The Martha Graham Dance Company kicked off its 85th anniversary season gala with a revival of “Snow on the Mesa,” Robert Wilson’s 1995 homage to Graham. Set to evocative, gamelan-inflected music by George Antheil, Lou Harrison and Colin McPhee, it’s gorgeous to look at — and as empty as a fashion spread.
The renowned avant-garde director thinks in pictures, and some of them are stunners. But this 70-minute traversal of Graham’s psyche often seems a superficial imitation of one of her own volcanic psychodramas.
It might as aptly be titled “Slow on the Mesa,” since Wilson specializes in enigmatic, glacially paced tableaux. He’s loaded these with symbols that demand to be puzzled over but lead nowhere. Three women gather severed wolves’ heads in a thunderstorm. Why?
Wilson grooves on the shapes the dancers’ bodies make, but the choreography he fashions out of a hodgepodge of Graham and Asian dance, both ancient and modern, lacks the dynamic arc of tension and release that would give it bite. A wild-haired priestess with a snake in her mouth writhes in a state of demonic possession for so long that it turns into kitsch.
Still, there are moments of gripping theater. Two nearly nude dancers swirl in and out of the shadows like wraiths blown together in the desert wind. A woman in a crimson gown — Graham, old and abandoned by her art — staggers through one last dance, wraps herself in a red shroud and vanishes into the night.
Donna Karan’s chic costumes evoke Graham’s own — with a twist. Men and women alike wear long, low-slung skirts and dance topless.
The program closed with “Maple Leaf Rag,” Graham’s last complete dance and a spoof
of her own style. It tells one joke — what happens when angst meets ragtime — but tells it well.
Five socialites — Somers Farkas, Karen LeFrak, Cornelia Guest, Muffie Potter Aston and Grace Hightower De Niro — made good-humored cameo appearances in honor of the gala. The program (minus the socialites) repeats tomorrow. Tonight’s program, which features three of Graham’s famous collaborations with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, would be a better path into her psyche.