By Adrianna Aguilar - Dance

with Hawkins. Other myth-inspired works of Graham such as Clytemnestra and Voyage:
“projected a heroic image of herself. [Yet] This was particularly true of Jocasta in Night Journey,
the only one of her roles she herself singled out as heroic.” 74 “I feel this character will be
different from any other I have done,” she wrote to William Schuman, “because she is of heroic
stature.” 75
Maggie Boogaart, the teacher with whom I studied Graham technique, spoke of the ideals
of the Graham technique in a way that emphasizes the kinesthetic experience of the body. She
said that in training and learning the repertoire she “felt a personal responsibility to allow the
energy to sing through her body.” She became attracted to the technique because of its demands
and the challenge of trying “to reach the extreme complex emotional depth of the works through
movement. It is beyond the soul, and the soul is revealed to the audience in a controlled
abandonment “As a dancer in the Chorus of Night Journey, Boogaart loved the sensation of
knowing that her movements with the hands and the falls gave the audience a “guttural and raw
impact” physically and mentally. Her words as a dancer and as a teacher in the Graham
technique support the effectiveness of Graham’s work to influence individuals. 76
It is not the goal of Graham and H.D. to duplicate Sophocles and Euripides’s works. Using
the latter as a foundation, these female artists re-establish a new artistic world that is linked to
their personal lives and artistic forms. Horace Gregory notes: “H.D.’s Helen in Egypt is no
translation, but a re-creation in her own terms of the Helen-Achilles myth.” 77 H.D. aims to
defend and prove the strength and the knowledge of Helen through a journey from conflict to
realization in her book-length work. A 1956 letter to Norman Holmes Pearson underscored these
74 Franko, 98.
75 Franko, 200.
76 Maggie Boogaart interview by Adrianna Aguilar, Paris, France, 20 June 2012.
77 D.H., vii.
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