>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:23 >> Anne McLean: I'm Anne McLean from the Library's Music Division. We are very excited to be able to present this special lecture by Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance. The title is "Cave of the Heart," Noguchi's set for the Graham ballet. It's an interesting and unusual event for us and kind of an informal gallery talk centering on Isamu Noguchi's serpent and spider dress. If you're coming to one of the Graham Company's performances this week, and I hope you are, you'll see the complete set on stage. And by the way, if you have a program, please hang on to them because they're going fast. Tonight's lecture is one of four events focusing on Isamu Noguchi and our Martha Graham at the Library festival. They are made possible through the generous support of Dr. Sachiko Kuno and Dr. Ryuji Ueno. The profound artistic connection and lifelong friendship between Graham and Noguchi is an important programmatic thread running through our tenday festival of events in talks and film screenings that explore a fourdecade collaboration. Without Isamu Noguchi I could have done nothing, Graham commented, saying that he was for her almost like another dancer. And she talked about the unspoken language she shared with him, a rich vocabulary of symbolism. Everything he does means something, she said. Whatever he did in those sets, he did as a Zen garden does it, back to a fundamental of life of ritual. Janet Eilber has written about the challenges of working with these arresting, evocative sculptural designs for dancers, quote, an intimate and complicated relationship with the sets. A dancer herself, she's performed many of the roles originated by Martha Graham, dancing, for example, the role of the pioneering woman in "Appalachian Spring" on our stage in the Coolidge Auditorium. In other arenas she stared in Bob Fosse's musical "Dancin," and in the "American Dance Machine". Her extensive work as an actor includes stage, film and television appearances, and she has received four Lester Horton awards for her reconstruction and performance of seminal American modern dance. Since 2005 her brilliant curatorship of the Graham legacy and her work as artistic director of the company has centered on creating new forms of audience access to the Graham masterworks. In this endeavor she's opened new avenues through technology and media ventures, like a new app for mobile phones and a presence on the Google Cultural Institute, as well as a substantial commissioning program from new works, which we have benefited from. I'd like to say that we are very grateful to Janet, who's a longtime friend of the Library, for helping also to bring the Martha Graham collection here to the Library of Congress, and especially for her collaboration in developing this festival with us. We are celebrating together the 90th anniversary of the Library's concert series and the 90th anniversary of the Martha Graham Dance Company. So please join me in welcoming Janet Eilber. ^M00:03:33 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:34 >> Janet Eilber: I just need to squeak through. ^M00:03:35 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:41 >> Janet Eilber: Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Anne. We are so excited about this festival and especially, of course, about the commission that I hope you're all coming to see at the world-premiere on Friday and Saturday night and the many different ways of looking at the Graham legacy. It's all a wonderful highlight of our 90th anniversary season. Once in a while we say it's 90 the hard way, but we're feeling really good about it. And we want to say a big thank you to the Library for this special festival. It's really wonderful. So tonight we're going to focus on this wonderful collaboration between Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi, and especially on one particular work, "Cave of the Heart". I'm here to speak from the Graham side of the aisle because I danced "Cave of the Heart" for many years as the chorus and it was one of my very favorite roles. Tonight I want to begin to look at talking about their common aesthetic, the commonality between these two artists and the evolution of their discoveries, their innovations for the stage leading up to "Cave of the Heart" so we can all better appreciate what all is poured into this work that they arrived at in 1946, and then I hope we'll have some time for questions and perhaps a social media moment. We'll hope you'll take some pictures of the set and Tweet them or Instagram them, or whatever you want to do. So Martha and Noguchi had a partnership, as Anne said, that lasted for decades, created over 20 unique works for the stage. And though they were working in different art forms, they were both searching for the elemental shape, whether in movement or in sculpture, that would provide the viewer with what they like to say the shock of recognition, a phrase that they borrowed from their friend Buckminster Fuller. Noguchi said I wanted something that was irreducible. And Martha often said I was after the thing itself. For Martha that involved creating a