The Krishna Flute 1925

[Deleted]

Choreography by Martha Graham & Ted Shawn

www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5EHQgF0ZM

[Nitaidas]

harisarandas said:

Choreography by Martha Graham & Ted Shawn

www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5EHQgF0ZM

Thanks for this, Mahasaya. It is interesting to see how Krishna was conceived back in the 1920s. Rather effeminate and unstable to my eyes, but perhaps not so back then.

[Deleted]

You are welcome Nitai-ji, I am happy you liked it.

Martha Graham is considered to be the pioneer of modern dance. In her innovative style, she actually incorporated the symbolic elements of Indian dance including movements and melodramas. Her 5 solo works from the 1920 and 30s, reminds very much the aesthetic pleasures -5 Rasas-.

Now, take a look at this advertise promoting a workshop this year at the Museum of Contemporary Arts:

Saturday Matinee: American Original

This program illuminates the origin, development and fruition of Graham's contributions to the birth of a new American art form: modern dance. The program begins with 5 solo works from the 1920s and 30s: Incense (1906); Serenata Morisca (c 1920); Lamentation (1930); Satyric (1932); and Spectre (1937). Rather than presenting the works traditionally with formal entrances, exits and pauses for bows, each work is interwoven with recently discovered films of four benchmark dances that span the same era. This treatment merges the dances in a variety of ways, even allowing dancers to travel into and out of a projection, or dance with the images of their predecessors. After intermission, the audience views dancers performing Appalachian Spring. Diversion of Angels completes the afternoon, a short piece inspired by a Wassily Kandinsky painting that Graham viewed at the Art Institute here while on tour with the East Village Follies.
Works on film: Flute of Krishna (1926); Heretic (1929); Lamentation (1930); Steps in the Street (1936)


Here is a brief review about Matha Graham's film:

"On April 18, 1926, her company, featuring students from Eastman, debuted in New York City. The program was heavily derived from the Denishawn repertory, featuring Graham in exotic solos and her students in a ballet ballad called "The Flute Of Krishna." A review from The Dance, described Graham as "clad in a heavy gold kimona, making patterns with her body against a screen of brilliant lacquer...Martha Graham presents a series of pictures that fire the imagination and make a hundred stories for every gesture. Shall we say her dances are motion pictures for the sophisticated."

More by IMDB:

"Early Colour Film made by Eastman Kodak itself. Martha Graham's dance "The Flute of Krishna" is performed in front of the camera by students from the Eastman School of Music."

[Nitaidas]

Thanks, Harisarandasji. It is an interesting posting. Keep such things coming. There is a history of Krishna in the West that we don't as yet know much about. I wonder what sources Martha Graham drew from.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the encouraging words, Nitai-ji, no wonder why you became interested on the subject; It is really fascinating and I would say that it definitely deserves your attention and insights.

Actually after researching on the subject, it would be appropriate to say that Martha Graham is not the pioneer of modern dance, but a successor of Tad Shawn, her teacher. However, not even Tad Shawn should really deserve the title, for it was his wife, Ruth Dennis, who exposed her husband and many others under the East influences and forever changed the Art Performances in America. In fact, in the scenario of Modern Dance, the East influences become the pivotal aspect of the transformation and in reality, Ruth Dennis is understood to be the Mother of Modern Dance, or like Murshid Samuel L. Lewis would call her Mata-ji "my fairy godmother". Nonetheless, the immortal Anna Pavlova (1882-1931), reputedly the 20th century’s greatest ballerina, shares parallel status and similar quest.

Lets have a glimpse at the beginning stages of the development of her connections with the East. "Ruth Dennis was born on a farm in rural New Jersey. Sources place her birth date variously at 1877, 1878, 1879, and 1880."

"In 1898, the young dancer was noticed by David Belasco, a well-known and highly successful Broadway producer and director. He hired her to perform with his large company as a featured dancer, and was also responsible for giving her the stage name "St. Denis". She toured with Belasco’s company around the United States and in Europe, and was exposed to the work of several important European artists, including the Japanese dancer Sado Yacco and the great French actress, Sarah Bernhardt.

St. Denis’ artistic imagination was ignited by these artists. She became enthralled by the dance and drama of Eastern cultures, including those of Japan, India, and Egypt. She was also influenced by Bernhardt’s melodramatic acting style, in which the tragic fate of her characters took center stage. After 1900, St. Denis began formulating her own theory of dance/drama based on the techniques of her early training, her readings into philosophy, Scientology, and the history of ancient cultures, and the work of artists like Yacco and Bernhardt.

In 1904, during one of her tours with Belasco, she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egyptian Deities cigarettes. The image of the goddess sparked her imagination and resulted in the creation of a solo dance, Radha, telling the story of a mortal maid who was loved by the god Krishna. St. Denis designed her own elaborate and exotic costume, and performed the dance with three extras from the then flourishing Coney Island Hindi community.

