Easiest to follow is the new couple’s story. The Husbandman (Jacob Larsen) is the third of the figures to walk on, after Preacher and Pioneering Woman take slow, measured steps to assume their place onstage. When he enters, he first goes up to the wall and touches it softly, gravely, then turns and begins to walk to the rail fence. He senses the Bride (Anne Souder) behind him and turns: a beautiful moment as they face each other. There is a parting, a wedding, another parting; at dance’s end, they are on the porch, she seated, he behind her, as the others leave. Throughout, the two dancers maintain a connection with each other.

As with the other dances, the solo of the Pioneer Woman (Leslie Andrea Williams) is full of what we have learned to recognize as Graham’s distinctive contractions and gestures. Though her name makes the Pioneer Woman’s role clear, I have trouble understanding her place in the narrative. The authoritative start of Williams’s solo was clear, however: one bent leg lifts slowly to the side, where a contraction holds it in weighty stillness.

The movements of the Preacher (Alessio Crognale-Roberts) are different still, now cannonball jumps with no apparent preparation, now steps punctuated by sudden, fierce freezes. One could see how Merce Cunningham was the original dancer. The fire-and-brimstone solo shows why the Preacher is named “Revivalist” in some programs. Frenzy was the strongest part of Crognale-Roberts’s performance.

This aloof figure’s four Followers (So Young An, Meagan King, Devin Loh, Marzia Memoli) move with quick, lively steps that alternate with a squatting and scuttering whose mechanisms are hidden under their long skirts. The rapidity is well done, but the grounded heaviness required even in skimming motions was harder to achieve. All the while, their hands flutter and frame their faces, fetchingly bonneted; even when they hold their hands in stylized prayer position, the elbows flicker in and out. They lie down, roll around, and raise their hands up to the Preacher to receive his hat, so he can dance. “Groupies,” Janet Eilber suggested. Or perhaps a kind of revivalist ecstasy? 

In the world Graham depicts, prayer is dominant and, given the period, perhaps evangelical. It seems significant that the Followers have the first dance and that they introduce the hands in prayer that all the dancers use in their solos, albeit without the fluttering. The new couple kneel in prayer at one point in the Preacher’s solo; later, a solemn procession appears to be religious. This aspect of what Graham captures for her Americana is perhaps the least generalizable feature.