revolutionary new type of dancing that was borne out of natural gesture, out of body language, and while she was doing this, Noguchi was experimenting with the same idea, the power of organic, primal shapes in his sculptures. Martha said she was attracted to Noguchi's ideas because, quote, He had the astringency that everything was stripped to essentials, rather than being decorative. Everything he does means something. It is not abstract, except if you think of orange juice as the abstraction of an orange. And that pretty much describes her own aesthetics to a T. I can't tell you how many times in rehearsal she would stop and rail against some lovely new interpretation we had added by saying it was frankly decorative. That was the ultimate insult. Their first work for the stage came about in 1935. I'm going to see if I know how to do this now. Yes. Earlier in her career Martha had rejected the traditional stage décor, which was usually a painted backdrop. She considered it to be distracting and decorative. And she danced on a bare stage needing nothing else. But as her work matured she wanted the audience to have more information and she wanted a sense of place, location and atmosphere, so she turned to her friend Isamu Noguchi. He had created a bust of her several years earlier, which she hated, and she insisted that he create another, but they remained friends. And he created this set for the solo she was working on titled "Frontier." Noguchi later wrote about this set. "Frontier" was my first set. It was, for me, the genesis of an idea to wed the total void of theater space to form an action. A rope running from the two top corners of the proscenium to the floor rear center of the stage, bisected the threedimensional void of stage space. This seemed to throw the entire volume of air straight out over the heads of the audience. At the rear convergence there was a small section of log fence to start from and return to. The white ropes created a curious ennobling of an outburst into space, and at the same time, of the public's inrush towards infinity. Martha had suggested to him that she wanted something like the railroad tracks. Her family traveled across country quite often, and that idea of perspective. Noguchi finished, This set was the point of departure for all my subsequent theater work. Space became a volume to be dealt with sculpturally. Prior to "Frontier" in 1935 -- there's one with Martha next to the set -- Martha had already been experimenting with this idea of the power of manipulating the empty space on stage with her choreography for large groups of women. "Heretic," from 1929, is a prime example of Martha's use of space to support her emotional theme, with its wall of women in black constantly shifting and blocking the path, blocking the freedom of the lone figure in white. It was a modernist, geometric evocation of oppression. In her classics "Primitive Mysteries" from 1931, "Celebration" from '34, and "Panorama" from 1935, which had a cast of 33 dancers, Martha was mining the space on stage with her geometric patterns, the counterpoint of these groups of women, to create pathways, tableaus, lines of force and different levels to most powerfully send her message, her emotional message. In fact, "Panorama" used ramps and staircases on stage, as well as an overhead mobile by Alexander Calder. So she was primed with these ideas when she and Noguchi connected, and the two of them continued to innovate and develop this idea. You'll see "Appalachian Spring" in our programs this weekend, and I'm going to show you a little bit of it. The stage here at the Library is concise, so we do -- part of the set is kind of through the door in the back of the stage, but that's the way Martha must have done it in the very first performance, but I want to show you a film that shows you the entire set and you'll see that it's an extension of the discoveries Noguchi talked about in "Frontier". The beams of this house, this outline of a house that is on stage, have that same idea of perspective built into them so that space is pushed out over the audience's head, and at the same time inviting them in to this new home nestled in the prairie. Let me see if I can manage this. Come on. There it is. This is kind of a side view at the moment. The camera's going to come around and give you the front and center view. ^M00:11:54 [ Music ] ^M00:12:30 You might have caught a bit of it in that clip, but you'll definitely see it in performance this week, that the dancers are also required to inhabit this new space that Noguchi has created. So as they enter, and in many places throughout the ballet, they gesture out across the limitless space, the frontier, the future, they gaze out in that direction. The pioneering woman is often making sure that there's no trouble out there, out on the prairie. So it's quite a revolutionary aspect of what Graham and Noguchi put together. Now, they no sooner had sort of conquered this idea of extending and changing the space on stage, but they began to understand that they could also evoke inner space, the psychological space. As Martha liked to call it, the inner landscape. And while she began