Aeschylus Embodied: Martha Graham's Clytemnestra

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Aeschylus Embodied: Martha Graham's ClytemnestraAuthor(s): Norman AustinSource: Arion, New Series, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1975), pp. 380-399Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163386 .

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AESCHYLUS EMBODIED: MARTHA GRAHAM'S CLYTEMNESTRA

Norman Austin

T JL HEATER WAS A VERB BEFORE

it was a noun, Martha Graham likes to say. And

tragedy, we may add, was a dance before it appeared on

our shelves as a row of Oxford Classical Texts. Despite the obscurity surrounding almost every feature of early Athenian drama, we can hold to one unequivocal fact at

least, that tragedy grew from, and had its being in,

dance. The tragic songs were composed by dancers,

choreographed and performed by dancers, for audiences

of dancers. Knowledge so axiomatic scarcely calls for

comment were it not that the connection between drama

and dance became obliterated except as a merely polite

acknowledgement. The transmission of the extant trage dies we owe to a long succession of persons both ignorant of dance and opposed to it as a diabolical invention. So

estranged are we even today from that which gave trag

edy its form and rhythm that we must practice a rigorous

exercise of will and imagination to remind ourselves that

the parodos signifies the entrance not of a choir but of

the corps de ballet. When, therefore, a dancer who is, like

Aeschylus, honored almost as a national monument in her

own lifetime, puts Aeschylus' Oresteia back into dance

for us, her choreography can illuminate aspects of the

tragedy which not even a stage production, relying on

the best poetic translation, can make available for us. For

the stage, reflecting our cultural bias, knows that drama

is the study of action (which we take to be dialogue em

bellished with hymnal interludes), but has forgotten drama's ancestry in the choros, which is the study of mo

tion.

At a recent performance by Martha Graham's company



Norman Austin 381

of her dance, Clytemnestra, I overheard a student ex

plaining to a friend the political themes of the Oresteia, the dissolution of the old family structure and the evolu

tion of a new civic consciousness. Was this what Martha

Graham was about, translating Aeschylus' political state

ments into dance? Must we think politically in order to

follow her choreography? Well, yes and no. Martha Gra

ham disclaims political intent in her dances, but her

Notebooks reveal a politically active mind. In her notes

on the Oresteia we find quotes from various scholars,

George Thomson for example. "The art of tragedy was

the product of democracy," she writes, giving us a clue

that she was revolving questions on the politics of Athe

nian tragedy as she began to choreograph her Clytemnes tra.1 But the dance is no manifesto of a burgeoning de

mocracy, rather an introspective exploration of a woman's

guilts, desires and compulsions. And yet, if by politics we mean the art of balancing the claims of the individual

against those of the community, then her Clytemnestra is a political dance, and like the Oresteia signifies the

dissolution of an old order to make way for a new and

larger order. As with any artist, Graham's politics are accessible only

in the terms of her own medium. We can better under

stand the poetry of her Clytemnestra when we see it

against the tradition of dance. In the other media the

tradition is easier to follow because the artists leave us

documents in which we can trace the trajectories of cer

tain historical developments, and the points of rupture on those trajectories. In dance the tradition is a more elu

sive thing, dance being an art rarely recorded (never

recorded before the invention of the camera) and rarely elucidated. As with Athenian dramatic festivals, there are

no texts, only performances, and performances, even

with the same choreography, vary from year to year and

company to company. Still, enough documents exist to

show that dance suffered the same explosion which befell

the other arts in this century. We are familiar with the revolt of the Edwardians

against the constraints of their Victorian predecessors. It



382 Martha Graham's clytemnestra

was a corseted society which their parents bequeathed them, but they sprang violently out of the tidy forms

which seemed inadequate to express their sense of the

world. In ballet, the forms must have seemed even more

constraining than Victorian iambics seemed to poets. In

both subject matter and style dance had come to seem an

arbitrary and artificial set of conventions alienated from

living experience, forms rigidly fossilized into formulas.

It was more interested in reproducing the floral patterns on the floors of ancient castles, was the accusation of its

critics, than in communicating human ideas, experience or emotion.

Since dance was a woman's art, an art, that is, in which

women were at least permitted, and even encouraged (in a limited way) as men were not, we can imagine the

impression ballet must have made on many a young girl who might have viewed it as a possible avenue for her

physical energy and creative powers. A rambunctious

young girl, taken to the ballet, would have seen other

girls transformed into delicate sylphides by one of the

most rigorous systems of discipline yet devised for hyper kinetic children. Such a sylphide could, by determination

and talent, and if spared crippling accidents, hope to

emerge just before her career's occlusion as La Sylphide,

princess of sylphs, for a brief but picturesque reign. Whatever the story, whether impersonating a swan, a

dryad, or even a spirited signorita, the dancer would pro

ject from the stage a salutary vision of woman as Sylph,

fluttering forever in a Wedgwood blue music box but

without damage to her gauzy wings or her essential in

nocence.

