Lamentation (ballet)

Lamentation is a modern dance solo choreographed by Martha Graham to Zoltán Kodály's 1910 Piano Piece, Op. 3, No. 2. One of Graham's signature works, it premiered on January 8, 1930 at Maxine Elliott's Theatre in New York City. The performance was part of a concert staged by the Dance Repertory Theatre, a group that included dancer/choreographers Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Helen Tamiris. Their stated goal was "to give annually a season of continuous dance programs which will be representative of the art of dance in America and will give native artists an outlet for their creative work."

In program notes, Lamentation was subtitled Dance of Sorrow, "not the sorrow of specific person, time or place but the personification of grief itself." The ballet is less than four minutes in length. It opens on a set containing a single low bench upon which the soloist sits, feet and lower legs in a wide second position. She wears a loose purple tube-like garment from which only her head, hands and feet protrude. Graham said of the costume, "I wear a long tube of material to indicate the tragedy that obsesses the body, the ability to stretch inside your own skin, to witness and test the perimeters and boundaries of grief."

As the piece begins, the dancer shakes her head gently from side to side in silence. After cueing the music with a movement of her foot, she rocks and twists her upper body, swinging through deep contractions. The angular motions of torso, head and arms become increasingly exaggerated, shaping the jersey costume into squares, triangles and rhomboids that frame her emotionless face and a portion of her chest. Seemingly anchored to the bench, she ultimately struggles to an upright position. In a final gesture, she clutches the upper edge of her costume in an upraised fist, stretching the fabric tautly over her head and face. She sinks once again to a seated position and drops her head between her knees in resignation.

Lamentation has been praised highly since its premiere. In 1930, the critic for Dance Magazine described the work as "a statuesque composition, which relied for much of its eloquence upon an ingenious and simple costume arrangement." After seeing a later performance, the Philadelphia Record's critic wrote, "When Miss Graham in her Lamentation depicts the dumb agony of grief she does not droop like a flower or attitudinize like Patience on a monument, she is grief from the first stricken bewildered gropings of her head and torso to the last moment when she averts her covered head with a finality that is pitiful and terrible."

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