choreographing the mind, Noguchi was using organic shape to also evoke the interior. The same evening as they premiered "Appalachian Spring" at the Library, they premiered "Herodiade," with a score by Paul Hindemith, another commission from the Library. It's kind of a mysterious dance, even to those of us who have danced it. There's no exact narrative. This may be a woman choosing between life and death, it may be a recurring theme in Graham's work, the dilemma of the creative artist fighting against repression, but it's definitely an internal battle made visible. Noguchi said about his set that "Herodiade" was the most Baroque and specifically sculptural of my sets. Within a woman's private world and intimate space I was asked to place a mirror, a chair and a clothes rack. Salome dances before her mirror. What does she see? Her bones, the potential skeleton of her body. The chair is like an extension of her vertebrae; the clothes rack, the circumscribed bones on which is hung her skin. This is the desecration of beauty, the consciousness of time. So the mirror is on the left side there, with the swinging moon-shaped articles, and Martha in her solos would advance to it and back away, really aiming for the bird. She used to talk about the bird in the center of the mirror that was the animating life that she could dance to in the middle of this. So following "Appalachian Spring" and "Herodiade" in 1944 Graham and Noguchi did three works that I consider to be some of their greatest, all based on Greek myth. They both were  this was a common to both of them, very interested in myth and legend, and to the archaic, archaic art of ancient cultures. I think they understood that these ancient stories were elemental to the human condition and very much aligned with what they were trying to do in their modernist form. These three works; "Errand into the Maze," "Cave of the Heart" and "Night Journey". Using the classics as inspiration also gave Martha another advantage. Again, the audience would arrive with preknowledge. They knew the characters and she didn't have to spend any time introducing them. She could dive right into the drama. And so not satisfied with just manipulating space on stage, Martha was now also beginning to rearrange time on stage, choreographing memories, flashbacks, stream of consciousness. "Night Journey" from 1947 is probably the best example of this technique. It's Martha's version of the Oedipus story, and it begins as Sophocles' play ends, with Jocasta having discovered the truth and the curtain goes up with her holding the rope over her head and about to end her life. The ballet takes place, it's about a 30minute ballet, as if her life flashes before her eyes in the seconds before she does herself in. She remembers Oedipus and she remembers their marriage and discovering the truth, and the ballet ends with her tightening the rope around her neck and doing herself in. For this dance, this story of incest -- I'm going to have to shoot through. Sorry, you're going to see "Errand into the Maze". Noguchi created a bed, but it's more than a bed, of course. He said, I created a bed as the central sculpture, a double image of male and female. So you can see the left side of the bed is the phallic side, the male side, and the right side of the bed has the organic breasts, if you will. So his organic shapes, it was as Noguchi could be so practical, it was a bed and a story about incest, but it just has so many more meanings in its beautiful shape. I want to detour just a little while we're talking about organic shape, to talk a little bit more about Martha's interest in this because one could say, well, you've got a body on the stage, that's an organic shape, right. But really, Martha's technique is a little more complicated than that. In the 1920s she was dissatisfied with dance of the day, which was, frankly, decorative, escapist, gods and goddesses from imaginary places, kings and queens, swans and flowers, and that sort of thing, and she really wanted to dance about real human emotions and the human condition. And she started experimenting with and studying body language, how we hold ourselves when we are under stress or when we're in love or when we laugh or when we cry, and she discovered her new approach. One of the things she discovered was that emotion rides on the breath. When you're nervous, oh, it's on your breath. When you sob, when you laugh, it's all coming from the center of your torso. And through that idea she developed her famous contraction and release; the contraction being the coiling in, the folding of the torso, [demonstrating], the exhale, and the release being the inhale, [demonstrating], and the expansion that sends energy throughout the whole body. I'm going to put on a video and I'm going to keep talking. This is an excerpt from a Martha Graham classroom, from a technique class, and in a Graham technique class we spend about the first 30 minutes of a 90minute class on the floor, sitting on the floor, so that you articulate and strengthen the torso without the legs getting involved. Of course, they are involved, but  and so you'll see in this exercise, which probably the one you're