Cutting Room Floor: This Is A Dance, Isn't It?

As I mentioned in a previous post, finding enough material to fill the first halves of our Inside the Classics concerts is never a problem - the challenge comes in deciding what will have to be left out due to time constraints. In fact, after each of our first two concerts this season, Sarah and I have had several people ask, "Why didn't you talk more about...?", and the answer is always that we simply ran out of space in the show.

However, since we have no such limitations here on the blog, I thought I'd spend the next week or so offering up bits and pieces related to Appalachian Spring that we're not going to have time to explore in our upcoming concerts. These "cutting room floor" posts will have their own tag, so if you want to wait until after the concerts to read the extra material, you'll be able to click cutting room floor in our list of tags over in the right-hand column, and you'll get everything on one page.

The most glaring omission from the concerts is going to be any sort of prolonged focus on the fact that Appalachian Spring was originally composed not as a work of concert music, but as a ballet score written for the revolutionary 20th century choreographer Martha Graham and premiered in 1944. Those who attended our Firebird concerts last fall know that we spent a good chunk of time examining the interaction between Stravinsky's score and the dancing that it was written to accompany, but for various reasons, we decided not to do that for the Copland concerts. The major reason is simply that, while Stravinsky's ballets told a very definite story and managed to revolutionize the world of ballet as well as the world of music, Appalachian Spring is somewhat vague in its storyline and was more or less forgettable as a ballet. The piece took on a second life in the concert hall once Copland rewrote it for full orchestra in 1945, and it's that version that we'll be focusing on.

Still, anything choreographed by Martha Graham can't be dismissed entirely, and while the ballet version of Appalachian Spring is rarely performed these days, Graham's influence on both classical and modern dance is with us everywhere. Her signature style is unmistakable, whether accompanying Copland's wide-open scores or, as in this clip from "Night Journey," the sharp, angular sounds of William Schumann.



I find Graham's commentary on this clip fascinating. She talks about "the weight of the body against the floor" being emphasized, rather than minimized, as it would have been in an earlier era. Think about a 19th-century ballet like Swan Lake, in which all the dancers seem to be doing their best to convince you that they are, in fact, weightless, floating about the stage as easily as if they were on the moon. Weight is most decidedly the enemy in traditional ballet, and an almost ethereal style of movement is the goal. Graham turned that philosophy completely on its head, demanding that audiences embrace the raw humanity of her dancers, warts and all. People are heavy. Gravity weighs us down. Deal with it.

This, of course, is why Graham's choreography tends to make some viewers uncomfortable, just as attending a production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? makes us squirm in recognition of the everyday malevolence of people just like us. Rather than offer a vision of human movement that seems godlike and idealized, Graham gives us humanity as it is: endlessly complex, frequently awkward, but beautiful in a raw, earthy sort of way. To me, it's a fascinating contrast with Copland's idealized musical view of America, which we'll be getting into in depth at the Appalachian Spring concerts.

For more on Graham's technique (as well as a few musical clips from the original chamber version of Appalachian Spring,) check out this short clip from the Martha Graham Legacy Project. (They've disabled embedding on this clip, for some reason, so I can't include it on the blog.)