Mastery (45 page)

After several years she became one of their leading students, a major performer in their troupe and a teacher of the Denishawn method, as it came to be known. But soon she began to tire of this form of dancing. It did not suit her temperament. To get some distance from the school she moved to New York, and to support herself she taught classes in the Denishawn method. Then one day in 1926, perhaps upset at her leaving the troupe, Ted Shawn surprised her with an ultimatum—she would have to pay $500 for the right to teach Denishawn exercises and dance material. If not, she was strictly forbidden, under penalty of a lawsuit, ever to use any of their methods in her classes or personal work.

For Graham, this precipitated a crisis of sorts. She was now thirty-two years old, no longer young for a career in dance. She had barely $50 to her name, which meant that she could never pay Shawn even if she had wanted to. To earn extra money she had already tried working in popular dance shows on Broadway and had hated it, vowing never to go back. But as she weighed her options, one idea kept recurring to her. In her mind she had always been able to envision a kind of dance that did not exist in the world but that spoke to her innermost desires, both as a performer and a spectator. This dance was the polar opposite of the Denishawn method, which now seemed to her like empty, arty gesturing. It was more related to what she had seen of modern art—somewhat jagged and occasionally dissonant, full of power and rhythm. It was a visceral form of dance that she envisioned, and as she imagined it her thoughts kept returning to her father and their discussions about the body, about the language that all animals express through their movement.

This dance she could visualize was rigorous, based on a new kind of discipline—not at all free-floating and spontaneous like the Denishawn style. It would have its own vocabulary. She could not shake the image of the beauty of this nonexistent dance. She would never have this chance again. With age comes conservatism and the need for comfort. To create what was not out there, she would have to start her own school and dance troupe, building up the technique and discipline on her own. To support herself,
she would have to give classes, teaching the new dance movements she would be in the process of creating. It would entail a tremendous risk, and money would be a constant problem, but her desperation to create what she could imagine would fuel her past any obstacles.

Within weeks of Ted Shawn’s ultimatum, she made her first move. She rented out a studio, and to show her pupils that this was a new kind of dance they were going to learn, she covered the walls in burlap. Unlike other dance studios, her studio would have no mirrors. The dancers would have to focus intensely on what she was teaching and learn how to correct themselves by feeling the movement in their bodies, not becoming fixated on their images. Everything she wanted in this new form of dance was outwardly directed at the audience, without self-consciousness.

At first, it all seemed rather impossible. She had only a few students, just enough to cover rent. They would often have to wait for her as she slowly invented some new kind of movement or exercise, which they would then practice together and refine. A few early performances, although awkward, managed to attract more recruits, enough for Graham to think of creating a small troupe. From this group, she demanded the utmost discipline. They were creating a new language and would have to work hard. Week by week she built up a set of exercises that would bring the dancers more control, along with an entirely new mechanics of movement. She and her recruits would spend an entire year working on and perfecting one simple new technique, until it became second nature.

To distinguish her method from other forms of dance, she placed all of the emphasis on the torso. She called the torso “the house of the pelvic truth.” She had determined that the most expressive part of the human body came from the contractions of the diaphragm and the sharp movements of the torso. This would be the center of focus, not the face and arms that made dance too romantic. She created endless exercises to build up this area, and she encouraged her dancers to feel the deep well of emotions that came from using these muscles.

Much of what stimulated her in this early phase was the desire to create something that had never been seen before on the stage. In Western dance, for instance, it was taboo for a dancer to fall—that would be a sign of a mistake and loss of control. The ground was something to resist and never surrender to. She decided to turn this around by creating a new sequence of controlled falls in which the dancer would melt into the ground and reascend, ever so slowly. This required building up a whole new series of muscles. She took this concept further, using the ground itself as a space upon which the dancer could move like a coiled snake. In her new system, suddenly the knee became a different instrument of expression—a hinge upon which the dancer could balance and move, giving the effect of weightlessness.

Slowly, as the work progressed, she could see coming to life the new form of dance that she had visualized. To add to the effect of newness, Graham decided to design and sew her own costumes. These costumes, often made out of stretch materials, would turn the dancers into almost abstract shapes, accentuating their sharp movements. Unlike the usual fairy-tale decor that was used for ballets, her sets would be minimal and stark. The dancers would wear little makeup. Everything would be designed to set them off from the stage and make their movements explode.

The response to her first series of performances was electrifying. The public had never seen anything remotely like it before. Many were disgusted and repulsed. Others found the work strangely emotional, giving dance an expressive quality they had never suspected it could possess. The work elicited extremes of reaction, a sign of its power. Over the years, what had seemed initially so harsh and ugly began to be accepted, as Martha Graham had indeed single-handedly created a new genre—modern dance as we know it today. To avoid this dance turning into yet another convention, she would constantly struggle to upset people’s expectations, never going over old ground, and constantly changing the subject matter of the dances, from Greek myths to Americana and depictions from literature. For close to sixty years after the formation of her troupe, she continued to drive herself to create that feeling of newness and immediacy she had always wanted.

