The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • 7

Dancing With Martha Graham 3 4 Yl i it By Henrietta Buckniaster The Christian Science Monitor News Service 3, i ARTHA GRAHAiM'S influence on the modern dance cannot be measured. She also has had a profound influence on all the arts. it L. 9 1 art v. i I 1 ff i Is, 5 if r4 f' The experience of knowing the body, not just as something lovely to look at, but as a wonder to experience, is the reason dancers are like shells.

Shells are a tiny bit of life, an instant of life, that demands a place. And it begins to weave its own house and it makes its own body. A dancer takes about 10 years to be made 10 years of constant daily work for the body to be so steady and strong that you are not afraid of it any longer. But this is only the beginning. Edgar Varesc, the composer, said, "Martha, everyone is born with genius, but some people only keep it for a few minutes." That is the demand, to keep it.

Q. How do you retain your original vision when you are obligated to divide it between dancers, designer, composer? A. I've been fortunate to work with designers who are. artists. Isamu Noguchi is a great sculptor and although we've not always seen eye to eye, we've never had words because his way is also the result of an intense innqr, vision.

can accept that and keep yourself intact, then your own remains. 4 As for composers, I have worked with great ones. I write copiously, usually at night. I give this script or notations to the composer, if he wants it. script is not rigidly followed.

I never show the composer any movements because then I would never get his fresh, creative response. I never choreograph until I have the music. Halim El-Dabh wrote the music for Clytemnestra. This was not easy. He would come and play the drums himself.

His hand inside an Egyptian drum was an entirely different hand from anyone else's. I never could reproduce those sounds in movement but I did the best I could. Q. I think Clytemnestra stands entirely alone, but why did you do It, an entire evening of the Orestiana? A. I did not start out to do a full length work.

It just got bigger and bigger' as I knew more, about this woman. The why, the terrible inner drive that, caused her causes people today to destroy and be destroyed had not been illuminated in the dance before: Every woman perhaps has some vestige of Clytemnestra in her. I said that to a girl who was going to dance in it, and she said "I have nothing to do with her." I said, I'm sorry but you have. I've seen you kill a man by speaking to him in a certain way and I suggest that is a form of death, just as though you had used a knife." Q. You say the East has meant so much to you.

Yet your imagination has been greatly stirred by Judco-Christian and Greek thinking. A. I think the Greek is more Asian than it is Western-I think this is true of the Hebrew also, and I've read a great deal in Hebraic don't mean by that I accept Asian philosophy. But Asians have the capacity for great stillness. That is why I find it easier to work with Asian giiis because their bodies have the ability to be absolutely still, though never immobile.

The stillness is like a hummingbird's. I lerc is the highest vibration, I suppose, of any living thing; this utter stillness is a miracle. And it is that stillness out of which everything is born. And it is the ability to hold that-an intense still activity at one's own center that is life. The vibration unseen is always there.

And the worker in the arts must recognize this, seize upon it and use it. As far as Asia is concerned perhaps it's the Yankee Clipper part of my background that loves it. I was also brought up in a strange way religiously, half Presbvtcrian and half Roman Catholic this left its mark! "I'll never for- She herself has drawn deeply on many sources and, like all great artists, has made this collective wisdom her teacher and her playmate. Recently the notebooks which she kept for several decades have been published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The imagination of any other artist, in whatever field, would be kindled by their contents.

But the fact that there is never an end to the seeing and the doing is shown in her answers to questions put to her in this interview: Q. Do you agree that the interplay and the intercommunication of the arts Is something that every artist has for his own use? A. Oh, yes, because we are all in this strange world of imagination together. We're all seeking to reveal that interior landscape what the Orientals call the "other mind." Q. A private vision becomes a dance how does it begin? A.

My experience as a dancer has been that I am under orders to work from the body itself, that is, the necessity to reveal the hidden things that we all share. "I've been there now, a boy, a girl, a bird, a tree, a fish swimming in the silent sea." If we don't take advantage of our ancestry, our ancestry not only as human beings but as inheritors of the marvels that exist around and around us, then we lose a great deal of life. When I start a dance, I'm absorbed with an idea, because my ideas deal with theater as a very definite and strong impulse in life. I believe that the word "theater" was a verb before it was a noun: It was an act before it was a place, and all of, my works deal with life rather than design. When I'm working on a new, piece, I'm a thief I steal from anything poetry, painting, music, color, only I hope I do it no dishonor.

There is so much to feel. There is nothing unique about feeling everything feels, a leaf feels, a flower feels. Experiments are being made with leaves with one that was cut five days ago and one that is new cut. The one that is new cut leans toward the worker leaf as though to give it strength. In working on a piece, if it is about a woman, and most of them have been, I try to find her lowest common denominator and then go up.