From our vantage point we can see that there was

more to ballet than intricate floor designs and mechanical

sylphs playing hide and seek in papier-mach? woods. We

can see that such stories as Giselle were as topical in their

day as Hardy's. We can see too that ballet, far from being a museum of moribund postures, had preserved in its

vocabulary the essence of the human heritage of motion.

But try to persuade a hyperkinetic Edwardian girl of



Norman Austin 383

such truths. As well persuade young Ezra Pound to prac tice iambic reveries in country churchyards.

It is not surprising that America, a country lacking the

monarchical institutions out of which ballet had arisen, became one of the strongholds of the revolt against the

traditional form. Its artists in every medium were chafing at their colonial dependence on European cultural values.

Nor surprising that the leaders of the new kind of dance

should have been women, who were glorified in dance

but with the glory of pinned ephemerids. Deploying a

familiar strategy, the rebels leapfrogged over their par ents back to a more distant time. At the turn of the cen

tury Isadora Duncan discovered that there were other

kinds of dance, other rhythms than those preserved in the

formulas of the royal houses of Europe. After her came

Ruth St. Denis, who found her exotic inspirations in

Egypt and India. In 1911 Martha Graham, then seventeen

years old, saw her first dance performance. Ruth St.

Denis, dancing "Egypta," acted as electrically on the di

rection of Graham's life as the cigarette poster of an

Egyptian goddess had in propelling St. Denis into her

career. From that evening in 1911 the two aspects of Gra

ham's youthful character, the literary and the athletic,

began to converge towards a single goal. In her career Graham made a rigorous repudiation of

ballet and its forms, but not from any childhood exposure to it. Dance of any kind had been excluded from her life

by her parents, "strict religionists," she called them, "for

whom dancing was a sin." When she discovered dance

she was, both by age and certainly by temperament, un

suited for impersonations in the classical style. She chose

to study with Ruth St. Denis, from whom she learned of

a possible range of motions outside those of classical

dance. Flute of Krishna, performed by her dancers in

1926, marked Graham as a modern choreographer, but

beguiling in its novelty, it was still much under the influ

ence of St. Denis' conceptions of the Oriental mode. By 1930, in Lamentation, a solo dance for Graham herself,

Graham revealed that she had passed beyond Oriental

exoticism to a new kind of motion distinctly her own. She




had somehow penetrated to the essence of motion, and the essence was so stark that to audiences accustomed to the smooth designs of classical dance, to its practiced disguises of the essence, her counter-style seemed mon

strous and repellent. Neurotic, some called it, morbid,

ugly. Kinder critics dismissed it as being too much

theater and too little dance, forgetting that once theater

had been dance and dance had been theater. But Graham

continued to explore and project her language of the es

sence.

The roster of her dances in the early years?Bas Relief, Baal Shem, Chinese Poem, Arabesque, Clair de Lune, with music taken from Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, shows her orientation still towards the romantic. But we can sense the change of emphasis as with greater fre

quency appear such titles as Primitive Mysteries, Dithy rambic, Incantation, Ekstasis. From lyric Graham moves

to dithyrambic, and from dithyrambic to heroic, as Gra

ham finds her sympathies drawn to the tragic and heroic

women, Jocasta, Judith, St. Joan. Graham turns to primitive themes, finding them among

the Indians of New Mexico, in her own Puritan tradition, and of course among the Greeks. Again and again she

draws on Greek myths whose symbols carry the power and universality to match her motion. As early as 1933

she had prepared, as it were, the choral passages for the

full-length tragedy she was later to choreograph, pre

senting in Tragic Patterns three choric dances, the Chorus

for Suppliants, the Chorus for Maenads, and the Chorus

for Furies. In succeeding years she developed the con

tours of the tragic protagonist in such dances as El Peni

tente, Night lourney, Judith, The Triumph of St. Joan. In 1958 Graham was ready to bring chorus and pro

tagonist together in Clytemnestra, the full-length dance

which is perhaps the culmination of her tragic vision. It

is the testament of a woman who in 1929 had danced

Heretic, and had never lost her obsession with heretic fig ures, with the guilt, fears and defiance which motivate the

heretic. In an artistic sense it was Graham's autobiog

raphy, for through Clytemnestra she could show the ten



Norman Austin 385

sion of a woman who, as a tenth generation descendant

of Puritan pioneers, had spent her life wrestling free from

her roots and yet in ever deeper search for them. This

dance portrait of a queen who, in the underworld, admits

to and defends her crime, explodes with the tension of a

woman who, daring damnation, thrusts aside her Calvin

ist preceptors to lay violent claims to the motion which

she knew to be her birthright. At an age when dancers

in the classical form would have long since retired, Gra

ham brought dance to a new kind of maturity, for with

Clytemnestra she proved that dance could portray not

only the adventures of youngsters but the agonies of

adults. Its range of themes could now include the heroic

and the tragic as the other arts had always done. Clytem nestra is the dance of a woman who had been recording her heartbeat for forty years. Graham has the first requi site for a translator, for if she would give us Aeschylus'

pulse she must first know her own.

