improvisation while a cellist and violinist (Crispin Campbell and Daniel Roumain) improvise to the Miles Davis composition "In a Silent Way."
Graham created tragic or solitary heroines (Clytemnestra, Medea, Jocasta) who tested the boundaries of the most primal emotions. The heroines of Ms. Buglisi's luminous "Suspended Women" move, float really, in a dream space where those primal emotions renunciation, sexuality, chastity and ecstasy seem in no way at odds. Graham made a great dance about Emily Dickinson based on the lines "This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me." Ms. Buglisi's inspiration is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a worldly and beautiful young woman in 17th-century Mexico, who left her family and court life to become a nun, a poet and a scholar. (The last a vocation she defended in a bold letter to her disapproving bishop.)
It is a beautiful sight, these women in long full gowns, rising, failing, losing and finding them-selves. They move to the music of Ravel and to the musical interpolations of Mr. Roumain, who cherishes Ravel's voluptuous rigor. It's a beautiful dance. I can't pretend to analyze it fully, any. more than one can fully analyze what a poem leaves you with after its structure has been analyzed. That's the point, I think. This is a dance about the soul's intimate mysteries...