about to see would happen 20 minutes into a class. We've gone through the basic contractions and releases. Okay. It's going to come up, isn't it? Give it a minute. There we go. And this one's a little more complicated. You'll see the torso is not only contracting and releasing, but it's spiraling. The legs are leveraging against the floor. And she began to understand, as she developed this technique -- and she developed it on stage, really. She had a vision for what she wanted on the stage, and then began excerpting the movement that she was putting on the stage into the classroom so that she could study it and teach it to other dancers. So it's a very dramatic emotional technique. And she began to understand how intimate and emotional, even erotic, movement driven by the torso and the pelvis can be. And at the same time she saw how much physical power is generated by using the core muscles, the weight of the body leveraging against the earth, rather than the antigravity goals of classical ballet. Quite the opposite. She wanted both the power and the message of effort. These are called pleading contractions, and we're encouraged to think of the Pieta. We're showing the vulnerability of the inner wrist and the side of the neck exposing the jugular. ^M00:22:16 ^M00:22:25 Release. ^M00:22:26 ^M00:22:42 Big contraction. So on our programs this weekend all of the Graham works on these programs will be using this vocabulary that is entirely driven by the torso. It's not always a very obvious big contraction and release. Sometimes it's a simple shift of the back that makes us walk. There's no such thing as just sort of a casual Graham walk. It's the weight of the body shifting before the foot catches it. In Medea's dance of vengeance, her second solo, she begins -- you'll think she's just standing stock still and then you'll begin to see her dress vibrate and her whole body is shaking with fury. These are all little contractions, stuff coming from the center of her body to denote these emotional things. They're going to do a little bit more for us. There's a beautiful contraction. They're going to go into a full  another move from Medea is what we call the knee vibrations, where her insides are so stirred up that it gets the leg involved, but again, it's all coming from the torso, contracting and releasing, and the turmoil in the  what she's going through shows throughout her whole body. All right. I'll let them keep going for a minute, but I want to now talk about the specifics, specifics of "Cave of the Heart". Martha was so eager to choreograph this story. In 1941 she wrote a script titled "Daughter of Colchis," about the dance drama she envisioned, and she wrote, about Medea, To me, she is a barbarian princess. She possesses the animality of the undisciplined being. It is bitter, sardonic, murderess, despairing. Someplace I read that it might be any wife to any husband. I ought to know about that. She intended to do Medea as the first commission with the Library of Congress, and she sent that script to Aaron Copland who declined and suggested it might be nice, as he said, to be a little less severe, maybe a combination of "Our Town" and the script that you sent me. ^M00:25:28 [ Laughter ] ^M00:25:31 So in 1942 she sent the script to Carlos Chavez, but the score that Chavez sent her did not have what she called the secret violence that she had described in the script and she decided the score was without stage awareness, so she didn't use it until a few years later, when she created a gorgeous ballet, "Dark Meadow," from the Chavez score. Very ritualistic. It's known as her Jungian ballet. And we are doing highlights from "Dark Meadow" on our program this weekend. So finally, in 1945, now we're four years later, she sent the script to Samuel Barber who created the score that you'll hear with "Cave of the Heart" today, and which has become a wellknown standard orchestral work in the American concert repertoire. So "Cave of the Heart" premiered in 1946. Martha, of course, stripped the Greek tragedy down to its essences, and Noguchi matched her with the abstract set pieces that evoke both story elements as well as some of the most basic human emotions. The action in "Cave of the Heart" is carried by four players only; the sorceress Medea, who has been rejected by her lover; the ambitious Jason, who's overthrown Medea to make a political marriage to the princess; the innocent princess, Jason's new bride; and the all-knowing but powerless Chorus, who warns the audience that a tale of horror is about to unfold. Now, about the set. It's both a landscape and an inner landscape. Noguchi said, I constructed a landscape like the islands of Greece. On the horizon, center rear, lies a volcanic shape like a black aorta, like a heart. To this leads steppingstone islands. This references Jason's voyage and the Golden Fleece. Opposite is coiled a green serpent on whose back rests the transformational dress of gold. So these five smaller rocks are the Greek Islands, the stepping stones. Of course, they're in a different place on the stage. I think one of my video clips will show you how they're set up on stage. And this is the