What of Aeschylus and his tradition? Ah, how smoothly the handbooks calm Time's turbulent dialectic as they conduct us around the agora of antiquity and point out

the monuments, Homer here, Pindar there, here Aeschy lus, Thucydides, Plato, patriarch conversing with great

patriarch. Very different, surely, would be the portrait of

Aeschylus if we could approach him as a contemporary. The Greeks loved their Homer and delighted to hear

their rhapsodes declaim his honey-sweet formulas. Homer

was home-base. But he was the Mandarin too, the poet of

ancient mandarin manners. There was another side to the

Greek character which found little reflection in Homer's

ordered cosmos, others besides Achilles and Odysseus whose lives cried out for their maker. In their villages the Greeks were a noisy folk, given to disputations, to

masquerades and phallic buffoonery, night-long revels in

the mountains, blood-curdling dances to summon the

ghosts and lay them firmly to rest again. From such rustic

hurdy-gurdy grew the strange and violent new Goat-song. Anecdotes hint at the struggle of the early dramatists

to place Dionysos on an equal footing with Apollo. Solon

once asked Thespis if he were not ashamed to tell so




many lies before so many people. When Thespis con

fessed that he saw no harm in acting out such things in

play, Solon struck the ground with his staff and ex

claimed, "If we praise and honor such play, we shall soon

find it in our business affairs."2 If ever Solon spoke thus, it was not fictions he objected to?those he could tolerate in Homer's noble verse?but play, the undignified mas

querade compounded of pantomime and dance with

which Thespis was beguiling the populace. Aeschylus was no Thespis we say, but Dioscorides, in his tactful way, makes us wonder. "Sporting in the woods," he writes, "and revels of still less account Aeschylus made sublime."3 The story that Aeschylus was charged with divulging the

Mysteries, even if apocryphal, has a certain plausibility, as suggesting the presence of an element within the de

mocracy which was appalled at the indecency of the new

spectacle which was threatening the place of honor long held by Homer, master of temperate rhythms. Aristopha nes, his reverence for Aeschylus the Patriarch notwith

standing, acknowledges the smell of the shaggy goat still

clinging to the old poet's sublimity, and being no mean

choreographer of the Goat-dance himself, prefers shaggy

Aeschylus to slick Euripides. So well-effaced is Dionysos from the tragic stage, or

our conception of it at least, that only in the varied meters of tragedy can we experience some of the rever

berations of the dancing foot which accompanied, and

interpreted, the tragic action. Behind those neat schemata

and the metricians' nomenclature attached to them, be

hind the cretics and bacchics, glyconics and pherecratics, are those village revels to which Dioscorides alludes. For

most of the rhythms, of course, we can trace a path

through other literary modes before their appearance in

tragedy. But for one meter, that curious slanting rhythm, the dochmiac as the Greeks called it, scholars are at a

loss to find an origin before tragedy. Dale conjectures that Aeschylus may have invented it.4 We should be glad to accept her conjecture, for Aeschylus is already credited

with the invention of numerous dance schemata, and the

dochmiac has the kind of energy which exemplifies the



Norman Austin 387

poetic form which he did so much to define. Rebel! Serfs, rebel! Resent wrongs so dire. Jebb's example of an Eng lish dochmiac (given in his edition of Sophocles' An

tigone) gives us some sense of the percussive rhythm with which tragedy came at ears educated on Homer's

hexameters, and may tilt us back to Graham and the per cussive dochmiacs of her choreography.

The music for the dance begins, a chant in an eastern

mode, plaintive but resonant with lamentation.

PRIME IMAGE: A massive black man walks in prose

step to take his position at center stage in front of the

curtain. His torso is bare, a plain purple cloth falls taut

from his waist to the floor. He holds a staff of wood, taller

than himself, around which a coiling serpent is carved.

Standing in profile, he plants his feet firmly on the

ground, holding his staff before him. Suddenly the still

image convulses into life. Head and torso bend forward, back muscles rise outward and press violently against

purple-black skin. They strain as if to burst the dark

membrane containing them, hold, then as violently sub

side. Now another massive contraction and release, now

another, great vessels threatening to hemorrhage within the body's prison.

