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[速度1]
The mother of modern dance
BARBARA KLEIN: And I'm Barbara Klein with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today, we explore the life of dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. She created almost two hundred dance pieces. She is often called the Mother of Modern Dance. Her influence on the world of dance continues today.
STEVE EMBER: In the beginning of the twentieth century, women like Isadora Duncan and Ruth Saint Denis wanted to create a new form of dance. Duncan and Saint Denis felt restricted by ballet. Modern dance was created as a revolt against ballet.
Dancer Fang-Yi Sheu from Taiwan, in white dress, performs sketches from "Chronicle" in Cologne, Germany, in July 2006 at the start of a European tour by the Martha Graham Dance Company
Martha Graham was one of the most famous dancers and creators of dance, called choreographers. She brought modern dance to a new level of popularity in American culture. She created a new language of movement that expressed powerful emotions.
She started traditions that are still used in modern dance today. They include expressive movements of the body to tell a dramatic story, special music, lighting, stage design and costumes.
BARBARA KLEIN: Martha Graham was born in the small town of Allegheny, Pennsylvania in eighteen ninety-four. After Martha turned fourteen years old, her family moved to Santa Barbara, California. While traveling across the Midwest, Martha enjoyed the wide, open spaces of nature. She also enjoyed the beautiful flowers and plants in California. The free, expressive movements of modern dance were clearly influenced by the beauty of nature Graham observed.
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【速度2】
In May 2004 the U.S. Postal Service released new stamps honoring Martha Graham, George Balanchine and two other American choreographers, Agnes de Mille and Alvin Ailey
STEVE EMBER: Earlier in her life, however, Martha did not know that she would become a dancer. Her father was a doctor and her family was very religious. They were members of the upper class and did not accept dance as an art form. Still, in nineteen ten, Martha's father took her to see a dance performance by Ruth Saint Denis, one of the first modern dancers in America. Martha was sixteen and she decided then that she wanted to become a dancer.
BARBARA KLEIN: Ruth Saint Denis and Isadora Duncan were at the center of attention in modern dance. They established some of the traditions we see today. For example, Duncan was famous for starting the tradition of not wearing dance shoes while performing. Saint Denis was famous for creating dances influenced by other cultures. She studied dance from countries such as Mexico and Egypt, instead of the European countries where ballet had started. Martha Graham took an immediate interest in this new art form.
STEVE EMBER: Martha's parents, however, did not approve of her sudden desire to dance. At this time, people saw American dance as a lower art form. Graham chose to follow her dream of dancing, even though she was considered too old to begin dancing. She was in her early twenties when she began studying dance in nineteen sixteen. She attended the school created by Ruth Saint Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California.
At the Denishawn Dance School, Graham worked very hard to improve her ability to dance. She trained her body to become strong enough to meet the difficult demands of dance. She performed with the Denishawn dance company for several years before moving to New York City. There, Graham performed in shows but she wanted to make greater experiments with dance.
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BARBARA KLEIN: Martha Graham started teaching dance at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Later she returned to New York City to teach at Carnegie Hall. She began to choreograph, or create the steps of dances. In order to express herself freely, she decided to establish her own dance company and school. In nineteen twenty-six she started the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance.
She enjoyed having her own company of students to perform her dances. Graham produced a dance called "Heretic" in nineteen twenty-nine. She wore all white and danced against a wall of dancers wearing all black. Graham began to work with music composer Louis Horst. She worked with him until he died in nineteen sixty-four. Graham once said that, without Horst, she would have felt lost.
STEVE EMBER: In nineteen thirty-six, Graham created "Chronicle," one of her most important dances. "Chronicle" was influenced by current events including the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War. The dance expressed sadness and loneliness. At this time, showing strong emotions in dance was very rare. Graham also created dances based on ancient Greek tragic stories and famous female heroines.
At first, people did not react well to Graham's style of dancing. It was very different from European ballet, which was more commonly accepted. Graham's dances were powerful, with strong and sharp movements. Some of the movements involved contracting and releasing parts of the body, using the arms in dramatic movements and falling to the floor. These movements are still used in modern dance today.
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BARBARA KLEIN: In nineteen thirty-eight, President Franklin Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, invited Martha Graham to perform at the White House. She created a dance called "American Document." Graham later danced at the White House for seven other presidents.
In nineteen forty-four, Martha Graham created "Appalachian Spring," one of her most famous dances. It tells the story of a wedding among early American settlers. Aaron Copland composed this music for "Appalachian Spring."
STEVE EMBER: In nineteen fifty-one, Graham was among the people who established the dance program at the Juilliard School in New York City. It is still one of the best arts schools in the country. Many famous artists have begun their careers by studying there. Graham created her largest dance in nineteen fifty-eight. She named it "Clytemnestra," and used music from the Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh.
Graham worked with other famous and influential people in the world of dance. Many of her students became famous dancers and choreographers. She also taught movement to famous people. including singer Madonna, actress Bette Davis and film director Woody Allen.
BARBARA KLEIN: Some of her dances were filmed and made into a DVD called "Martha Graham: Dance on Film." This is a collection of three programs Graham made for American public television in the nineteen fifties and sixties. "A Dancer's World" is an introduction to Graham and her work. She tells about her dances and her dance group shows some of their methods. The DVD also includes films of two of her dances, "Appalachian Spring" and "Night Journey."
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STEVE EMBER: Graham continued to dance past the age of seventy. Once again, she was met with criticism from people who came to watch her shows. Younger people knew that Graham was an important influence but they did not understand the meaning behind her dances. Graham began to suffer emotionally. She began to drink too much alcohol.