serpent, Medea's sort of home base, with the transformational dress on top. Martha said, When I needed a place for Medea on stage, the heart of her being, Isamu brought me a snake. And Noguchi said, Martha didn't ask me to make a snake. These are objects that I make that derive from a depiction of an emotional state. So as Martha choreographed she integrated this set into the choreography. Noguchi's design, of course, gave her pathways and gave her different levels and places to hide. Each character has a home base. We have Medea's here with us, and you'll see when she's on stage, you're viewing it from the front and she is so low inside, it's almost like there's a lower level to the stage. It's almost as if she's below the area. And she's hiding things behind the serpent that appear in the course of the dance. The chorus, her home base is the heart, the aorta, which is not on display, you'll see in one of the clips. And the dancers call it the elephant because it looks like an elephant lying on its back with four feet sticking up in the air. And the great creativity in how Martha has designed the choreography for the chorus and for the other characters to use the different levels and the ins and outs of the elephant is quite wonderful. Who else. Jason. Jason's home base is really the five Greek Islands that he strides across on occasion. At the pinnacle of his male chauvinistic arrogance he takes the princess up onto the heart center stage and puts her on one corner and straddles two other corners as absolute the highest point on stage, which Martha has used specifically this high and mighty position to prime us all for the great fall that is about to happen. The princess' home base is Jason, and you'll see why when you see the show. They're very complicated lifts. They're kind of joined at the hip. She's either on his shoulder or on his hip or walking up his thigh or stretched across his lap or -- you know, home base is Jason for her. As for how Martha used time in "Cave of the Heart," she starts in the middle of the story. The princess is already there, Jason has already made the announcement that -- you know, and Medea's world is already upsidedown. So we start right in the middle of things. And it marches fairly chronologically. Not so much to like "Night Journey," which is memories and going back and forth, but what she does do is she freezes time in "Cave of the Heart". Three of the characters will go into a tableau while another one comes forward and we see his or her inner monologue. It's very kind of cinematic, I'm ready for my close-up, they come forward, and then the group dances again and then the princess and Jason come forward. They each have a moment to let you into their secrets. Also, she uses the same technique in "Appalachian Spring," by the way. You'll see time freeze, the tableaus that the dancers make while we hear the inner workings of one or another of the characters. So I want to show you a video of Jason and look at the movement motifs for each one of these characters. You'll see that they are very archaic, almost like coming off the side of a Greek vase, particularly the three other than Medea. Of course, Medea was Martha's role. Here's Jason. Very two-dimensional. You can see how the islands [inaudible]. ^M00:32:22 [ Music ] ^M00:32:39 Yeah. You almost got to see the aorta in the background. Next I'm just going to show you the princess. You can see how two-dimensional she is, too. ^M00:32:50 ^M00:33:01 I hope. ^M00:33:02 ^M00:33:09 No. It's the wrong one. You'll get to see that, I promise. ^M00:33:14 ^M00:33:23 Here she is. ^M00:33:24 [ Music ] ^M00:34:02 So she's very frontal, keeping her shoulders to the audience, doing all these little doll-like gestures, like a little paper doll, really. And finally, the chorus, if I'm in the right place now. This is, in particular, a moment where she's like a [inaudible]. ^M00:34:21 [ Music ] ^M00:34:41 Something else to look for in the role of chorus, which is, I think, why it was one of my favorite roles, for the chorus alone the fourth wall is down. She's talking to the audience. The other characters are interacting, you know, they're creating something for Medea to fight against and move the story along. But from the very first gesture of the chorus Martha told me in Greek theater someone would come out and bang a staff on the floor and say a tale of horror is about to unfold, if you can't take it, you should leave now. And that's the role of this character. She empathizes with Medea, but she knows what's going to happen and she is constantly moving forward to the audience sort of saying you should leave, you should leave. And, of course, that costume is so beautifully graphically designed. All right. Let's talk about Medea. It's Martha's role, of course, so it's much more flesh and blood than it is archaic; although you'll see it does have some stylization that is within the vocabulary of the work. It's her journey, Medea's journey in the course of the ballet, so in spite of being a vengeful murderess, she's the protagonist of this work. She has two remarkable solos. The first one is a lament. She's trying to win Jason back. She does gestures, you