her technique is all about that counter tension and the counter resistance, the use of gravity and pull of gravity and reach of the body. I’ll put on the Deep Song video—this is a very early stage of it. It’s a 1988 rehearsal and we didn’t premier until October of ’89 I think, so this is really early on. We had to make the photographs move, because there was no video of this at all. […] That stance right there was for Martha what Deep Song was about. The strength and the clarity of contained in that moment of thrusting forward. You can see that run is a little different; it turned into a ronde de jambe. This was our studio at 55th street, which no longer exists. A lot of work was created there, that’s for sure. [Capucilli then reads from and comments on a passage from Ernestine Stodelle’s Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham] You know that Martha read; she was a voracious reader. And if you just take something as simple but complicated as Deep Song and an artist in the world thinking about what’s happening in the world […] let’s just read a little bit about “Deep Song” because I was enjoying reading this, so I thought maybe I’ll enjoy reading it to you. This is really beautifully written; Ernestine Stodelle is a wonderful, wonderful woman. It says “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn” (Stodelle 99), and this is something [Graham’s] grandfather used to say to her, and he was quoting Robert Burns during the Spanish Civil War. Now “across the Atlantic and other countries, Spain was being torn by fratricidal strife. Two young American writers, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway who had lived previously in Spain and felt close to the Spanish people became involved in the etiological struggle,” you’ve probably read most of this but, “Hemingway became a war correspondent and Dos Passos was to help create a film, The Spanish Civil War”
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