Friday afternoon, February 21 2025 – In the 11th floor rehearsal studio, inundated by Hunter Johnson’s invasive score, bearing witness to the Martha Graham ensemble unspooling this episodic quasi-narrative under the impeccable guidance of Blakeley White-McGuire and the aegis of Janet Eilber, with Miki Orihara lending advice. I haven’t seen this 1943 classic live/alive; I’ve only watched videos from the succeeding decades, and spelled out the work’s resonances with the Bronte sisters in Chapter 25 of Martha Graham – When Dance Became Modern. And yet, when the (ostensible) Victorian literary premises shatter under inner turmoil, fractured partnering, dynamic travelling, and “Emily”/Martha/Anne Souder’s unbearable ambivalence, I let go of preconceptions, seduced one more time into Graham’s field of action.
“How does she do this?” I wonder, yet again, “How does she hypnotize me with movement?”
I am struck by the dramatic sensory shock in the instant I snap this picture: bodies meticulously-placed in the throes of their frenzy, choreographed aura-to-aura, like mutable words in the hundredth draft of a modern poem in process…
…And, lo and behold, the very next evening, while perusing Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte, I landed upon a passage that seems to explain Martha Graham’s choice to “represent” sister Emily in this dance.
Here is Constantin Heger talking; he tutored the Bronte sisters in French at his Brussels Pensionnat during the fall and winter of 1842-43:
“He considered Charlotte unselfish, [as distinguished from] Emily, who he thought to be egotistical and exacting. Emily’s genius was greater than Charlotte’s, he reasoned. Emily was logical and pragmatic but tenacious enough to make her impossible to reason with. “She should have been a man,” Constantin Heger told Elizabeth Gaitskell, “a great navigator. Emily’s powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by oppposition or difficulty.”