know, trying to -- perhaps considering she's not beautiful anymore. And this is a solo that contains a series of upsidedown arabesque turns, that I'm going to show you, that are known now as the Cave turns because Martha invented them for this ballet. She throws her torso over, the leg comes up, she turns around. It's a cry, a wail, and at the same time shows you that her world is absolutely upsidedown. So here's a little bit, I hope, of that one. ^M00:36:55 ^M00:37:00 [ Music ] ^M00:38:07 And there you got a good shot of the aorta up there in the back, too. The second solo is Medea's dance of vengeance, probably the best known part of the music of this score. It contains a wellknown moment where she pulls a long red ribbon out of her costume and devours it, spews it out, rolls around in it. Noguchi said she's dancing with the snake in her mouth and then she spews it out of her mouth like blood. Martha used to say that it was her own venom that she was dancing in. And it's an extraordinary solo that I'm not going to show you any of. You have to come see it. But I am going to give you a sneak preview of the use of the brass dress of thorns because it sits glittering evilly on stage for the entire ballet, and for anyone who hasn't seen before, you may not realize that it's going to move. Martha said when I brooded on what I felt was the insolvable problem of representing Medea flying to return to her father, the sun, Isamu devised a dress for me, worked from the vibrating brilliant pieces of bronze wire, that became my garment and my chariot of flames. I also think that it becomes her glittering evil aura in these last moments. So I'm just going to show  I'm not going to show you the very end, but I'll show you a little bit of it. ^M00:39:47 ^M00:39:55 [ Music ] ^M00:40:38 That's all you get. You got to come back and see more. Well, that's my story. I'm happy to take any questions and anything you'd like to know about the set or the dance or what we're bringing this weekend. Yes. ^M00:40:53 [ Inaudible comment ] ^M00:40:54 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:55 Oh, thank you. ^M00:40:56 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:58 Thank you. >> Thank you. Where are  >> Anne McLean: Just a second. >> Microphone. >> Janet Eilber: Oh, they want you to have a microphone. >> Yes. Where are you? >> Janet Eilber: Right here. ^M00:41:09 ^M00:41:14 >> Where are the original 20 sets? >> Janet Eilber: We have some of them. Some have left us, have some private owners at this point. Do you want to hear the Hurricane Sandy story? About almost four years ago now we moved into Merce Cunningham's studios down in the West Village, which we still are not sorry about, and about three months later Hurricane Sandy hit and all of our sets and costumes, and many other things, were down in the basement and under water for about two weeks because there was no electricity to Lower Manhattan and we couldn't pump it out and there were, of course, many other more urgent situations. So none of the Noguchi sets were destroyed. They were damaged. They need painting and fixing and that sort of thing. So we've been working hard. And, in fact, this is new. This "Cave of the Heart" on Friday night will be the first cast to use the new set. We've restored the old set, but we also have created a new set with the help of FEMA. And that is really a short version of the story. It was quite  we didn't miss any performances and all of our dancers were fully clothed. We had over 5,000 costumes in the basement and -- you know, I mean, a 90year legacy, it's like, you know, sort of a closet that hasn't been cleaned out in 90 years. We had a lot of stuff, so. But we worked with the Noguchi Foundation and Museum and to really try to restore the sets and understand what the original was like. We've had other iterations. The sets have been in use constantly over the decades so they have been replaced before. And in my opinion, the middle age version that was created after I danced in the company was too shiny and the colors were too bright and  you know, so we're trying to get back to the original looks of the set as best we can. Only black and white photos exist, you know, so you don't know the exact colors, that sort of thing. >> Yes. Hi there. I'm wondering, just seeing her up close in that last two sections, what was her ethnicity; what was Martha's ethnicity? >> Janet Eilber: That was not Martha. Sorry. I should have  >> Oh. >> Janet Eilber: I should have told you. No. This was the cast  >> She looked so Asian so I thought  >> Janet Eilber: She is definitely Japanese. >> wait a minute now. She looked really different when she was younger. Okay. Okay. >> Janet Eilber: This was a cast from the '80s. >> Okay. >> Janet Eilber: Yeah. Martha stopped dancing "Cave of the Heart" in the '50s. >> Okay. Yeah. Right. >> Janet Eilber: So we don't have a film of her dancing "Cave of the Heart" though. >> And another quick question was did Erick Hawkins dance any of those? >> Janet Eilber: He was the original Jason. >> He was. >> Janet Eilber: Yeah. