Lea Clay Why didn’t Martha initially have men in the company? Terese Capucilli It had nothing to do with wanting more; it just had to do with how she was emerging as an artist. She left Denishawn in ’26 and started doing her own choreography. It was like a cult, basically a following of women that would be working with her. But the main reason that there weren’t that many men was very simple: they were all out in war; they were all fighting. Lea Clay We discussed previously that you look at sculptures a lot, such as the hands of the Pietá, and that you see movement in still sculptures. Was that something that you were thinking about as you were looking at the still photographs and trying to extract movement from them? Terese Capucilli Maybe subconsciously at that time; I think that one thing you learn very early when working with Martha is that you need to delve deeply into the reason, the inner dialogue, the technicality of what’s happening in any given character or dance to understand where she as an artist was coming from and was trying to say. Everything, even the most abstract ballet, has what we call an “inner dialogue,” but Martha’s response to humanity had to do with how she delved deeply into the landscape of a song in order to find the essence of some very ugly and some very beautiful things about ourselves as human beings and she wasn’t afraid to express those. Her brilliance is in how deeply she could go into the human spirit and bring that forth in all of the years that she was choreographing, 181 ballets, in total. Every aspect, whether it deals with Emily Dickinson, or the Bronze Age or with war themes, or delving into the crazy Greek myths and all the great archetypal heroes and heroines of Greek myth, we’re all brought back to the same place; it all brings you back
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