TRANSPOSING POETRY INTO MUSIC AND MUSIC INTO DANCE
MARTHA GRAHAM'S HERODIADE (1944)
as described by
Henrietta Bannerman
Henrietta Bannerman's wonderful essay on the iconic US dancer and choreographer Martha Graham demonstrates most impressively how poetry may be transposed into music and music into dance. Bannerman demonstrates how a poem by the French poet Stephanie Mallarme was transposed into music by the German composer Paul Hindemith and the music and its inspiring poem transposed into dance theatre by Martha Graham, using a set by Isamo Noguchi. The essay is sublime in its linguistic precision and imaginative robustness, its flawless structure, its sensitivity to the distinctive identities of poetry, music and dance and their correlative being.
Essay can be found free at :
Below are highlights, rearranged using mostly subheadings I devised :
TRANSPOSING BIBLICAL NARRATIVE INTO DANCE: THE STORY OF SALOME
The twenty-two-minute dance Herodiade created by Martha Graham in 1944 marks a pivotal moment in her choreographic development, bridging the divide between the Americana dances of the 1930s and early 1940s and the mythological works of the next twenty years. Based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name1 (1864/65), Herodiade is a duet for an enigmatic ‘Woman’ and her ‘Attendant’ and alludes to the biblical legend of Herodias/Salome.
In her autobiography and in interviews that have been published concerning Herodiade, Graham refers to the principal role as Herodias (Sears 1982; Graham 1991). According to biblical legend, Herodias was the wife of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. This was an incestuous union, which was denounced by John the Baptist and prompted the famously erotic dance performed by Herodias’ daughter Salome. As a reward for herdancing and to avenge her mother’s wrath, Salome demands the head of John the Baptist (St Mark 6, 16–17)
THE POETRY OF THE DANCE
Herodiade repays close study since the separate layers of meaning, drawn from the archetypal sources of myth and history and from Graham’s own artistic and personal narratives, overlap, and create a powerful depth and diversity in the dance. This interweaving of different signifying systems can be analysed through
Intertextuality…
The duet is choreographed in the form of a danced conversation with alternating solos between the two women, and the tone of the choreography ranges in colour and timbre throughout the dance. From the sombre, almost ritualistic, entrances of each woman, the dancing passes through passages of intensity and passion, as well as moments of reflection and contemplation, anger and desperation. There are chilling moments of tension as the woman crosses the stage, upper body twisting sharply against the feet and hips held in parallel.
The attendant9 is an intrinsic part of the drama of the dance and is witness to her mistress’s emotional agony. She is at times solicitous and at others accusatory. In gestures that are hieratic and ominous she seems to spell out the tragic fate which awaits her wilful mistress. But there are also lyrical passages in the dance, which help to relieve its sense of terror. Halfway through the duet, the woman recalls a time in her life when she was more at ease with her surroundings and with herself. Skirt in hand, and with the piano and oboe playing a gentle tango rhythm, she travels forwards to the mirror and retreats from it in kneeling and lunging movements and with steps that softly rise and fall, as though remembering a ball she once attended. The woman appears to see beyond surface reflections as she bows low to the ground. It is as though she acknowledges a dancing partner whom she conjures from the mirror’s depths, or recognises an
apparition, a former self, free from the forces of evil and darkness that now envelop her.
The culmination of the duet comes in a solemn ritual of preparation. As her attendant slowly strips away her outer robe, the woman stands in a shimmering white under-garment, which represents her naked and unprotected soul. As the sombre music dies away, clothed now in the black cloak of fate, the woman
begins to walk towards the wings of the stage. She raises her arms inside the cloak so that the black cloth forms a pyramid, which extends high over her head. In the final image, she bends slowly backwards in such a manner that her head seems to float disembodied against the black material.
TRANSPOSING POETRY INTO MUSIC
Seeking to accommodate Graham’s requirement for music that would offer an emotional core and provide a dramatic edge, Hindemith proposed a score based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Hérodiade. Hindemith had a process in mind whereby he would ‘explore word by word every nuance’ of the poem, and he planned to ‘set the poem as though to be sung, then score the setting for (voiceless) chamber orchestra’. Hindemith himself confirms his intention: ‘The melodic lines in the orchestra are the recitation, which follows the poem word by word’.
