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Art and Actuality

“Imprints on a Landscape: The Mining Project”
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Round House Theatre
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA 
January 6, 2007

by George Jackson
copyright 2007, George Jackson

Martha Wittman looks American Gothic. With her hair swept into a bun, wearing granny glasses and sensible shoes, she sits straight and still as a schoolmarm, attentive to the post-performance discussion until invited to talk. Then, although her words are clear, Wittman also speaks with her hands. They illustrate and amplify her thoughts. Her gestures are powerful when she makes a point, and immaculately controlled. At other moments her hands, as if preparing to launch, press down on her knees.

Wittman did not perform in the premiere of her “Imprints” Project, but no one seeing her in action afterwards could doubt that this woman is a dancer to the core. She began “more than 50 years ago” for the likes of Doris Humphrey, Ruth Currier, Anna Sokolow and other American moderns. For a long while Wittman taught dance at Bennington. A dozen years ago Liz Lerman invited her to join Dance Exchange, where she has been part of the family. “Imprints” is Wittman’s first big staging for the group. She is credited with the conception, direction and leading choreography of this theatrical rumination on coal mining. What concerns her includes mining as an activity, a way of life, a necessity and yet the cause of immeasurable harm to humans and the planet. The question whether art can contribute to solving the problems is posed. Past and present are invoked, both for coal mining, which isn’t just historical but still an industry, and for art insofar as “Imprints” springs from the printmaking of the late Michael J. Gallagher. He came from a Pennsylvania coal mining family, studied art and focused on his roots, especially in the carborundum imprints he made for the WPA during the great Depression of the 1930s. Wittman got to know his work because she was his daughter.  

As choreographer, Wittman translates the feel and form of WPA art into contemporary dance. Powerfully! The bodies on stage have the low center of gravity of the figures in the prints. Weight resides towards the bottom of the torso. Yet legs aren’t crushed. Sturdy, they stay active. Bodies are outlined clearly; one becomes aware of their rounded volume because attention has been paid to the space between figures even when they touch. Often movement is accented at the start of a phrase. That upbeat gives a silver lining even to so pessimistic a motif as people, down on all fours, beating their heads against the floor.

Groupings form and split with ease. Wittman counterpoints her working, washing, sleeping, courting miners and their mules with lighter figures — a banshee, a child. The all-out dance passages in “Imprints” are many but short. I wish she had developed them further and trusted her choreography to tell more of her story in movement. The work as it emerged at this premiere is a collage of dance, spoken text, video of mining country and slides of Gallagher’s art. There are 14 sections.

The texts — from historical sources, interviews, literature - are well chosen. The videos by Gwyneth Leech, a Gallagher granddaughter, contrast with her grandfather’s prints. There are no people in the videos, which focus on abandoned structures and sooty, snowy, scarred landscape. The music that accompanies Wittman’s collage is a collection of traditional labor songs, jigs and pieces by Jelly Roll Morton and her son Ben Wittman. In programming the scores, Ben Wittman almost succeeded in giving his mother’s work a musical form. Last night, though, the many ingredients didn’t always coalesce and the many scenes seemed episodic. Perhaps “Imprints” needs a strong narrative thread such as the story of Martha Wittman’s own journey of discovery through her father’s art and the reality behind it.  Her moving images — the art nouveau windings and washings of the tub dance, the jiggling descent into the mine shaft, the women’s defiant broom dance, those knocking heads et al. — will remain imprinted on the memory. There they may illustrate and amplify issues, and perhaps prod us to face them.

The 15 performers — Elizabeth Johnson, Shula Strassfeld, Vincent E. Thomas, Sharon Chaiklin, Dona Davis, Thomas Dwyer, Margot Greenlee, Ted Johnson, Dorothy Levy, Matt Mahaney, Quincy Northrop, Cassie Meador, Peg Schaefer, Sarah Steel, Megan Wilson — were very much an ensemble.     

Volume 5, No. 2
January 8, 2007

copyright ©2007 George Jackson
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