Dance, Gender and Psychoanalysis: Martha Graham's Night Journey

Abstract

Now Jocasta kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed and then she rises with her leg close to her breast and to her head, and her foot way beyond her head, her body open in a deep contraction. I call this the vaginal cry; it is the cry from her vagina. It is either the cry for her lover, her husband, or the cry for her children. The dance proceeds but there are small intimacies that I have never revealed in words. All of these things mean a tremendous amount to me. I don't talk about them much because people might think I'm a little cuckoo. But as other people took over the dance it seemed necessary to explain the certain small mysteries that animate the instant in the reliving of the tale. (Graham 1991, 214)Martha Graham wrote this passage about the opening of Night Journey (1947) in her autobiography Blood Memory (1991). Night Journey tells the story of Jocasta who at the end of her life is reluctantly forced by the blind prophet Tiresias to relive the most significant and thus painful moments of her life. Graham too, at the end of her own life, seems almost to have been forced, perhaps by time or perhaps by the obligation to fulfil a publisher's contract, to write her autobiography (1). There is a nice symmetry here.