Siglind Bruhn has since explained that the process followed by Hindemith is musical ekphrasis, a term deriving from ekphrastic poetry: ‘poems inspired by paintings or other works of visual art, including etchings and drawings, sculptures and architecture, photographs, films, etc.’ (Bruhn 2000, p. xviii). Drawing on a quotation from an article by Claus Clüver (1997) Bruhn defines ekphrasis as ‘a representation in one medium of a real or fictitious text composed in another medium’ (2000, p. 5). Bruhn demonstrates how Hindemith approximated the sonorous qualities of Mallarmé’s vers libre, and employed the musical techniques of ‘pitch contour and rhythm’ so literally that ‘they are found to speak quite eloquently.’ She goes on to say that the music is ‘by no means in some symbolic, non-verbal language, but in Mallarmé’s French’ (ibid.). The notion of musical ekphrasis is appealing and even useful since the process of what Bruhn calls ‘transmedialization’ is the basis on which she claims that several composers have translated literary and visual texts into music.
According to Bruhn, Hindemith used the sonic resonance of the poetic words to transform them into the musical tones and textures of piano, string and woodwind instruments. Hindemith himself claims that his musical idea was to make the sense of the words implicit within what he referred to as the ‘musical Gestalt.’ This drawing together or fusion of instrumental cadences sought ‘to mirror the language/text, which strives towards the most secret springs of poetic expression’ (in Briner 1971, p. 163). These words suggest that Hindemith had a sensitive approach to Mallarmé’s poetry. As a consequence he created a score in which he uncharacteristically gave free reign to ‘sensuous feelings’ (Skelton 1975, p. 211) and which provided the core of emotional depth and expression to which Graham could respond. This development in Hindemith, away from formal abstract structure and patterning and towards more emotionally charged musical composition, should have drawn him closer to Graham’s artistic sensibility.
TRANSPOSING MUSIC INTO DANCE
Graham’s dance theatre tends towards a form of abstraction for which she has a specific theory.Abstraction in dance for Graham is not mere formalism or, as she states, ‘a matter of lines’ (Graham 1963, p. 26). She uses the word abstract more in the sense of a concentrated form of expression since she explains that it means ‘taken from.’ ‘Orange juice,’ she says, ‘is the abstract of an orange’ (ibid.). Graham’s narratives are the expression of underlying currents rather than ofsurface events. It is the mental processes and internal dynamics of her protagonists’ experiences to which her dances give representation and expression. Graham’s metaphoric movements with their associative meanings, and Noguchi’s symbolic tower of bone-like shapes, which represents the all important mirror of the poem…
Reviewing the premiere of the duet as Mirror Before Me, [the critic Robert Sabin] praises the way that the ‘music and dance blend flawlessly’, remarking that the ‘counterpoint’ of Graham’s movement was ‘as strong and logical as the development of the musical texture’Considering the dance now, Graham’s choreography closely follows the range of the composer’s rhythmic gestures and tonal devices, which fluctuate between ‘the lowest notes of the contrabass to the highest flute’ (Hindemith in Briner, p. 162). As each musical speech reaches a crescendo, Graham’s choreography grows vehement. When the musical ‘words’ hover in the air the women hold each other’s gazes. At other times a lingering gesture coincides with the music as it dies away. Graham also follows Hindemith in setting the dances for the woman to woodwind, string, or piano solos, and for the attendant to the ‘gentle themes of the string instruments’ which represent her character. Graham does not just reflect the music, since the attendant punctuates the softly intermingling sounds of strings with violent split falls, high kicks to the side or dramatic hand gestures, representing the spewing forth of some ominous message. In the dances for the woman, Hindemith’s tonal ‘words’ cascade through her body in a torrent of arm and leg movements, or rolling on the floor in an agony of passion. At other times she echoes the almost whispered tremors and vibrations of musical sound with small, delicate movements of the head and hands. When the music grows insistent and urgent, mounting in volume, Graham matches the musical climaxes with forceful movement – the ‘sparkle’ jumps with arms reaching desperately upwards or sudden dives in arabesque to the floor. Graham often infuses the musical score with an extra layer of dramatic intensity but also responds to it with subtle details of movement which follow Hindemith’s variations in dynamic range and richly textured orchestration.
