A Dancer’s World, the first of Peter Glushanok’s three films on Martha Graham, cuts from the title screen of Graham’s company, standing in the dressing room stretching, to three figurines. The figurine to the right is a dancer, its left leg raised and turned upwards at an impossible ninety-degree angle, with a third arm stretching out from its faceless head. Next to it, on its left, is a small stone sculpture of an arm, raised on a pedestal, its hand held up like a dancer’s. To the left of the arm is another figure of a dancer, this time standing with its feet crossed, its back arched slightly, its hands held out in front of it. Like these three, Glushanok’s film will present us with its own representation of dance, a new, cinematic examination and experience of the medium and of one of its seminal figures. We do not see her at first, though, only the faint shadow of her on the dressing partition behind the statues. Over the image, her voiceover begins. It is controlled, composed, and authoritative, speaking to us almost as a higher power. “The theatre is a very special place,” she tells us. “It is where the act of theatre begins.” The camera is drawn to her here, moving upwards at the sound of her voice, floating slowly towards her shadow on the right and eventually landing on Graham herself, sitting in front of the dressing room mirror.
Glushanok’s film doesn’t focus on Graham’s past, who she is and why she’s significant. Nor does it ever show Graham herself dancing, creating or choreographing a piece, or instructing her company. Instead, we see her in the theatre dressing room as she applies her make-up and prepares her hair for her role as Jocasta. Whereas others might pass it off simply as a place to prepare for the show, an interim space between the studio and stage, the dressing room, for Graham, is an integral part of the dancer’s world; it is where the dancer becomes the character she is to play. This transformation is, on one level, physical. “Make-up,” she says, “is a magic. It’s a ritual. It’s the means by which you transform yourself into the character you hope to play.” But the change is not only external for her, not only the way she styles her hair or the costume she puts on, but internal as well. As Graham tells us, there comes a moment in which she looks into the mirror and the character looks back at her, recognizing the reflection not as Martha Graham, but as the character herself. It is through her that her character and her character’s “hopes, fears, love and terror,” will be expressed.
It is through dance, through how Graham communicates her character, though, that differentiates her as an artist; and yet Glushanok never shows her at work. We never actually see her on stage or in the studio. She is presented here not as a dancer or chorographer, but as an actress (both an actress for the stage and within Glushanok’s film). The image of Graham at the mirror changes and we are brought out of the world of the dressing room and into the studio. The stark setting, the plain white walls and wood floor, stands in contrast to the cluttered dressing room from before. From this point on, the film will alternate between the two, with Graham in one, explicating and expounding her artistic philosophies that drive and shape her work, and her company in the other, illustrating the different techniques that define her style: the awareness of the head and throat, the attention on flexibility and control, the mastery of the turn of the body on its axis, the focus on contracting and releasing the breath. Glushanok and Graham thus provide us with the tools, the raw materials with which she can construct a narrative, but not with the vocabulary of meanings attached to them, nor with the final product or narrative to be interpreted.
Graham controls these two worlds. She dictates the action, blocking, dances, dancers, uniforms, and setting. The mise-en-scene belongs to her. There is thus a certain struggle here, an inherent tension in the balance of power between Graham as both subject and actress and Glushanok as the filmmaker. He exercises his own authority over the film, though. The mise-en-scene may be that of Graham, but the frame is not. We view the dancers here as Glushanok, not Graham, wants us to view them. In the first shot of the studio, the camera follows a dancer as she enters the studio and moves across the floor; like her, it is mobile, controlled yet fluid, moving freely throughout the room. It is its own entity, separate from Graham, elaborating what she says but presenting us with its own perspective, its own point of view.
The filmmaker inherently imposes himself here, and by filming the dances our experience of them is different than if we were to view them in the theatre. Dance is a medium without cuts and without close-ups. Editing and cinematography create their own rhythm that is both intrinsically connected to and separate from the action. The shifting angles and distances, the movement of the camera, and the length of the shots have their own beat, tempo, and pace that gives us a different emotional response. Halfway through the film, we watch as two dancers express “youth’s lyric joy and sadness at being in love for the first time.” It’s a light, energetic dance, captured at first through a long shot, with the two dancers making up only a small portion of the frame, their bodies and the studio in full view. 29 seconds in, though, our experience changes. Glushanok cuts from the long shot to a medium of the two, the man standing behind the woman, holding her arms as she raises them above her, their eyes locked. There is an emotional shift here as their figures become bigger within the frame, the world around them smaller. A stronger intimacy and spark between the characters is established, and we feel a new connection with them. Glushanok gives a new power and significance to the moment between them. The electricity of the live performance is lost on screen, but it’s replaced by a new way to view and experience the work, by a new and different language with which the narrative and characters can be expressed and captured. The world within the frame may be a dancer's, but our experience is something new entirely; and one that is as reliant on Glushanok as it is on Graham.
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