In 1914 Pound defined the poetic image in a new way, "a radiant node or cluster ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly

rushing." How apt his definition for this Messenger of

Death. Graham is an Imagiste in dance. Ballet had its

images too, of course, but it would be hard to find there a symbol of such compressed energy. Lamentation, in

1930, showed that Graham had brought the sensibility

permeating Imagist poetry into dance, and in so doing had set herself against both the tradition of classical

dance and the innovations of St. Denis. Hardly a dance

at all by Victorian standards, it is really a single image, of a woman expressing her grief, seated throughout but

for one moment when, as if in extremity, she raises her

self to erect posture. But from what profound depths

mobility wells up in that seated figure to flow through her legs and arms and torso. The Messenger of Death in




Clytemnestra has the same potency, an ideogram com

pressing in itself the motions of this specific drama and the fundamentals of Graham's language. Her dance is not in feet skimming the ground, nor in wafting arms, but in the coil of the spine and in muscular contractions

around the spinal column. Movement expands towards

explosion but abruptly, just short of explosion, implodes. Ballet's illusion of effortless ease is exchanged for the

body's confession of its dis-ease. Instead of ballet's

smooth designs across an unimpeding surface, in this

tragic style the body stands rooted to the ground and ob structs itself. The evil magician of old ballet romances

who, with draughty stage wings and Hallowe'en make

up, baffles a royal court until a prince's chivalry sets the

furniture aright again, how inconsequential he seems be

side his modern counterpart, this Messenger of Death

who bends to his own destruction. In this Alpha of Gra

ham's alphabet is no disguise of tension, nor merely simu lated dramatic tension, but tension made the most visible

aspect of motion, the self bound to the earth and doubly bound in its own coils of resistance. The body its own

vortex.

Aeschylus would understand Graham's choreography for the Alpha of his trilogy is likewise an image which

both sets the dramatic stage and measures the distance

of his style from the hexameters of Homer, his classical

predecessor. His Agamemnon opens with the figure of a

humble watchman, keeping watch on the circling stars

when he would rather sleep, writhing between hope and

despair. "A great ox is on my tongue," he says, stammer

ing the paean his tongue would sing to celebrate the

long-awaited beacon's light which no sooner seen than

becomes the long-dreaded signal of new cycles of stran

gulation. The Messenger of Death ends his labor contractions,

grows calm, and walks off stage. The curtain goes up to

reveal a brilliant but almost naked stage. No enormous

canopied throne encumbered with wide-scrolled arms

and velvet cushions. No trompe-1' il landscapes to dis

tract from the motion study with their false assurance of



Norman Austin 389

reality. The stage has the simplicity of Aeschylus' stage and we, like Athenians, must assist the choreographer in

inventing the landscape. The vortex is transposed from

the human body to a diagram on the floor. Graham gives us three points on which to pin our invention, pricked out

with an asymmetry which suggests the precision of a

draughtsman's eye. At point one, just left of center stage, stands a small platform, greyish-white, raised a few

inches but raked to meet the stage in front. Back a few

feet, and almost centered, strips of metallic gold, fiercely

glittering, hang suspended in an arc around the second

point. Over the third point, downstage right, rests a

chair, also painted white, with a flat bottom and a high narrow back, a chair so stripped of ornament as to de

clare itself the Platonic Form, not chair but Throne. Like

alchemists and engineers, mystagogue Graham knows

the strength of a triangle, who threads her choreographic

line into this narrow funnel at the center of so vast a

sea. It is difficult to recollect any distinctive spotlights used during the dance. The memory carries away an im

pression of an inquisitorial floodlight falling vertically on

the scene throughout the dance, leaving nothing in

shadow.

The economies which the poets brought to language Graham brought to the stage, but so familiar are these

economies that we may easily forget that Graham was

one of the inventors of this modern classicism which re

duces to find the energy at the core. As the poets found

it necessary to strip away sentimentality from old forms

to uncover sentiment's essence, so Graham had to dis

mantle the overstuffed Victorian set, discarding it along with the romances played within its bounds, to liberate

the body's new motion. The artists' instincts were sure, that they recognized the counterfeit in sentimentality's affectation of sentiment. Gresham's Law holds true for

all life's economies. As bad money drives out good, paste

jewelry drives out diamonds, imitation ritual eliminates

ritual. Ornate vestments and sets, pretending to the high

style, instead can diminish the action played within them

to children's charades. By reduction to essence Graham



390 martha Graham's clytemnestra

defines once again the high style. The plain angularity of

the set, the fierce light, the imagistic content in the glit

tering scimitar or the scarlet net, the torsions of the bod

ies, all demand that we bring our concentration to assist

Graham in this high celebration.