SYNERGY: THE CHOREOGRAPHIC INTERPRETATION OF THE POEM
Creating a dance based on Mallarmé’s Hérodiade was a task which Graham originally found daunting, working hard to respond to Mallarmé’s vers libre. At the heart of the poet’s practice is the process he underwent in striving to create lyric verse that was entirely self-referential, a ‘pure’ poetry which would achieve Mallarmé’s ideal of perfect beauty. It was the activity and the creation of a ‘coherent, self-sufficient construct’ with ‘tight structures, and deliberately imposed rhymes,’ which preoccupied him.
It was Graham’s task to embody the formal structures and linguistic sophistication of Mallarmé’s poetry in her own dance language and she consulted the scholar of French literature, Wallace Fowlie, in her search for an interpretation of the poem. To some extent, she followed the myth enmeshed within it, but for Graham, the poem also evokes the notion of fear. She described it as ‘[…] the fear we all have, the fear of the artist, of a blank white page when writing a composition, the fear of the empty studio when starting a dance’ (1982, p. 28). Clive Barnes responded to this reflexive aspect of the work when he wrote of Herodiade as a ‘wonderful piece of art within art, of drama within drama, the mirror image of the mature woman as an artist […] (1990, p. 17).
Graham took what after all is a literary construct and gave it a fully-fledged embodied presence. She did so through the two-dimensional and regal motif described earlier in the article. The movement permeates the dancer’s body with lines of energy that flow into the space that surrounds her.
Graham approximates the lines from Mallarmé’s poem although she adapts them towards a more narrative function. She borrows the desolate imagery and tone from the poem, echoing their sombre prescience, but as an artist from a different age, she is less concerned with the elusive ideal and more with the search for the self. She emphasises the subjective dimension of Mallarmé’s text, but at the same time she redirects the narrative towards a more pronounced sense of place and moment of self-realisation…
CONCLUSION
In this article, I have endeavoured to show that the dance, the music and the poem spring from pre-existing artistic and narrative codes. Each is already a space in which sign systems and artistic processes enter into a free play with one another. Graham’s dance, for example, merges the archaic two dimensionality of her early movement vocabulary with the later development of characterisation and dramatic staging.
In their exploration of the poem, Hindemith and Graham responded to different aspects of Mallarmé’s poetic sensibility. Hindemith chose to extend what was perhaps a natural affinity between music and poetry as both art forms address the ear. An aspect of Mallarmé’s poetic endeavour was to approximate
music’s shaping of sound and exploration of rhythm (Millan 1994). In turn Hindemith explored tonal variation and the reverberations of human dialogue. Graham’s choreography engages the eye and, I suggest, echoes Mallarmé’s description of the dancer he saw in the 1880s. He remarks on the ballerina’s
‘miraculous lunges and abbreviations’ as a way of ‘writing with her body’ suggesting ‘things which the written work could express only in several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose’. The dancer’s bodily configurations produced a poem ‘written without the writer’s tools’ (1984, p. 112). Mallarmé realised that dance can tap into the pre-linguistic space of human thought and imagination and, that unlike poetry, it transcends the conventions of representation and rules of syntax. Dance produces the fluency of form and pliancy of meaning which Mallarmé constantly sought for his own artistic practice.
Graham’s motifs are a form of bodily inscription in the way that they etch enigmatic hieroglyphs against the visual field of the stage space in which the dancer moves. The motifs in Herodiade condense and distil a narrative of the mythological heroine’s proud and unassailable nature, the emotional and spiritual journey she undertakes and the drama of her situation which generates the courage she needs to confront the fate that awaits her.
The motifs, movement devices and stage sculpture in Graham’s Herodiade exceed the merely representational.Their bodily forms are infused with a rich store of signification reflexive of dance itself and of the mythical heroine who permeates the poem, the dance and the music. The princess Hérodiade is an elusive and ineffable creation because she is a symbol for ‘the poem itself, so difficult to seize and possess that the poet ultimately despairs of knowing it’ (Fowlie 1953, p. 126). In this respect, it seems to me that Graham succeeded in her interpretation of the enigmatic heroine and in following Mallarmé by meditating on her own art form. Hindemith’s choice of Mallarmé’s Hérodiade spurred Graham on to develop a role of archetypal significance.