You can't start at the top and go down. Q. You speak of the body as the thing you work with most, but you are also working much of the time with ancient wisdoms disguised as men and women. Clytemnestra, for example your greatest woman-dance, explores almost more than one can bear. A.

The secret of Clytemnestra was that until, in Hades, she could say, "Why do I go dishonored among the until she was willing to face the fact she had done evil in murdering her husband, she was denied a future life. You are unique and so am I. If you do not fulfill that uniqueness, it is lost to the world. No matter how uncomfortable it may be, you must pay your debts to the life that has been permitted you. And to do it with as much courage as possible.

I feel that those people who drink too deeply of the River of Forgetfulness, as in Plato's myth, are unfortunate, because they miss so much. Remembering can be torment. But wheu you emerge, you're able to laugh. And, of course, the ability to laugh has been man's saving grace. Q.

What happens along the way that allows you to laugh? A. Everything. I can put it best in the words of Sarah Bernhardt, "Even so." AH her life she met defeat by looking for another door. And the consciousness of memory, the excitement one finds in a book, in a landscape, in sounds; it's all so exciting because you recognize it. That is what memory is.

It is not an easy course because sometimes you remember things it would be better to forget. But to fulfill your ultimate is a responsibility. It's like Marianne Moore saying "Victory will not come to me. I must go to it." Q. You speak of ancestry.

What about the future that on is capable of creating? A. don't think very much of the future. I believe very much with St. John Perse, "You have so little time to be born to this instant, and if you can be born to this instant, then the future builds on it, like a step forward." But the future no one could make me believe for a moment that my future, when I was a child, would be anything comparable to what it is in my present. Martha Graham get my excitement when I found an unexpected meaning in the dictionary, for the word "sin" "to miss the mark." That was for me a great comfort.

Sin had nothing to do with Cotton Mather or hellfire or damnation. POINTS FOR Home and family PARENTS Q. You wrote: "If the Kingdom of Heaven is within, then within is where reality lies." Would you put that any differently now? A. No. Though I might not use the words "Kingdom of so lightly now.

But drawing out the true meaning of education that's touching some part of the Kingdom of Heaven. I think we're beginning to get back to that understanding drawing, forth what you, are. i- In working with dancers, particularly now that I no longer dance, my in-, tcrcst is in helping them live as individuals, not as members of a group to give, them every opportunity to become what they are able to become if they have the courage. And if that lies within one, then the fields, the palaces and meadows of your memory which St. Augustine speaks of overcoming become nature inclining once again to those places in your memory.

If that is within you, then all the world should help you bring it forth. Tuesday, January 8, 1974 Page 7 Don't feel flattered if your small child won't let anyone but you feed, dress or care for him. He's too dependent on you and must learn that others cart care for him lovingly and well. The knowledge should add to, rather than detract from, his sense of security. Checking In on First Class At Wit's End By Erma Bonibcck Y(5U DON'T have to be a sensitive person to sit in the tourist section of an airplane and wonder what goes on in first class.

There's a mys- iinua ahmif if was sitting in tourist class!" I looked around me to make sure no one was listening. "Let me lay it on you. Sec that cushion that says, 'Flotation cushion'?" He nodded. "I've been flying for 15 years and not once has that cushion flotated." "What docs flotation mean?" he asked. "Who knows? I've never been in first class to find out!" My eyes narrowed.

"Don't you believe it. The people in first class get to where they are going first. Their magazines are always current. Their cabins are always pressurized. Their windows don't open.

There are no children with chocolate dried around their mouths. "Their fastcn-scat-belt lights never burn out. Good heavens, man. You saw You know where the nut with the homemade bomb i that titillates the tancy of the most in-d i cnt traveler. May be if they didn't draw the curtain that divides the two sections, no one would ilVllHIII "jtf ERMA OMB ECK 1 4743f Season Greats famous label bras and girdles 99 to 14.99 Come in today dnd choose from your favorite brands your favorite styles.

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Later when he got bumped to tourist, I asked "What was it like up there? What did you have to eat?" "No big deal," he said. "We had shrimp cocktail and filet mignon. What did you have?" "Veal look-alike and plastic green noodles. Level with me. Could you stand up in the restroom?" "Sure.

And we had car-phones for music. You had earphones, didn't you?" "Actually, no. We had a steward who went up and down the aisle humming the theme music from Grapes of Wrath." He shrugged, "I don't think first class is any different from tourist class." 1 Start a new season smashingly with this zip-front dress. Pattrrn 4743: Misses' Sizes 8 through 20. Crochet jacket of worsted in rib-stitcli design.

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