Passage Two Martha
Graham’s territory of innumerable dances and a self-sufficient dance technique
is a vast but closed territory, since to create an art out of one’s experience
alone is ultimately a self-limiting act. If there had been other choreographers
with Graham’s gifts and her stature, her word might have seemed a more balanced
part of the story of American dance. But as she built her repertory, her own
language seemed to shut out all other kinds. Even when an audience thinks it
discerns traces of influence from other dance styles, the totality of Graham’s
theatrical idiom, its control of costumes, lights, and every impulse of the
dance makes the reference seen a mirage. Dance is not her main subject. It is
only her servant. Graham had achieved her autonomy by 1931. By
that time, three giant figures who had invented the new twentieth-century dance
were dead: Serger Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan. Their era ended
with them, and their dance values nearly disappeared. Their colleagues Michel
Fokine and Ruth St. Denis lived on in American like whales on the beach. During
the twenties, Martha Graham and her colleagues had rescued art-dance from
vaudeville and movies and musical comedy and all the resonances of the idyllic
mode in the United States, but in so doing they closed the channels through
which different kinds of dance could speak to one another and these stayed
closed for half a century. Modern dance dedicated itself to deep significance.
It gave up lightness, it gave up a wealth of exotic color, it gave up a certain
kind of theatrical wit and that age-old mobile exchange between a dancer and the
dancer’s rhythmical and musical material. No material in modern dance was
bodies. Modern dance excluded its own theatrical traditions of casual play,
gratuitous liveliness, the spontaneous pretense, and the rainbow of genres that
had formed it. But all these things survived in the public domain, where they
had always lived, and they have continued to surface in American dance, if only
by accident. What criticism does the author make of Martha Graham and he
colleagues
A. They patterned much of their choreographic style after vaudeville.
B. They insisted that all dancers learn the same foreign language.
C. They adopted the same dance values of the previous era without
interjecting any new ideas.
D. They prevented modern dance from expanding beyond their personal
interpretations.