She later wrote a book about herself, called "Blood Memory." In her book, she wrote that she performed for the last time in nineteen seventy, when she was seventy-six years old. Two years later Graham stopped drinking alcohol. She went back to her dance company to choreograph more dances. The final dance she completed was called "Maple Leaf Rag," which she finished in nineteen ninety. Scott Joplin composed the music.
BARBARA KLEIN: Martha Graham received many awards during her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen seventy-six. She was the first dancer to receive the country's highest civilian honor. She died in nineteen ninety-one at the age of ninety-six. In nineteen ninety-eight, Time magazine listed her as the "Dancer of the Century" and as one of the most important people of the twentieth century. The Martha Graham Dance Company still performs her dances in New York and around the world.
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[越障]
There is nothing like a dame. That’s what the lusty sailors sang, in “South Pacific,” going nuts in paradise. The servicemen in “The Master” are in much the same place, and the same plight. The Second World War is drawing to its exhausted close, but these young Americans still seem to be doing battle with themselves, and, rather than expressing their quandary in song, they carve a woman out of sand on the beach. One of them, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), climbs onto her and can hardly tear himself away. More than once, we will see him, in flashback, gazing at her granular breasts. She may be nothing like a dame, but Freddie, equally likely to crumble and collapse, isn’t much of a man.
The tale of his dissolution, which consumes the first portion of the movie, casts a spell as bewitching, but also as controlled, as anything that the writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, has wrought before. (For the first time, for extra glory and precision, he is shooting in 65mm.) We see short chapters, sliced from Freddie’s time after the Navy, showing what it meant to be knocked aside, rather than swept up, in the nation’s postwar boom. Freddie becomes a photographer in a department store, making out with a model in his darkroom, where he brews a cocktail in a chemical beaker, and then, in one extraordinary passage, taking offense at a customer—a robust and portly type, who wants his picture taken—and laying into him, as though ignited by envy at such unattainable well-being. The colors here burn with the soft, civilized half-glare that we associate with the heyday of Kodachrome—a matchless example of Anderson’s period detail being driven less by fussiness than by his unfading avidity for anything that will saturate the real.
More startling still is the sudden cut to hard, unglamorous gray-greens, and the sight of Freddie hacking the heads off cabbages in a California field. We sense that he is drifting not because jobs are scarce but because no regular slot can hold him or stop him exploding from within; hence the catch-your-breath sequence that sees Freddie bursting through a dark doorway, which is framed like the final shot of John Ford’s “The Searchers,” and then sprinting and panting across the brown ridges of plowed earth, the camera travelling beside him at a pace that would have left Ford in the dust. And so the Anderson patterns, familiar to fans of “Magnolia” and “Boogie Nights,” reassert themselves: elegy followed by convulsion, stasis interrupted by the chronic need for speed, nerves no sooner gathered than lost. Where, we ask ourselves, will Freddie Quell find rest?
The answer comes, as so often in this movie, on the water. Some enchanted evening, in 1950, Freddie wanders past a wharf, where a fancy yacht is moored, lit like a Christmas tree. Having nothing better in mind, he hops on board, and the ship sails off, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, with the Stars and Stripes, at its stern, barely visible under a dying sky. Next morning, the stowaway is introduced to a fellow who describes himself, in the first of many questionable statements, as “the commander” of the vessel—and then, for good measure, as a writer, a doctor, a theoretical philosopher, and a nuclear physicist. “But, above all, I am a man,” he adds, instantly hitting the pure note of solemn, self-persuading bull. The same is true of the pose in which Freddie initially sees him: pooled in light, brow clutched, pencil in hand, one careful comma of blond hair dangling down, as if posing for the portrait of a thinker. This is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the founder and magnetic core of the Cause—a cluster of folk who believe, among other things, that our souls, which predate the foundation of the Earth, are no more than temporary residents of our frail bodily housing. Any relation to persons living, dead, or Scientological is, of course, entirely coincidental.
Dodd warms without ado to Freddie, and you spend the rest of this fretful, elegant movie wondering why. The current that flows between them is far more pedagogic than erotic, as the title would suggest, yet the clinginess of it seems to embarrass and perplex not just the people who surround them—led by Dodd’s wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), and his son, Val (Jesse Plemons)—but the two men themselves. Their first point of contact is booze. Freddie still makes a mean hell-brew, pouring in whatever takes his fancy, including paint thinner, and Dodd develops a taste for it, and thus for the risky, id-laced flavor of Freddie’s whole spirit. They sit alone, in shadow, belowdecks. “Would you care for some informal processing?” Dodd asks, like a waiter offering cream and sugar. He is referring to the method whereby recruits to the Cause can be cleansed of whatever faults and stains continue to foul their existence—nagging Freddie about his “past failures” and calling him a “silly animal.” Freddie is told not to blink, a vein bulges and beats in his forehead, and he slaps himself hard, three times, as if trying to awake from the bad dream of being who he is, or was. The session subsides. “Close your eyes,” Dodd says.
Three things must be said about this. One, the scene picks up on a simple but potent refrain that has rung through Anderson’s work from the beginning. The first sequence, in his first feature, “Hard Eight” (1997), consists of Philip Baker Hall giving coffee and a cigarette to John C. Reilly, in a diner, and making him an offer he can’t refuse. Whether it was a scam, or a path to salvation, was left beautifully suspended, like smoke, and the same uncertainty lingers in the air of “The Master.” This leads to the second point: namely, that we are watching not a scalding exposé of a particular cult but something far more delicate. Dodd has, whatever the backdrop of nonsense behind his ideas, brought some respite and relief to Freddie, and—to judge by the mood, if not the vocabulary—we could be attending any encounter between shrink and patient, in the therapeutic wave that swelled, à la mode, through the society of that time.
【1000】
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发表于 2012-9-16 01:14:09
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