Tuesday, July 19 and Wednesday, July 20 – “Blood Memory” by Martha Graham and “Martha Graham” by Victoria Thoms
I HAVE FUN COFFEE SHOPS TO TELL YOU ABOUT THIS TIME!
So on Tuesday 7/19, I went to Overflow Coffee Bar in the south loop. It was honestly just sort of fine; the coffee was decent and there was plenty of sitting room but I wasn’t too enamored. The neighborhood was really nice to walk around in, though, so I’d highly recommend that.
On Wednesday, I spent the morning at Buzz Killer Espresso and the afternoon at The Wormhole. Both were really awesome, but in very different ways. Buzz Killer was more clean-cut, with plenty of outlets and sitting space. Their coffee was the best coffee I’ve had thus far–I wish I could remember the name of the particular blend, but it had hints of pomegranate and it was delicious. The Wormhole was really great for its atmosphere; it has tons of nerdy paraphernalia (including a DeLorean) and lots of comfy couches. The coffee was decent, but the food was sub-par.
To be totally honest, there wasn’t a lot in “Blood Memory” that stood out to me too much, which I think is telling. Graham talks us through her life and all of her different endeavors, and nothing was really all that surprising to me (maybe because dancers generally know a lot about Graham to begin with?). Some recurring themes were ones that we’ve seen pop up for a lot of these choreographers–the struggle between art and love, working to maintain some sort of income, etc. Something I found really amusing was that Graham wasn’t asked to perform a lot while she was at Denishawn (they thought she was a great teacher, though), and she wasn’t asked to travel with them to Asia because she looked too Asian (had dark hair, basically) and they wanted an “All-American” dance troupe traveling.
Man, not getting to do something because of how you look? That must suck.
Graham was married to and infatuated with Erick Hawkins for a lot of her life, which may be the one thing I didn’t actually know about her before reading this book. It’s interesting to me because she spends a lot of time talking about how brilliant and wonderful and perfect Hawkins is, but in the grand scheme of things he’s a relative nobody compared to her. So who’s the real winner, you know?
“Martha Graham: Gender and the Haunting of a Dance Pioneer” was a bit more exciting and novel to me in terms of content. Thoms talks through the relationship of Graham’s work to gender and feminism, and also argues that our conception of Graham is ghostly because it’s based on a combination of sources, including Graham’s writing and works but also the conceptions and perceptions and memories of other people. (To which I say, isn’t that true of literally anyone?).
The one thing that sort of struck me was that Graham did not consider herself a feminist. That’s not to say she just avoided the topic; she very clearly said that she was not a feminist. But her work, as Thoms points out, has a hell of a lot of feminist undertones. So then the question becomes, is it the choreographer’s intention that’s important? Or the actual work that it does?
(Jay Grossman, if you’re reading this, I promise the answer is the latter!).