Northwest Michigan Folklife Center

The recent production of Martha Graham’s American Document

performed at the Mills Community House in Benzonia was brilliant,

intense, and moving, reminding us that there is art that we just

consume, and then pure, original art that really moves us.  Directed

and adapted by Gretchen Eichberger, who also dances in the ensemble,

American Document “incorporates vaudevillian structures, folk rhythms,

and spoken text to examine America and the continual conflict between

the rights of the individual and society.  The central questions posed

throughout the work ask “What is America?” and “What is an

American?”"  Eichberger has managed to include the words of native son

Bruce Catton, the excellent writer of Civil War history and the memoir

Waiting for the Morning Train about growing up in Benzonia.  The

recorded music composed by Mark O’Connor, Aaron Copeland, Samuel

Barber, John Newton, Scott Joplin, Edgar Meyer, and John Adams is

supplemented by the live drumming of Rick Jones, percussionist from

Song o’ the Lakes.  His insistent rhythms during the transitions

between episodes as the ensemble circles the stage provide a visceral

doorway into the physical textures captured by the dancers.  The

spoken word segments that frame each dance are deftly articulated by

Holly Wren Spaulding and Tim Joseph.  Spaulding sets an elegant and

lofty tone that challenges the audience to let the performance engage

both the imagination and the intellect, while Joseph seems

increasingly ready to jump out of his skin at the urgency implicit in

his words.  The cast of dancers besides Eichberger, whose intensity

and focus is a powerful glue holding everything together, includes

Brooke Beuby, the excellent veteran Hughthir White, Jamaica Lynne

Weston, James Weston, and Stephen Kelly.  The central questions at the

heart of the work are considered in five episodes:  Declaration,

Occupation, The Puritan, Emancipation, and finally Hold Your Own.  The

sequence expertly draws the audience into both the agonies and

triumphs of American History.  Bueby manages in her Dance of the

Native Figure to capture the ethos of both primitive and contemporary

America, Jamaica Weston’s and Stephen Kelly’s Puritan Love Duet

creates wonderful tension between both the desire and the fear to

embrace the world that pulls at the heart of the American psyche, and

the Ecstatic Duet of Beuby and James Weston during the Emancipation

episode creates a breath-taking climax to the piece.  As the ensemble

performs the final Dance of Declaration that provides an exhilarating

denouement, many in the audience have been moved to tears.  American

Document is humbling and transformative, thought-provoking and

wistful, elegant and affecting. One hopes Gretchen Eichberger’s

adaptation of American Document finds its way onto several other area

stages in the months to come.

Norm Wheeler