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> In terms of the props and the headpieces  >> Janet Eilber: Yes. >> that were used in the various dances, did Noguchi work on any of those? >> Janet Eilber: Yes. >> Okay. >> Janet Eilber: In fact, that will let me show you one of these other pictures, if I can get back to it. In "Errand into the Maze," which I moved through too quickly, but let me see if I can get to it now, he created  "Errand into the Maze" is based on the myth of Theseus. Ah, and there he is. And Theseus who went into the maze to battle the monster Minotaur, but Martha, of course, sends a woman on this journey. And the maze, maybe in her own mind, the confrontation with her own fears, Noguchi created this incredible sort of cavernous brain space, those bones on the side making a very interesting V-shaped portal for this journey, and he created this staff bone that goes across the man's shoulder. This mask, he created several different versions of the mask. This is the one we're currently using. But the man, the creature of fear, dances for the entire dance with that bone through his shoulders, does lifts with the woman and everything. It's quite a marvelous contraption. Yeah. Yes. >> Well, first, I have to say what a thrill it is to have you here and  >> Janet Eilber: Oh, thank you. >> up close and personal. I've seen you on stage and it's  I'm tingling. >> Janet Eilber: Oh, good. >> Thank you so much for being here. I'm wondering, in the floor exercises that you showed, are there positions  is there like a canon, like in ballet  >> Janet Eilber: Yes. >> you know, first position, and so that there is a regimented, you know, that you refer to, you know, when you say, you know, position X and Y? >> Janet Eilber: Yes. We'll do the position, the fourth position spiral on two, four and eight. >> Oh. >> Janet Eilber: We're going to the back leg extension, we're going to do the pleadings with the pretzel. Yes, it's a codified vocabulary system that's been compared with classical ballet with its methodology and the specificity of it. >> Is that  >> Janet Eilber: So we do about 30 minutes on the floor, starting with simple breathings, we call them, just lifting the spine to upright and then contracting, and lifting and then we give it  we start to do a spiral and then we add a head to the spiral and then we add an arm and a leg to the spiral, and then it develops from there. But, yes, it's very codified. And, as I said, because Martha was bringing movements from her stage works, there are things that we just say, okay, now we're going to do Cave turns and nobody bothers to say, by the way, these are from "Cave of the Heart," blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just the Cave turns, so. >> Is that in some form that's accessible to the public to study or to  >> Janet Eilber: Well, of course, we teach it at our school. >> Do you have classes for the public? >> Janet Eilber: We do. >> Oh. >> Janet Eilber: We have open classes. >> Okay. >> Janet Eilber: And we have full-time students. And there have been a couple of books written about it. They're out of print, but you can still find them online. >> Oh, wonderful. >> Janet Eilber: And we are working  Anne mentioned our Google Cultural Institute. If you go to googleculturalinstitute /marthagraham, search Martha Graham, you'll see we have an exhibit there and it's in three categories. One is Martha Graham herself, one is the Martha Graham Dance Company, and one is the Martha Graham Technique. So you can see short films, a little more explanation about the language that she created. And that exhibit is going to expand so  >> Oh, wonderful. >> Janet Eilber: But it's a good start. >> Thank you. >> This gentleman here [inaudible]. >> Janet Eilber: Okay. >> Yes. If you could speak of the collaboration between Noguchi and Graham, how the sculptures were created, and was it iterative or did they just appear? >> Janet Eilber: I'm sorry. I didn't hear the end. >> Was it iterative? >> Janet Eilber: Iterative. Not really. Martha would hypnotize her collaborators, I think. Speaking as one of them, I know she would certainly hypnotize the dancers. As she was imagining a new world that she was going to create for the stage she would bring in books, she would bring in poetry. We'd be all warmed up and ready to go and we'd sit on the floor for a couple of days just listening to her, looking through big art books, and she was drawing us into the world. And then she would  when I worked with Martha, she was quite old so she would not demonstrate movement for us. She would ask us to look at these shapes and create something, and then she would begin to manipulate it and shape it, and invariably make it harder than anything that we had put together. And I really think she did the same thing with her collaborators. Certainly we know the letters between Copland and Graham, she was sending scripts, they were considering poetry, primitive painting, religion, the war. They were filling themselves with ideas and images before they began to create the work. And I'm sure with Noguchi it was the same thing. They discussed what the theme would be, what she was going for. And he would go and create something and bring it to her, and if she didn't like it, she would