With the set cleared, opened, Graham can then show

the dismantled human foot. Now that the bare foot

has become familiar on the dance stage, we forget the

audacity of Isadora Duncan, and those who followed her, to uncover the human foot at a time when legs were still

limbs, and even a pianoforte's were best covered to

avoid salacious thoughts. In Clytemnestra a body will

move across stage at a slow tempo, and with each step the foot will come down squarely forward on its toes, and hold its position for the impression to register. The

foot, itself another powerful image, becomes something detached, a fragment from an old statue, monumental

and as uncompromising now as it was when the sculptor first chiselled it out of marble a millennium ago. F-O-O-T, we say in unison after Miss Graham, as we learn our

alphabet and spell our first words. FOOT. STEP. FOOT

STEP. FOOTSTEP. The naked foot disarranges traditional choreography.

Gone are those continuous undulations of motion along the diagonals of the stage, the glissades and turns,

whether by one dancer or by the whole corps. Gone too

the dancer spinning like a top aligned by centripetal force

with the axis of the universe and caught there in per

petual motion. No swans either in Graham's choreog

raphy, forever gliding on placid ponds to feed from a

royal hand outstretched at the water's edge, no sprites

transported through the air by gentle zephyrs. A power ful will Graham must have had (even with the example of others before her) that she could so resolutely defy the traditional inflexions of ballet, and the supple poetry

which they had made possible, and invent a new style with naked foot instead of satin pointe, with turn-in in

stead of turn-out. While in high school Graham had con

tributed to the school magazine a Cinderella story of a

girl from humble circumstances who was mocked by her



Norman Austin 391

more refined peers at school for her awkwardness and

backwardness. Are we glimpsing in this dochmiac dance

the matured features of that young author whose heroine

was "certainly not pretty"? Every moment in Graham's

choreography wages war on the merely pretty, the pic

turesque, and calls us to find beauty in the not-pretty. As Graham teaches us to see the human foot again

with its toes, arch, heel, ankle, so she dismantles the rest

of the body to reveal its components. And in dismantling the body she must do likewise with the body's syntax as

preserved in traditional dance. This need to observe the

body's components gives a tempo quite different from

traditional dance where we are caught in a breathless

whirl of motion, with only momentary arabesques to

punctuate the flow. Motion in Graham's choreography is

a series of impulses which jumps a dancer forward or

back, arches a back, thrusts a limb awry.

The hard sand breaks

And the grains of it

Are clear as wine.

So H.D. had written in her "Hermes of the Ways," the

poem for which Pound had coined the word Imagism. This is the quality of Graham's choreography?hard,

granular, and each particle clear as wine. We seem to be

scanning a set of still photographs, a sequence of motion

dissected, and each segment immobilized in the white

glare of the photographer's flash.

Or we might be witnessing the birth of a new art, an

art preoccupied with the process of vision, how optic rods

and cones transmit discrete impressions to the brain, which in its turn invents a thread to connect them which

it calls motion. A succession of images moves slowly, but now faster until, with the projector's increasing

speed, images almost resolve into a single image, stills

almost blur into cinema. Cinema, intent on improved technicolor illusions of reality, soon forgot the magic of

its primitive scrambling flurried motions in its haste to

wards technological perfection. Graham gives us back




something of those cinematic origins as her, and our, au

thentic syntax. Let classical dance keep its fluent perfec tion. Graham wants the imperfection, the evolution of the

kinetic. Art is in the experiment. The human body is experimental here. Parts are still

learning their relationship to the whole. Sometimes a

body seems almost to puzzle for its principle of integra tion. A body will take an attitude with the downstage leg almost in profile, its foot in a position close to conven

tional turn-out, but the upstage leg wheels around en

face as if determined to invent a third dimension, and its

foot, defiant of conventional symmetries, rotates sharply inward, searching, it seems, for the correct attitude to

wards its mate. In other movements parts seem to follow

the body as if not entirely synchronized with it. Three

female figures, with black dresses falling almost to their

ankles, move downstage in a line, one directly behind the

other, but they move in such a way as to suggest that it

is not their feet which propel them. Their bodies jump forward as a single column, impelled by some dire com

pulsion, and with each jump the feet below gesticulate in convulsive hysteria. I have never seen feet in such a

state of panic before.

Often parts flout relations. They force towards inde

pendent existence until overpowered they fall back into

conformity. Arms and legs do not acquiesce willingly in

their relations with the whole system for the sinuous illu

sion of unity we expect in classical dance. An arm

extended in correct rotation abruptly contracts and flips

up and out in violation of the natural rotation of the

shoulder, as if a connecting spring had sprung loose. It

takes a moment for the body to register the dissension, and then the heretic limb is pulled sharply back into

compliance. Relations are won through violence, both to

the whole and to the part, as recalcitrant limbs test the

limits of their powers with Promethean defiance.