In Radha’s staging, St. Denis surrounded her Indian maiden with symbols of the five senses: bells for hearing; flowers for smelling; wine for tasting; jewels for seeing; and kisses of the palm for touching. St. Denis danced barefoot, which was unheard of at the time and considered quite risqué. At the conclusion of one of these early performances, the audience sat in stunned silence for nearly twenty minutes before finally bursting into thunderous applause. Radha was the first of many creations by St. Denis translating her understanding of Eastern culture and mythology to the dance stage."

In her unpublished book The Divine Dance (1933), Ruth St. Denis wrote:

The dance of the future will no longer be concerned with meaningless dexterities of the body…Remembering that [we are] indeed the microcosm, the universe in miniature, the Divine Dance of the future should be able to convey with its slightest gestures some significance of the universe…As we rise higher in the understanding of ourselves, the national and racial dissonances will be forgotten in the universal rhythms of Truth and Love. We shall sense our unity with all peoples who are moving to that exalted rhythm.

www.ruhaniat.org/lineage/RSDBio.php

[Deleted]

Hence, from the year 1900, Ruth Dennis introduces her own version of the Eastern dance movements into the Western world. Denishawn Company, which becomes a successful enterprise, was put together by Dennis and Shwan. Founded in Los Angeles in 1915, the Denishawn school and dance company was active through 1931. Ted Shawn however, was responsible for more then half of the choreography produced at Denishawn. It was in 1916 that Martha Graham starts studying at Denishawn. She was one of their notable students, and consequently in 1927 Martha founded her own school, exactly two years after “The Krishna Flute” performance.

Herein we go through a concise look at the sources of the East waves of Modern Dance and how it merges into the West waves of the Modern Dance Movement. Moreover, we will be understanding how the dynamics of these two styles that were carried by the tidal forces of those two waves, turns up at famous theaters, and the influences of Rabindranath Tagore on the development of Modern Art in the 20's.

Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn met early in 1914. Shortly thereafter they began a tour of the southern United States with their newly formed dance troupe. In August of that same year they were married. They founded the first Denishawn School in Los Angeles with the intent of providing students with a diversified dance education a year later.The Denishawn Dancers toured the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Far East from 1915-1932. Some of their dancers, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Eleanor King, later went on to develop the field of modern dance.

www.nypl.org/research/lpa/dan/pdf/DANtSHAW.pdf

In "The Soul of India, an interpretation," The Denishawn Dancers traveled in India for five months from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea, from the mountain passes of Baluchistan and the Himalayas on the north to the island of Ceylon, which lies below the southernmost tip, and were fascinated by the endless pageant of colorful types of peoples and their costumes. The Bunnia Bazaar is one of the bazaars of Bombay to which come Pathans and Punjabis from the north and the Tamils from the south; Hindus and Mohammedans, women street sweepers and veiled "Purdah" ladies, Marwari, Bengali, Madrasi, all come to the Bunnia Bazaar to buy shawls from Cashmere, brass from Benares, jewels from Rajputana, gold cloth saris and chuddars from Delhi.

The music for this Bazaar scene was arranged by Mr. Clifford Vaughan, from the compositions of Lily Strickland Anderson. The draperies and costumes are all from India and the choreography is by Ruth St. Denis. {Sinhalese Devil Dance}{ A Delhi Nautch}Back Inside Cover {Chanchal Banerjea of the Indian School of Oriental Art (Tagore or Modern Bengali School (sic) made this sketch of Ruth St. Denis' Nautch Dance during the Denishawn season at the Empire Theatre in Calcutta} Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn and their Denishawn Dancers Souvenir Program, 1926, 1925.

oceanpark.ws/1925test.htm#DenishawnSouvenirProgram

In the 1920s, in India, Rabindranath Tagore (Asia’s first Nobel Laureate) began to compose dance-dramas in West Bengal, using movements from other Indian states such as Manipur, Kerala and Tripura, and going beyond conventional stories to embrace modern concepts as well.5 Meanwhile, in the United States, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis were creating dances based on their ideas of the Orient, and their Indian renditions were performed throughout the world, including major cities in India.6 Interestingly, Ted Shawn’s first present to St. Denis, was a book of poetry by Tagore.7

www.urmikadevi.com/dance_contemporary.html

[Nitaidas]

This is fascinating stuff, Harisaranji. Thanks for these postings. I wonder when Radha was performed. Was it in 1904? If so, I wonder if Baba Bharati was in the audience or had something to do with the production. His book Shree Krishna came out in 1904 and he had been in the country since 1902. The artistic and intellectual atmosphere seems so open and fertile back then. It is a shame that the Christian backlash closed the US down in a few years and created the repressed society we have come to know and chaff at. Weren't the Fundamentals written around this time, Subalji? The Fundamentals was a Christian book that became the basis of what we call Fundamentalism today. I love the irony of it all though. Fundament means shit, doesn't it?

Maybe, though, the 60s would not have been what they were if it were not for the "closed society."

Anyway it is good to be learning all of this.

