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Lingualism in Graham's Night Journey

Daihyun Chung 1

1이화여자대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This paper is to claim that dance is a form of language, by relying on a wide view of language where the lingual notions of meaning, interpretation, understanding and explanation are clarified in terms of communal uses of language, rather than terms of denotation or truth. What I do intelligently when I watch Martha Graham's Night Journey is to ask what the dance work may be trying to say. Then I find that I myself apply these lingual notions mentioned above to the dance work. Graham interpreted Sophocles' Oedipus Rex from a woman's point of view in order to reach her own distinct conception of tragedy and interpreted it again to express this conception in her dance movements. Graham's understanding of notions like heroin or marriage was evident in her work. She took Jocasta to be the heroin in her version of the tragedy so that Jocasta dominated the whole dance piece where Oedipus played only a minor role. Graham also used her notion of marriage between Jocasta and Oedipus to be the leading story of the dance work from the start to the end where the marriage in the case of Oedipus Rex was an event which was mentioned only in memory and never an event presented in any way on the stage. And Graham seemed to appeal to the notion of explanation when she showed a necessity in which Jocasta killed herself. For she couldn't believe herself to be a human when she found out that she married to her own son. I tried to conclude in this paper that the content of Night Journey may not be accessed apart from those lingual notions.

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