say, well, let me think about it, Isamu, and he would know she didn't like it and take it away and bring something else back the next day. Dakin Hart, who's speaking tomorrow, speaks from the Noguchi side of the aisle and he has much better information than I do about how Noguchi put it all together for Martha. But I think there was this swimming around in a theme that all the collaborators did. Yes. >> I have two questions. One is how much does that dress weigh? And the other one, we saw "Dancers World" the other day and I was wondering what dance was she preparing for. And then that thing that she puts in her hair  >> Janet Eilber: Yeah. >>  and then the brooch, was that Noguchi or was that her? >> Janet Eilber: Totally Noguchi. Aren't they beautiful? That was "Night Journey". She was preparing herself as Jocasta. And that is just a beautiful headdress for the queen, a very unusual crown. The brooch, at the end of the ballet, she's lying upsidedown in the bed and Oedipus walks on top of the bed and leans over and grabs the brooch off her costume ^M00:51:14 and stabs out his eyes. >> Ooh. >> Janet Eilber: Yeah. >> Wow. >> Janet Eilber: It's remarkable, you know. >> And how much does the dress weigh? I'm sorry. >> Janet Eilber: Oh, you know, that little woman who was carry it around is fivefoot tall, so it's not that much. >> Very light? >> Janet Eilber: Yeah. >> Okay. Thank you. ^M00:51:31 ^M00:51:37 >> I guess my question was answered because I was thinking about that headdress, too. >> Janet Eilber: Yes, the Jocasta headdress. >> But was this done for Martha's height, this  >> Janet Eilber: Yes. Good question. Because I've danced Jocasta and the bed's a little short for me, you know. The brass dress has not changed size. Occasionally we've made a longer bench for a taller dancer for "Deep Song" or something, but the Noguchi sets remain the same size. But if you  I shouldn't tell you this, but PeiJu, our beautiful Chinese dancer who's dancing Medea this weekend, has to go down into the serpent and take the crown for the princess and crawl out between the snake right here. She has to crawl out of here. And she doesn't get to use her hands because she's got the crown. So she does it beautifully, but for her to get up on one knee and get her hand underneath there, you'll be impressed. I'm going to knock on wood I haven't jinxed her. Great. One more. >> I'm interested in the spider title to the dress also. And then my other question is how the program was chosen for the performances this weekend, and particularly what might we see in the Lidberg. >> Janet Eilber: Ah, yes. What was the first part of that question? >> Spider. >> Janet Eilber: Spider. You know, I don't know. Dakin might know tomorrow. I have a feeling it's kind of like the elephant. It's a sort of an inhouse name that we've labeled them, but I may be wrong about that. Yeah. Tomorrow's program, we were looking at the best scores created for Graham. We wanted to honor the Library's commissions, which, of course, include "Appalachian Spring" and "Dark Meadow," and because of the Medea script ricocheting around with those artists, there's a "Cave of the Heart" connection also. And the Lidberg, the new work, the Library commissioned with the Irving Fine family under the condition that the choreographer would choose a piece of music composed by Irving Fine, who was a contemporary of Copland's. In fact, was at the premier of "Appalachian Spring". So we have some beautiful mid20th century music and that this very 21st century choreographer has used to create "Woodlands". It's a beautiful work. It's for nine, ten dancers maybe. It's largely a group work. He's not given away too many specifics, but because its title is "Woodlands," when I see it -- and it's a very complex, geometric, flowing work. I think it has to do with being in the woods, you know, but in every permutation of that idea, both psychologically and physically. It's really quite a lovely caper, I have to say. ^M00:55:18 [ Inaudible comment ] ^M00:55:21 >> Janet Eilber: Microphone, microphone. >> In the first little segment you showed us of Martha dancing in the costume, she does these little  she lifts both legs, and that seems to be something she does a lot. Is there something she  a meaning for her about the little hops? >> Janet Eilber: Little hops. >> You know, the  >> Janet Eilber: In the "Cave of the Heart" Medea one, or  >> The one where she's in the beautiful red gown. I guess that's the Medea character. And she's posing like that and she jumps up twice. She lifts both legs up. >> Janet Eilber: Oh, oh. I know what you mean. The chorus. No, that's my role. That's not Martha. Yeah. She does these very flatfooted jumps on occasion. And again, as the antithesis of that light, airy, pointed foot leap that a ballet dancer would do. It's more stamping her foot, yeah, especially for that  the role of the chorus, where she's trying not to tell you anything emphatically, boom, boom. Yep. Yeah. Did we do it? Great. Thank you all for coming. ^M00:56:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:56:41 Hope you come see the show. Thank you. Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:56:53