Perhaps the greatest impediment to human creativity is the natural decay that sets in over time in any kind of medium or profession. In the sciences or in business, a certain way of thinking or acting that once had success quickly becomes a paradigm, an established procedure. As the years go by, people forget the initial reason for this paradigm and simply follow a lifeless set of techniques. In the arts, someone establishes a style that is new and vibrant, speaking to the particular spirit of the times. It has an edge because it is so different. Soon imitators pop up everywhere. It becomes a fashion, something to conform to, even if the conformity appears to be rebellious and edgy. This can drag on for ten, twenty years; it eventually becomes a cliché, pure style without any real emotion or need. Nothing in culture escapes this deadening dynamic.

We may not be aware of it, but we suffer from the dead forms and conventions that clutter our culture. This problem, however, sets up a tremendous opportunity for creative types, one epitomized by the example of Martha Graham. The process goes as follows: You begin by looking inward. You have something you want to express that is unique to yourself and related to your inclinations. You must be sure it is not something that is sparked by some trend or fashion, but that it comes from you and is real. Perhaps it is
a sound you are not hearing in music, a type of story not being told, a type of book that does not fit into the usual tidy categories. Perhaps it is even a new way of doing business. Let the idea, the sound, the image take root in you. Sensing the possibility of a new language or way of doing things, you must make the conscious decision to play against the very conventions that you find dead and want to get rid of. Martha Graham did not create her work out of a vacuum; her vision corresponded to what ballet and modern dance of the time were not giving her. She took their conventions and turned them upside down. Following this strategy will give your work a kind of reverse reference point and a way to shape it.

Like Graham, you must not mistake newness with wild spontaneity. There is nothing that becomes repetitive and boring more quickly than free expression that is not rooted in reality and discipline. You must bring to your new idea all of the knowledge you have acquired in your field, but for the purpose of reversing it, as Graham did with the Denishawn method. In essence, what you are doing is creating some space in a cluttered culture, claiming for yourself an open field in which you can finally plant something new. People are dying for the new, for what expresses the spirit of the time in an original way. By creating something new you will create your own audience, and attain the ultimate position of power in culture.

6. The High End

Yoky Matsuoka (see
chapter 1
,
here
) always had the feeling that she was different from others. It wasn’t so much how she dressed or looked, but her interests that set her apart. As a teenager in Japan in the early 1980s, she was expected to focus on a particular subject that she would transform into a career. But as she got older, her interests only widened. She had a love for physics and mathematics, but was attracted to biology and physiology as well. She was also a talented athlete with a future as a professional tennis player, until an injury cut this short. On top of it all, she loved working with her hands and tinkering with machines.

Much to her relief, when she began her undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, she fell upon a subject that seemed to open up all sorts of larger questions that would satisfy her voracious, wide-ranging interests—the relatively new field of robotics. After completing her undergraduate studies, curious to explore this subject further, she entered the masters program in robotics at MIT. As part of her work in the department, she was to help in the design of the large-scale robot they were building, and soon she chose to work exclusively on the design of the robot’s hands. She had always been fascinated by the complexity and power of the human hand,
and with the chance to combine so many of her interests (mathematics, physiology, and building things), it seemed she had finally found her niche.

As she began her work on the hands, however, she realized yet again how different she was in her way of thinking. The other students in the department were mostly men, and they tended to reduce everything to questions of engineering—how to pack the robot with as many mechanical options as possible so it could move and act in reasonably human ways. They thought of their robot as intrinsically a machine. To build it meant solving a series of technical issues and creating a kind of moving computer that could mimic some basic thought patterns.

Matsuoka had a much different approach. She wanted to create something as lifelike and anatomically correct as possible. That was the real future of robotics, and to reach such a goal meant engaging in questions that were on a much higher level—what makes anything alive and organically complex? To her, it was as important to study evolution, human physiology, and neuroscience as it was to immerse oneself in engineering. Perhaps it would complicate her career path, but she would follow her own inclinations and see where they led.

In going about her design, Matsuoka made a key decision: she would begin by building a model of a robotic hand that would replicate the human hand as closely as possible. In attempting such an enormous task, she would be forced to truly understand how each part functioned. For instance, in trying to recreate all of the various bones of the hand, she came upon all kinds of seemingly irrelevant bumps and grooves. The bone at the knuckle of the index finger has a bump that makes it larger on one side. In studying this one detail, she discovered its function—giving us the ability to grasp objects in the center of the hand with more power. It seemed odd that such a bump would evolve expressly for that purpose. Probably it was some mutation that ended up becoming a part of our evolution, as the hand became increasingly important in our development.

Continuing in this line she worked on the palm of her robotic hand, which she had determined was in many ways the key to the design. For most engineers, robotic hands were designed for optimal power and maneuverability. They would build in all kinds of mechanical options, but to make it work they would have to pack all of the motors and cables in the most convenient place, the palm, rendering it completely rigid. After designing hands like this, they would then fob them off to software engineers to try to figure out to how bring back maneuverability. Because of the built-in rigidity, however, the thumb would never be able to touch the pinky, and engineers would inevitably end up with the same highly limited robotic hand.