In a pre-show speech, Artistic Director Janet Eilber described this 1943 piece (which hadn’t been performed since 2012) as “the first dance to use stream of consciousness.” Stream is too gentle a term for Graham’s approach here; torrent is more like it. Graham employs the same highly dramatic contractions and laborious floorwork for the sisters’ parlor games that she uses in her bestial showdown. Thus, “Deaths and Entrances” is borderline comical at times. In her final solo, Xi Ying—superb in the mercurial lead role—skipped up and over the chessboard like it was a stile in a country field on a summer day, then theatrically banged on it and draped herself across it. In the tense final moments of the work, the sisters moved their chess piece dildos with all the subtlety of Brutus stabbing Caesar.  

In general, I think Graham’s dramatic style lends itself better to the many epic Greek myths she adapted. But despite—or maybe because of—its soap opera tendencies, “Deaths and Entrances” is a curiously compelling piece. At least Graham picked the Brontës of the literary windswept moors and brooding un-gentlemen instead of, say, the discreet repression of Henry James. And yet, like James’s Portrait of a Lady, Graham’s “Deaths and Entrances” insists that the somewhat circumscribed lives of clever Victorian women are worthy subject matter—as worthy as the beasts of ancient verse. Her equally extravagant physical treatment of both Emily Brontë and Theseus equates them, and thereby elevates a poor, wordy governess to the level of a mythic hero.     

Graham likely also selected the Brontës because she felt a kinship with them, as they too fought for artistic control in a sexist society. They wrote under male pseudonyms so that they would be taken more seriously. And, just as Graham bound her Minotaur, the Brontë sisters were not afraid to cut their leading men down to size, afflicting them with poverty, blindness, and self-sabotaging rage. More pertinent still, the Brontës examined the complexities of female lust and the various power imbalances in heterosexual relationships. One of the peaks of “Deaths and Entrances” is the pas de trois between Emily and her two Beloveds. Though Xi clearly felt a kinship with Villaverde, tenderly holding his hand, she couldn’t help but lean away from him and into Knight’s body at the same time. Though Xi raged and fought with Knight in their pas de deux, this melting into his embrace was one of the few instances, in any Graham dance, of a woman with a soft and yielding spine.      

Also unusual in “Deaths and Entrances” is Graham’s use of children. Well, not real ones. The dancers who portray the childhood versions of the Brontë sisters are full grown company members. Graham was not adding tiny, adorable technicians to her works like George Balanchine. The Three Remembered Children of “Deaths and Entrances” dance sprightly sautés, but they can be just as calculating as their future selves. We see them jockeying for power with each other even as they frolic and listen to seashells. They are little women, already dealing with Graham’s adult themes. And, like the men in the cast, they are also rather prop-like. They represent the grown sisters’ reveries, and their materialization is often triggered by the room’s various strewn objects—much like Proust’s madeleine daydream.