Page 48 - Studio Interantional - May 1967

Martha Graham and Noguchi

The close relationship between dancer and sculptor described in captions by
Charles Spencer and illustrated with photographs by Martha Swope from LeRoy Leatherman's
recently-published study of Martha Graham*

Martha Graham's studio is in a three-storey red brick
building at 316 East 63rd Street, New York, crowded
with the sculpture-settings she uses for her dance
dramas. Since Frontier in 1935, Isamu Noguchi has
made settings for more than twenty productions.
Martha Graham has worked with other sculptors,
notably Alexander Calder for Horizons in 1936, the
American artists Arch Lauterer and Frederick
Kiesler, and most recently the Israeli Dani Karavan
for Legend of Judith and Part Real—Part Dream, but she
readily acknowledges that much of the credit for her
success has been due to Noguchi. In collaborating
with him she has always insisted that he must work
as an artist, making pure sculpture which exists in
its own right. They are fortunate in a shared intuition
about the use of stage space and the power of
symbols. After the briefest preliminary consultation
on a new work he usually returns in a few days with
a shoebox containing a miniature maquette. Neither
choreographer nor designer are very practical. On
one occasion a setting which he assured the
company would fit into a suitcase required five
crates, two or three days polishing before each
season, and a mechanical genius to erect. Noguchi
designs are never rejected; instead, Martha Graham
adjusts her choreography so that characters and
action relate intimately to the final settings.

Night Journey (1947) tells the story of Oedipus and
Jocasta, one of the Greek mythological subjects
which has preoccupied Martha Graham since 1946.
Jocasta is the principal protagonist and when the
curtain rises she is alone, holding high the rope
with which she will hang herself. For this ballet
Noguchi created one of his most elaborate sets—a
simple white stool and a series of huge graduated
forms, like a menacing array of teeth, culminating
in a bed, which is more like a rack, deeply slanted.
Examined closely it proves to be a symbolic
abstraction of a man and a woman joined in sex,
representing the incestuous relationship of Jocasta
with her son. This bed-rack, sex-guilt symbol is the
centre of all the significant action, where Jocasta
and Oedipus enact their tragic drama, binding
themselves with ropes. The use of this rope is one of
the ballet's brilliant features, representing the
coiled inevitableness of the story and, in the climax,
becoming the umbilical cord, joining, binding
mother and son.