Martha Graham: the Other Side of Depression

Martha Graham: The Other Side of Depression Deborah J. Welsh Martha Graham's work nearly spanned the century, but the decade of the 1930's was of utmost importance both personally and socio- politically. This was the time of the Great Depression in America and Graham's dancing served her country well to artistically move beyond it in the heroic journey of separation, initiation, and return. Her dance was far more than entertainment in relation to the difficult times. In a Jungian theoretical framework, it was compensatory in a powerfully symbolic way. Included here is a brief description of the social climate of the decade and a presentation of C.G. Jung's concepts of symbolic process and compensatory behavior, followed by explorations of three of Graham's dances of that decade "Lamentation," "Frontier," and "Every Soul Is a Circus." She helped the culture move "beyond depression" with these dances. The conclusion is an elabora- tion of the metaphorical relationship between Graham and her dances and the treatment of clinical depression by dance/movement therapists. n an interview in the NY Times (Oct. 2, 1988), Nan Robertson encour- I aged Martha Graham to discuss the dark times in her life-the late '60s/early '70s after she had stopped dancing at the age of 75. With great In memory, MARTHA GRAHAM, 1894-1991, with gratitude and respect for the dancer, choreographer, healer and woman that Martha Graham was. May we, as dance/movement therapists, continue that which she so boldly began, and may we do this with fierce commitment to the power which movement has to express the truest self. American Journal of Dance Therapy © 1991 American Dance Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall/Winter 1991 1 1 7 Therapy Association 1 18 Welsh reluctance, and gentle urging from her associate artistic director and important friend, Ronald Protas, Miss Graham disclosed this anecdote: Anthony Tudor asked her a long time ago how she wanted to be remembered-as a dancer or as a choreographer. She said that she told him, ~'As a dancer." Tudor responded, ~'I pity you." The memory of this took Graham to a psychic place of emptiness and loss- of her dancer self- and reminded her of a close friend, a painter, who could not paint after her husband died. She told Miss Graham, "There is nothing to paint." She would just stare at the big, blank canvas in an empty room. Then one day she made a dot on the canvas. Miss Graham says, '~Because she could make that dot on the space, she knew that she would paint again." The comparison to her own process remained unspoken in the interview, but it is important for us to realize the analogy to our own lives and our work with depressed patients. The impact that Martha Graham's dance had on the Great Depression of the 1930's can be viewed as a socio-political metaphor for psychological depression and as a creative transformation through that depression to the other side. Therapists who work with the arts help people to mobilize Martha Graham: The Other Side of Depression 119 and utilize their creative energy to heal, and Martha Graham was in- volved in such a process throughout her long life. Her role was that of a major American artist and a woman who had, like all of us, been through her own struggles. Creative arts therapists can learn from her life, her work, and her human process. The treatment of depression involves encouragement to face that blank canvas, that immobilized body, and create a dot. Martha Graham was able to do that for American culture. Graham came of age artistically during the 1930's, a decade in which the world, especially the United States, suffered the shock and hardship of the Great Depression. She passionately enacted the essence of life, creating with others a new dance theater that represented, in her words, %he deep matters of the heart" CDancers' World," film). She was crit- icized. Her movements were angular, her dances stark, some said ugly, even violent. This was a time when audiences craved respite from their worried lives. Instead of entertaining, Graham confronted-and in this confrontation lay her magic. Audiences returned to Graham's theater because she challenged them to be alive-to face head on life's struggles, and to join her in a ritual that affirmed meaning without repressing pain. She faced and explored relationship with the unknown which is, so far as we know, one of the most important origins of dance. Graham's dance during the years of the Depression can effectively be viewed and understood from a Jungian perspective as compensatory. Her dances served to counterbalance or complement the tendency to escape from the depressive doom into mindless, entertaining activity or remain stuck in the mire of the frightening times. Dancers who, like Graham, are guided by what Jung called the %ollective unconscious," use symbols derived from explorations deep into their own inner lives. In her dances Graham balanced, or compensated for the depressive times by becoming full of life in symbolic opposition to what was consciously experienced as life-threatening. Other dance during this decade, such as that of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, was also full of life. Their dancing, however, was not so much compensatory as it was fantasy, in that it depicted life as glamorous, when, for the most part, life was just the opposite. Graham helped us to learn to appreciate the exploration of who we really are without denial and avoidance. Through impassioned dedication and refined creative process, Martha Graham emerged as a significant American artist during the Great Depression. Her dance ancestors had paved an expressive way, but she embodied energy that was perfectly suited to the times, not only in relation to herself, but in a larger sense, to the society. She served, in an artistically psychic capacity, to help balance an imbalanced world. Mar- tha Graham dared to affirm the challenge of life's crises. In a press interview during the decade she said, 120 Welsh My dancing is just dancing. It is not an attempt to interpret life in a literary sense. It is the affirmation of life through movement. Its only aim is to impart the sensation of living, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, of the mystery, the humor, the variety and the wonder of life; to send the spectator away with a fuller sense of his own potentialities and the power of realizing them, whatever the medium of his activity. (Armitage, 1978, pp. 102-103) Graham successfully portrayed motifs such as those in ~Lamentation" and "Frontier" in an expression of her personal symbolic journey. Her first encounter was in the depths of despair, after which she emerged in a pioneering spirit of discovery. By the end of the decade, in ~'Every Soul Is a Circus," she expanded her symbolic focus to include human relationship. Graham's greatness was in her ability to express human experience that is personal and emotional, yet has universal symbolic significance. She was one of the most important American dancers to personify this powerful social impact. C. G. Jung himself helps us understand Graham's significance in these words: The widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bun- dle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, ambitions which always has to be compensated and corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies: instead it is a function of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding, and dissoluble communion with the world at large. The complications arising at this stage are no longer egotistical wish-conflicts, but difficulties that concern others as much as oneself. At this stage it is fundamentally a question of collective problems, which have activated the collective unconscious because they require collective rather than personal compensation. We can now see that the unconscious produces contents which are valid not only for the person concerned, but for others as well, in fact, for a great many people and possibly for all. (Jung, 1966) Throughout her life Graham's work showed that she was a dance creator in the symbolic sense. She validated the products of the unconscious and, without doubt, was a dancer of "widened consciousness" important to America as woman, artist, and healer of the collective psyche. In order to explore the compensatory nature of Graham's dance during the Great Depression, I will first briefly discuss the social climate and where dance fits into the general social response to the Depression. Then I will present C. G. Jung's concepts of symbolic process and compensatory behavior. In the third section I will cite examples of Graham's dance to show how she helped symbolically to move the culture '~beyond depression." To conclude, I will relate this metaphorically to the practice of dance therapy. Martha Graham: The Other Side of Depression 121 The Great Depression The economic explosion of 1929 occurred because of weaknesses that economists and historians could only clearly define in retrospect. Faulty economic theory, an unstable international monetary structure due in part to World War I, and an atmosphere which encouraged unintelligent speculation all contributed to the crash (Leuchtenburg, 1973). By "Black Friday," October 29, 1929, there were no buyers, every trader lost money, and panic affected the entire nation. The American sense of self-worth was intricately related to earning power. Many were too proud to ask for federal help even in the face of malnutrition. They wanted work, not dole, and Franklin Roosevelt's ~'New Deal" of 1932 gave them hope.

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