Just so, in Aeschylus' language, radicals struggle

against their enforced alliance in larger compounds, and

within phrases words threaten to snap the syntax asunder

in their struggle for autonomy. And the dramatis per



Norman Austin 393

sonae too, each rages for independence and submits to

community only under severest necessity. Gales breathing from Strymon, chants the chorus in its

first dance lyric in Aeschylus' Agamemnon (vv. 192ff.), as it tells how Agamemnon

came to kill his daughter to

win fair passage, exhalations of foul inertia, fastings, hard

anchorages, wanderings of mortals, unsparing of ships and cables. Yes, Aeschylus would understand Graham's

translation, for he too had disrupted hexameter fluencies

to isolate image from image, then thrust dissociated frag ments together into a fierce whirl of stasis and kinesis.

Subjective and objective meanings he propelled towards

collision within the same image, but while we are still de

fining their relation the tide rolls in another oxymoron to

arch and break over the last. Are gales inert? No, gales are commotions foundering men's motion in foul inertia.

No, gales are inertia, cosmic disequilibriums which trap men in their inertia. Do gales fast? No, gales pen men in

inertia by their ships and make men ravenous. No, gales are ravenous themselves and make men ravenous. Are

gales hard anchorages? Yes, gales twist and snap ships' cables. No, no, gales are harsh to enforce unwanted

anchorage on ships impatient for war. Gales compel

anchorage and break the anchors they demand. Are gales

wanderings? Yes, gales are cosmic veerings, and from

their veerings make men's motion to veer. Gales are un

sparing, yes unsparing of cables in their violent inertia

and their violent veerings. The Greek language roiled in

that storm which mazed Agamemnon and shredded the

flower of the Argives at Aulis.

And Agamemnon, the dance lyric continues, spiralling in deeper descent into the vortex (Ag. 218ff.), Agamem

non girded himself with the yokestrap of necessity and

exhaled a veering of his lungs, a harsh obeisance, impure,

unholy, whence he would veer yet again to repent his

all-daring conception. To recognize the winds as an im

portant image in the Oresteia is an honorable task of lit

erary criticism, if naming them thus does not drain off

their dynamic energy and reduce them to linguistic orna

ment. Text-trained eyes are prone to transcribe action




into metaphor, as Denys Page does, who finds the two

passages in the parodos of the Agamemnon where the

chorus sings of Agamemnon's breath (v. 187 and vv.

218ff.) innocent of any "special connexion, apart from

similarity of metaphor."5 Aeschylus does not hide here

behind metaphorical riddles but speaks with meteorologi cal precision. Men become what they breathe. Graham's

dancers revivify giant Zephyros (as the chorus names him at Ag. 692) and the other winds, rescuing them from their

position as marginal drolleries to the text, and establish

ing them as physical agents of the action. Like the gods in the Mahabharata, who can be distinguished from

prince Nala by their exemption from certain constraints

of human physiology, classical dancers strive for libera

tion from physiology. They don't breathe on stage, or so

it would seem. But Graham, situating the human body back in its terrestrial frame, as the Greeks had so situated

it before Plato introduced the transcendental dimension, makes of the rhythm of breath's inhalation and exhala tion one of the most fundamental formulas of her dance

style. Could any but dancers, with their understanding of lungs' exhalation and veering limbs, so well represent the storm which, beginning at Aulis, continues unabated

through Aeschylus' trilogy until the Furies' breath turns

to grace for Athens (Eum. 938)?

Page, securing a handhold on the yokestrap of neces

sity (Ag. 218), arrests the choral movement to argue that here is proof that Agamemnon, in sacrificing his

daughter, submits to divine ordinance. Of course, of

course, seen from one perspective, there are no choices

in human affairs. Humans do not appear on earth by

autogenesis. Beyond all human spinning sit the Fates at

their larger wheel. Had Agamemnon chosen to be a de

serter of ships instead of a daughter-slayer, then that al

ternative would have been likewise his harsh necessity. What here without Necessity? But perhaps our linear

reading habits lead us unwittingly to see a thesis where

a dance was meant. Could we but understand this paro dos as a dance, we might then see its motivating force to

be the storm winds and that invisible vortex which they



Norman Austin 395

create. Placing equal emphasis on physics as on meta

physics, we should not deny Necessity's yoke in v. 218, but accord equal significance to Agamemnon's foul

breath in the following lines (w. 219-220), where Aga memnon veers with the winds until he himself becomes

the raging Typhoon. Martha Graham's dancers restore

the physiology of Necessity to Aeschylus' text.6

Disjunction within the body and disjunction in the line

of motion connecting one body with another. There is

none of the convivial interchange of energies around the

village Maypole, nor even the courtly stylizations of ro

bust village spirits, body's gay flirtation in waltz, gavotte or gigue. Even when bodies move in unison there is a

palpable demarcation between them, each kept within

its own isolation. Not circles in this choreography but

straight edges, not curves but crisp angles. Instead of

ballet's arabesque to punctuate a dancer's gliding phrase across the floor, here each dancer, and in each movement, seems always to be a punctuation point.

