Night Journey is a Martha Graham ballet performed to music by William Schuman with costumes designed by Graham and a set by Isamu Noguchi. Commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress, the work premiered on May 3, 1947, at Cambridge High School in Boston, Massachusetts. Night Journey is the third of Graham's dances derived from Greek mythology, following Cave of the Heart and Errand into the Maze.
Theme, synopsis and original cast
Graham based the 30-minute-long ballet on a fragment of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Original program notes explain "the action takes place in Jocasta's heart at the instant when she recognizes the ultimate terms of her destiny."
The original cast members were Graham in the role of Queen Jocasta and Erick Hawkins as King Oedipus. Mark Ryder as the blind Seer (Tiresias) was accompanied by the Daughters of the Night (Furies), a chorus of six women: Pearl Lang, Yuriko, Ethel Winter, Helen McGehee, Natanya Neumann and Joan Skinner.
The piece opens with Jocasta standing at extreme stage right illuminated in a conical spotlight. She twists slowly, holding aloft a loop of rope with which she intends to kill herself. At the first performance, a sustained note from the orchestra's horns created a mood of impending doom. But, when the sound ceased, Jocasta recoiled in horror. Hastening to her room, she collapsed on the bridal bed. The ballet was reworked shortly after its debut. In the revised version, Jocasta's suicidal thoughts are interrupted by the entrance of the Seer, followed by the Furies. After wrestling briefly with the oracle, she retreats to her bed to assess her life.
As she relives her past in flashback, she sees her husband/son as a young man. She remembers him as a triumphal young warrior, surrounded by an adoring public bearing black laurel leaves. He performs a dance of the domineering suitor, she one of acquiescence. Wrapping her in his cloak, Oedipus and Jocasta engage in what appears to be an exchange of vows. In the pas de deux that follows, Jocasta embraces Oedipus, in gestures both maternal and sexual. At the duet's culmination, the pair wrap themselves in a tangle of rope atop their marriage bed, the rope representative of umbilical cord as well as the tie that binds their marriage.
The pair is interrupted by the Seer, who breaks their bond, symbolically and literally, with his staff. Jocasta then recalls the Seer's revelation of her true relationship with Oedipus. Forced to drop the rope connecting them, the couple performs a dance of realization and shame. In the original production, Oedipus hoisted and rotated a painted plywood eye, blue on one side, bloodied on the other, as a portent of his fate. The prop was later eliminated as unnecessarily redundant. The desolate king removes the brooch fastening Jocasta's cloak, gouging out his eyes and groping his way offstage. The queen removes her cloak, the symbol of her sovereignty, winds the rope around her neck and falls lifeless to the floor.
Set and score
Noguchi's gray and white set is more elaborate than most he produced for Graham. A series of hourglass- and lyre-shaped stools, of increasing height, are placed diagonally from upstage left to right center stage. An offset stool/pillar serves as the throne where Oedipus makes Jocasta his queen. Inspired by the contours of the female pelvis, Jocasta's angled, raised rectangular bed resembles a stack of enlarged human bones. In some versions of the ballet, an oval-shaped wheel (of Fate) is located upstage right. The ominous artifacts and abstract elements combine to create a mood of impending doom.
Schuman’s harsh, dissonant, dramatic music reflects Jocasta's state of mind, underscoring the ballet's eroticism and expected unhappy ending. Strings and wind instruments dominate the work, for the most part strident, sweeping or shrill, with occasional percussive passages. While still maintaining an undercurrent of doom, the music softens when Jocasta recalls Oedipus as her lover.
Choreography
Each of the three central characters dance with a distinctive set of movements. Costumed in a mask with covered eyes and a weighted cloak, the Seer moves with an air of power and purpose. He carries a heavy wooden staff that he strikes noisily on the stage and bed, emphasizing the seriousness of his message. Tiresias "sees most and least, takes up huge amounts of space when moving or standing still, yet never becomes personally engaged in the tragedy."