[Deleted]

Jay Nitai-ji. For your question about the performance Radha, everything indicates that Ruth Dennis choreographed it in 1905. Actually that was her first public presentation. However, it was 1904 that Radha was created and Ruth made few private performances before 1905.

"Radha"

By 1905, St. Denis left Belasco's company to begin a career as a solo artist. She had designed an elaborate and exotic costume and a series of steps telling the story of a mortal maid who was loved by the god Krishna. Entitled "Radha," this solo dance (with three extras) was first performed in Proctor's Vaudeville House in New York City. "Radha" was an attempt to translate St. Denis' understanding of Indian culture and mythology to the American dance stage. As this publicity photograph illustrates, St. Denis surrounded her Indian maiden with the symbols for the 5 senses: bells for hearing; flowers for smelling; wine for tasting; jewels for seeing; and kisses of the palm for touching. The men sitting around her are Indian immigrants living in the then flourishing Coney Island Hindi community.


St. Denis' Society Notice

As a solo artist, St. Denis was quickly discovered by a society woman, Mrs. Orlando Rouland. With the aid of her wealthy patron, she began performing "Radha" at private matinees in respectable Broadway theatres. The following description appeared in The New York Times on March 25, 1906 after a performance at the Hudson Theatre: "Society has discovered something new under the limelight. Out of the jaws of vaudeville a group of New York women who still keep a weary eye out for up-to-date novelties, have snatched a turn which they hope to make more or less an artistic sensation.

www.pitt.edu/~gillis/dance/ruth.html


Regarding Baba Bharati, I would not doubt about the possibility that he was present in the audience, if not, at least he would probably be aware about the social events, where the love between Radha-Krishna, was -somehow- venerated. Moreover, what is really interesting is the fact that Vaishnavism's influences was not only restricted to the literature, but it was also generously permeating the Modern Art in the West.

There are a lot of material about Ruth’s life and how involving life was on those days. Repression created by fundamentalists Christians may be there, but it did little to stop St. Dennis. As you can see, her approach to Art was audacious and spiritually universal; moreover, she had a remarkable personal magnetism. “ She was a high-toned entertainer more than she was a schooled artist—and yet her imagination contained the freshness of an artist as well as the single mindedness of a crusader.”

“What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism”, pages 558/559


Now, let’s find out more about St. Dennis and the continuous flow of "Radha" until nowadays:

Ms. St. Denis founded Adelphi University's dance program in 1938 which was the one of the first dance departments in an American university. It has since become a cornerstone of Adelphi's Department of Performing Arts.

Her early works are indicative of her interests in exotic mysticism and spirituality. Many companies currently include a collection of her signature solos in their repertoires, including in the program, “The Art of the Solo,” a showcase of famous solos of modern dance pioneers. Several early St. Denis solos (including “Incense” and ”The Legend of the Peacock”) were presented on September 29, 2006, at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A centennial salute was scheduled with the revival premiere of St. Denis' "Radha," commissioned by Countess Anastasia Thamakis of Greece. The program's director, Mino Nicolas, has been instrumental in the revival of these key solos.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_St._Denis

Here is an eloquent description about Radha, on the stage:

Ruth as Radha on stage, pages 259/260

Here are the pictures from the Radha and many other performances:

Ruth as Radha/Pictures

Keep clicking next, next, for there are many pictures taken from the Radha and other performances.

[Deleted]

admin said:

This is fascinating stuff, Harisaranji. Thanks for these postings. I wonder when Radha was performed. Was it in 1904? If so, I wonder if Baba Bharati was in the audience or had something to do with the production. His book Shree Krishna came out in 1904 and he had been in the country since 1902. The artistic and intellectual atmosphere seems so open and fertile back then.

Nitai-ji there maybe another way to verify if Baba Bharati was in the audience. In those days there was a Hindi Community, where members apparently were supportive to her mission. It is described in Ruth Dennis biography:

St. Denis designed her own elaborate and exotic costume, and performed the dance with three extras from the then flourishing Coney Island Hindi community.

In other words, do you know if Baba Bharati had any type of connection with this Coney Island Hindi Community? Anyways, not in 1904, but around 1930, Tagore was in the audience:

Pickett convinced Tagore that if he wanted to place his cause before the U.S. public he would have to avoid antagonizing the press. Tagore agreed, and an orderly press conference ensued. Among the many public events that followed, Tagore appeared with the interpretive dancer Ruth St. Denis in a New York City theater. He sat on a throne surrounded by children reading his poetry in Bengali and English. Pickett described this "as a sight which I am sure no one who saw it would ever forget."

www.afsc.org/about/hist/tagore.htm

[JD33]

Nov 9, 2007 5:30:22 GMT -6 @Deleted said:

Choreography by Martha Graham & Ted Shawn

www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5EHQgF0ZM

Nitai-Gaur, Radhey-Shyam; Hare Krsna, Hare Ram.

This is really nice. Nice ending - worth the watch.