Often movements tending in one direction abruptly deflect or reverse their direction. Motion seems to be a

storm of electrical impulses, an alternating current, on off, on off. The current passes through a body, pulls it in one

direction, but then the current stops and the body falls

slack. Or positive,

it seems, reverses to negative,

attrac

tion to repulsion, and the body is mazed in the labyrinth of contradictions. A dancer stands squarely in second

position, legs apart, knees flexed for stability, as sure of

his ground as a Japanese wrestler. Suddenly, with the

current's pulse, his body rockets vertically from its foun

dation into the air, then drops back to earth stunned, to

resume again the same sturdy posture until the next im

pulse. Could anyone have thought of the human dance

in this way before the age of electricity? And yet, if we

place Graham's modern interpretation beside our Oxford

Classical Text, we begin to sense that perhaps Aeschylus too knew of the electromagnetic field and nuclear re

actions. He need not have known them, of course, as

Einstein knew them. He may have been simply a good conductor registering the influences of the cosmic electro



396 martha graham's clytemnestra

magnetic field on his body's electrochemical system. ELECTRIC IMAGE. In an age of aniline dyes can a

translator really convey a sense of the costliness of that

purple harvest of the sea which Clytemnestra lays down to cushion her errant warrior's homing foot? Graham

doesn't try for purple, perhaps because it is kingliness too

much, and in our affluent century it is something more

than royal affluence we want. She finds instead an elec

tric orange-scarlet. The carpet, masquerading first as an

enormous moth, floats on to the stage from some distant

tropical rain forest. It vibrates its brilliant wings, then moves forward and flutters its wings to the ground. Oh, this is an arrogant sheet, not merely one queen's extrava

gance but a whole nation's harlotry flouting the Olympian

light, stained with the neon from every red light district across the continent. Our eyes, smarting almost from the

glare of white light on hard surfaces, would take their

rest on that fabric did its high voltage not repel as much as its gentle weave attracts. Clytemnestra entices the

weary king to his royal bed. Down he tumbles with her, two children in the sand, no, two wantons in the public

thoroughfare. He jerks back to his feet, scorched by his own lust, and assumes

again his commandant's swagger.

But the neon pulses and pulses, and again Agamemnon, so ignorant of his own pulse, advances and swoons into

the moth which is no moth but a consuming flame. Aga memnon and Clytemnestra exit to his doom, leaving

god-raped Cassandra on stage, wrestling to throw the ox

from off her tongue, her body convulsing to expel

Apollo's charis in foul inertia pent within (cf. Ag. 1206, where Cassandra talks of wrestler Apollo's breath of

grace upon her). Dale, in enumerating the schemata of tragic dances

given by Pollux, stops short at the somersault: "but in

what circumstances a somersault (Kv?io-Trjais) could have

been performed on the tragic stage is beyond our wit to

imagine."7 Her reaction is a natural one when action has

been isolated out of motion. Gesticulations of rage, fear, obeisance or pride, such motions we find appropriate to

the tragic action. But King Lear somersaulting? Indeed,



Norman Austin 397

it is beyond the wit to imagine. Had Dale seen Graham's

tragic dance, however, she would have witnessed King

Agamemnon, Admiral of the Greek armada, perform an

unmistakable somersault. Or in Night Journey, Graham's

dance of Jocasta's fate, she would have seen Teiresias

bounding downstage using his priestly staff as a Pogo stick, and expressing thereby his vehement outrage at

the city's defilement. Somersaults and acrobatics of still

less account Graham has made sublime.

It is a bold use and misuse of the human body which

Graham has invented. So uncompromising is this personal

language that the style, like Aeschylus', balances on the

edge of its own parody. Graham mixes motley elements,

juxtaposing balletic and jazz idioms, and yet creating from them a strange and elegant coherence. Sometimes

the figures resemble automatons still experimenting to

find their points of balance or their source of motion.

But these creatures are no automatons, for they preserve in their struggles an animal resilience and grace which

we watch in envy. We seem rather to be deciphering a

fragment of a ritual from an archaic civilization, is it

Mayan perhaps, or Babylonian? Yet, as it imprints its

images on our vision, the alien seems also familiar, as if it

were an earlier phase of our own language all but for

gotten under the rhythmic overlay from the royal courts

of France and Spain. Strip away those courtly refine

ments, and it's Anglo-Saxon we hear, when the pulse of verse was still the tread of foot on bare ground, and the

image a hard crystal the foot might stumble on. Aeschylus was a primitive, some scholars say, reproaching him thus

for his blood-spilt furies and spastic human motions.

