January 15, 2025 – The new years parade by.
I lose count of how many times I have witnessed APPALACHIAN SPRING, and have come to understand why — because a masterpiece is inexhaustible. My familiarity with the enduring content of this dance has likewise expanded outward from within this work, as the intimate interplay of Aaron Copland’s music and Martha Graham’s movement broaden their aura, even here in Studio H, where limited space becomes a blessing: The dancers’ bodies approach. I remain fixed in the chair designated for me, and see them gaze into an imagined distance mere inches away. My privilege is that they do not see me at all. Yes, I’ve been thanked for bringing quiet vigilance into the room, but I revel in isolated irrelevance to (as MG would say) the Action. After the scheduled hour concludes, I leave the studio, emerge into the frigid air, and descend into the subway, agitation unflagging —
— suddenly — the first sentence of Anita Brookner’s Romanticism and Its Discontents leaps from my brain: “A Romantic has been roughly defined as anyone who believes that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”
Long before my immersion in Graham’s modernist movements, I was intoxicated by Romanticism – not merely the nineteenth-century historic period, moreso the aesthetic striving toward an ideal that the artist understands is unreachable. This dynamic seduced me onward into my own craft, a young poet and omnivorous reader of poetry – and still does, in my eighth decade, as an author who is a student of the human condition.
Re-seeing Appalachian Spring gave rise to a few (shall we say supplemental rather than supplanting) thoughts beyond the frame of Martha Graham as the singularly modern-dance maker. I don’t regret that stance; the wheel — as it so often does, if one lives long enough — has come full circle. I return to my nascent attraction to Romanticism that glorified the seeds of aspiration in poetry, painting, sculpture, music — and Martha Graham’s embodiment. Appalachian Spring exhibits the poignant, ambiguous dreams of the betrothed and married couple energetically ready in some ways, naive in others — embarking upon their Romantic “journey of seeking.”
