Portraits of a Lady
Martha Graham is the Georgia O’Keefe of dance. No matter what the source material, the primary subject of her works is womanhood.
PlusWorld-class review of ballet and dance.
While the television show Severance has been exploring the pitfalls of a complete division between people’s work and home lives, Sara Mearns’s recent solo show at New York City Center presented the dangers of the inverse. The opening piece, “Don’t Go Home,” examined the problems created by conflating the occupational and the personal. Oddly enough, as in Severance, Mearns’s production employed a doppelganger (a humorously bewigged Anna Greenberg), a destabilizing narrative, and mysterious period styling. Given that Mearns is a famous ballerina, it was surprising that “Don’t Go Home” was more of a theatrical piece than a dance. But Mearns has acted on the City Center stage before, in the title role of the Encores! musical revival “I Married an Angel” in 2019. Then, as now, she proved herself to be a gifted actress. She was even more convincing this time around, possibly because this was an autobiographical endeavor, with a script by Jonathon Young sourced from Mearns’s own diary entries (a diary kept at the insistence of her therapist while she navigated burnout, depression, and divorce). The border between character and pseudo-self (Mearns played the dual role of Sara/Claire) was deliberately fuzzy—with some eerie Lynchian crossover—making “Don’t Go Home” a fascinating self-portrait of an artist in crisis.
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Martha Graham is the Georgia O’Keefe of dance. No matter what the source material, the primary subject of her works is womanhood.
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