Martha Graham is a primitive too, and in the same way, this dancer whose Shockwaves pattern the rhythms of an

age desperate to find the prime. In the dance's epilogue the gold bands separate and

Clytemnestra is escorted to a position behind them. That

even narrower vortex encloses a furious recapitulation of

the tragic motions. The turbulence works through to still

ness as Clytemnestra, acknowledging her guilt, gains remittance from her dishonor among the dead. The pro




gram notes talk of a new birth, but the regal motions of the dance suggest not only a rebirth but a second corona

tion. Graham takes away the myth from Aeschylus to

give her version of the Eumenides, which is the artist's li

cense, for there is no copyright on myth. If Aeschylus can show Orestes avenging Agamemnon's honor, and his

acquittal, Graham can dance through Clytemnestra her

woman's response to the ancient poet. As with the con

ventions of classical dance, Graham dismantles the ele

ments of the myth and restructures it to create the ground for her own footing. So is the myth, already ancient in

Aeschylus' time, expanded, and Agamemnon and Orestes

must allow Clytemnestra not just her antagonism

Aeschylus had allowed her that much?but the full arc

of her protagonism. "Victim. I, too, a victim," Graham

writes of Clytemnestra in her Notebooks, ". . . Saddest

of all, I'm my own victim."8

It was hard to detect any difference between the move

ments in the epilogue and the rest of the dance. The

character of motion seemed the same after the vortex as

before. Clytemnestra wins her acquittal, but she will not

humble herself to become a sylphide, when it is the vor

tex she has braved. Those motions of desire, anguish, re

venge are hers and she will not deny them. Now truly a

queen, she is a woman whose body has survived the

shock of its electric storm and come through secure in

its selfhood.

"Movement never lies," Dr. Graham had admonished

his little daughter on one occasion when she had thought

to conceal some falsehood. "That was rather strong doc

trine for a small person of four or five," Martha, grown to womanhood, writes in her Notebooks.

" 'Lie' in a Pres

byterian household was and still is a clanging word which

sets whispering all the little fluttering guilts which seek

to become consumed in the flame of one's conscience."

The Messenger of Death, who concludes her Clytemnes tra, gives us the Alpha and Omega of Graham's struggle

against, and acquiescence in, her father's strong doc

trine. Death's body takes its place against the black cur

tain. Once again the body goes into massive shock, wave



Norman Austin 399

after wave. The shocks subside, the body grows calm, the Messenger walks offstage. Weltering through Neces

sity's storm, Martha Graham and her company of fellow

Asclepiads learn to dance the paean with Apollo's grace.9

NOTES 1 Quotations from Martha Graham are from The Notebooks of

Martha Graham (New York, 1973). Biographical information on

Graham I have drawn principally from her Notebooks and from

Don McDonagh, Martha Graham (New York, 1973). Clytemnestra was first presented in 1958, with Graham dancing the part of

Clytemnestra. The recent revival, which I saw in November 1974, retains the choreography, sets and music of the original dance, but Graham herself does not perform in it.

2 Plutarch, Solon, ch. 29.

3APVII.411. 4 A. M. Dale, The Lyric Meters of Greek Drama (Cambridge,

1968) 209. 5 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. Denys Page (Oxford, 1957), note

on v. 219. There is more insight in William C. Scott, "Wind

Imagery in the Oresteia;' TAPA 97 (1966) 459-471, and in Ot frid Becker, Das Bild des Weges. Hermes Einzelschriften Heft 4 (1937) 168-177.

6 If the chorus' reference to Agamemnon's breath is metaphor,

figure of speech merely, then we should place everything in the

choral lyric on the same plane. Artemis too must be figure of

speech. We practice a curious reversal on ancient literature, per

haps because of our kinetic loss, in that we usuaDy treat physical manifestations as metaphor and abstractions as the most physical and palpable realities.

7 The Lyric Meters, 209.

8 Graham actually takes a number of liberties with the story of

the Oresteia, and produces a version distinctively her own. To

discuss fully her changes would require another essay. In this

essay my concern is more with the dance qualities of her Clytem nestra than with its plot.

9 My thanks are due to several sources of aid: to Jane Brown

first, from whom I have learned most of what I know of dance, and much of the sibling rivalry between art and inertia; to Jean

Mclntyre, Bonnie Smetts, and Steven Vaughn, whose perceptions of Clytemnestra added to, and clarified, my own; and to Professor

Eleanor Lauer who, by giving me the opportunity to present this

paper to her class in Dance Analysis at Mills College, Oakland,

helped me to clarify my understanding. I am grateful also to the

John S. Guggenheim Foundation for its support of my research on

polarity and unity in Homer, which has indirectly contributed to

some of the ideas in this paper.



Aeschylus Embodied: Martha Graham's Clytemnestra

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