insisted. Finally she gave up trying to get me to dance and arranged for me to study with Sophie Maslow and Jane Dudley. But before I left, she said to me, ‘Yuriko, if you’re good, you will be accepted.’ I never made it to Hanya’s or Doris’s studios.”
“Another stroke of fate?”
“Yes, Rose. I left Martha’s studio that evening and walked all the way home, from 15th, all the way to 56th Street and cried every step of the way. That first meeting with Martha reminded me of those flashing red and green lights at the train station in Phoenix. I saw freedom in Martha, my rescuer. Her simple words, ‘If you’re good, you will be accepted,’ hit me deeply in my soul. For me it meant survival. Here I was having just come out of camp, I’d barely had a family, never really knew my mother, and had everything I owned taken from me. I was not accepted as an American, or even as a person, for that matter. Martha’s words filled me with hope and encouragement. What a wonderful gift. To this day I owe her everything. I owe Martha everything!”
“So Sophie and Jane began training you?”
“Yes, I started working with them in October, and that February Martha phoned me and offered me a scholarship, and she still hadn’t seen me dance. Sophie and Jane immediately put me in their advanced class and told Martha all about me.”
“Do you remember your first class with Martha?”
“I’ll never forget it. I came in and took a place in the back of the room. Louis Horst was playing the piano. Martha stood at the front of the room and demonstrated a contraction.” Yuriko now sat up, her eyes shining. “As Martha’s torso hollowed I thought to myself, that’s what I want in my body. Here was drama. Here was creativity. I had to find out where it comes from. In time, I understood that the contraction comes from the breath, and that its shape originates from a deep source within the body. This source extends to all the extremities in the physical body. Take for example, Martha’s famous cupped hand,” she said, demonstrating. “This is not a position or a shape. It comes from here,” she said, pointing to her solar plexus and then drawing her finger up the chest, through the armpit, down her arm to the center of her hand. “The body’s center is like the roots of a tree that sends nourishment out to all its branches. A contraction vibrates through the body and ends right here,” she said, pressing her index finger into the center of her cupped hand. “It’s alive. A shape is not alive. To achieve this, you have to steal it,” she said, looking me in the eye.
“Steal it?”
“Yes. I stole so many things from Martha. I stole everything.”
“Wasn’t she giving it, offering it to you?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure that she was. But … I stayed with her for twenty-five years and took from her whatever I could take. When she opened her door on that first day, she opened my dancer’s door and I walked all the way through.”
“How did you come to dance in her company?”
“After I was in her class for one week, she called me into her dressing room and said, ‘Yuriko, I’ve never said this to anyone. You are a born dancer. But if my technique doesn’t agree with you, then you should go somewhere else.’ I told her that I loved her technique, and that’s when she asked me if I wanted to learn her repertory. I didn’t know that she was planning her first New York season in May of 1944, and that my sessions with John Butler, Jane, and Sophie were leading up to a big performance. I thought it was just repertory class. The first pieces I danced in were American Document and Primitive Mysteries.”
“After twenty-five years working with Martha, I imagine the two of you were very close.”
“Yes, we were close. Martha gave me this,” she said, holding up a jade pendant that hung from her neck on a long chain. “It’s in the shape of two adjoining plums. This is one of my most cherished possessions. We were very close, Martha and I, but at times she was very envious of me because I had a husband and children. I felt as a woman it was important to have a family. Now I’m a grandmother. These are my grandchildren,” she said, pointing to a formation of framed photographs on a small table. “Martha gave birth to all her dances. Those were her children. But towards the end of her life she was drinking heavily and would call me after midnight and wake me up. Eventually I put the telephone on my husband’s side of the bed. One night she called and my husband answered. She complained to him about her life. ‘Oh, I envy Yuriko so much,’ she told him. ‘She has you and the children, a house and a career. And I have nothing.’ She thought compared to me she had nothing.”
“Everyone knows that Martha chose her work over everything else.”
“Yes, she did, but she was still envious of those who aspired to have more. I had both, a family and career. But I’m not a genius. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that wanting a family is a normal human desire. I never saw myself as such a big shot that I had to sacrifice the most basic things in life. To some people it’s more important to change the world and become famous. I never looked for fame, only to be a better dancer.”
“Do you still dance?”
“No, I’m long retired, but I teach class at the Graham school and coach the dancers. I try to give them the source of Martha’s work, the concept, not the shape. When Martha choreographed, she didn’t choreograph for shape—even though her shapes are very interesting. Her movement was very organic and the concepts for all her pieces were very human, including the abstract pieces, like Dark Meadow. This one was very mysterious, very beautiful. It was very deep in a religious sense with elements of ritual and sacrifice.”
“Martha’s choreography grew out of her own life experience—very different from your own. What did you get out of it?”
“I got out of it the experience of going on a journey—the human journey. All her work came from the center of her being. That’s why I referred to her dances as her children. She birthed them. To give birth is a human experience. When she choreographed Deep Song [1937], for example, she was expressing profound grief over the horrors of the Spanish civil war, in the same way that Picasso was, when he painted his Guernica. Martha choreographed steps, but beneath those steps we see devastation, homelessness, and exile. Recently while rehearsing Deep Song with the Martha Graham Dance Company, I thought to myself—this dance is contemporary! Look at what’s happening in our world, in our century. We have had such devastation with the tsunami in Asia, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the earthquake in Afghanistan. Even though Martha’s work was choreographed decades ago about the human condition of her time, it works for our time … it’s still relevant. But … if dancers just do the choreography by representing shapes on the stage, it won’t speak, it won’t have relevance.”
“Do today’s dancers understand this?”
“I’m afraid most don’t. They must be told. Dancers, listen up! You have bodies to express emotions and experiences. After Hurricane Katrina we watched the people of New Orleans on television—the death and destruction, the hungry and the homeless. People had to stand in long lines just to get a bottle of water. It’s degrading. ‘Can you help me? Help me?’” Yuriko pretended to be one of the homeless and demonstrated how the body could be used to illustrate real human suffering with facial expressions, body spirals, and contractions. “We all have imaginations, don’t we? Use it to express life! I’m talking about body language. That’s Dance!”
New York, 2005
