Analysing Martha Graham’s “Diversion of Angels” performance

I have been looking at Martha Graham and her piece "Diversion of Angels", which was originally called "Wilderness Stair". The message in the performance is about three different couples who represent the diiferent traits of love, where their costumes represent the role they are showing. For example, red couple portrays romantic and passionate love, the white couple represent mature love and the yellow couple represent flirtatious and young love. Graham's piece doesn't actually have a story line, unlike most of her work, however this performance is about the feeling of joy and excitement when falling in love for the first time (Sherwood, 2018). Martha Graham received her inspiration from two different sources, one of them was a poem by Ben Belitt and its reads; “It is the place of the Rock and Ladder, the raven, the blessing, the tempter, the rose. It is the wish of the single-hearted, the undivided; play after the spirit’s labor; games, flights, fancies, configurations of the lover’s intention; the believed Possibility, at once strenuous and tender; humors of innocence, garlands, evangels, Joy on the wilderness stair; diversion of angels.”. The title of Graham's piece obviously comes from the poem, but the other stimulus she used was a painting by Wassily Kandinsky, where she used the colours of the painting and incorporated them into her performance with the colours of the costumes, which are red, white and yellow (Diversion of Angels | American Ballet Theatre, 2020).

The movement and its relationship to the music seems to match together so that when the volume of the music lowers the movements seem to descend with the music, so that the movements become smaller and then other dancers join the current performers on stage, so then the music takes a sudden rise in volume and pitch, I thought this was really effective as it added an element of surprise. I also noticed that the different layers of the instruments in the music have several groups dancing to the sections of the music. This is a similarity that I share with Graham, as in the piece I am creating with my group, we have used a split focus in our performance. There was also some points of silence in the music where some slight sharp instruments were added ocassionally and the dancers would make small but harsh movements, which I thought was really clever as everyone was still on stage and the individual soloist made a small movement but it was noticeable. From my own observation from Martha Graham's piece, she used a lot of split focus and also used still images with a contrast of movements forming around a soloist or duet. The majority of the time Graham had a least two groups of dancers on stage where a duet might be dancing or holding a still image whilst a group of four or five would almost frame the soloist or duet. In my group piece we use multiple groups as well as unison which is a difference to Graham's work as she doesn't use unison during her piece, however we both have used soloists, because in the Bad Memory section of my group piece Elenor is the soloist who suffers from the bad memory. Here below is Martha Graham's performance of "Diversion of Angels". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv9r8-bq_FQ (MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY (Liceu 2010-11) "Diversion of Angels", 2013) Bibliography : Sherwood, M., 2018. Diversion Of Angels (1948). [online] Martha Graham Dance Company. Available at: [Accessed 15 November 2020]. American Ballet Theatre. 2020. Diversion Of Angels | American Ballet Theatre. [online] Available at: [Accessed 15 November 2020]. 2020. [image] Available at: [Accessed 15 November 2020]. 2013. MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY (Liceu 2010-11) "Diversion Of Angels". [video] Available at: [Accessed 15 November 2020].