Dance Reviews : Martha Graham Cast Changes in ‘Deep Song,’ ‘Spring’

In this time of growing social turmoil and impending war, we may feel closer to the anger and despair of Martha Graham’s solo “Deep Song” than her “Appalachian Spring,” with its vision of limitless horizons and a secure American future. Certainly, new dancers in these works, Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, made the former work seem like personal testimony, the latter like wishful fantasy.

Reaching her hand out imploringly and then suddenly pulling it back in a fist, tiny Terese Capucilli superbly embodied the extremes of desperate need and furious protest at the heart of the reconstructed 1937 “Deep Song.” With every image sharply defined, every action strongly motivated, this was a performance of spectacular immediacy--one that refused to accept a historical frame around it.

The Sunday “Appalachian Spring,” however, seemed very much a period piece--with the doubts and conflicts of the Bride never very real to Joyce Herring and with Floyd Flynn making the Husbandman more the boyish dreamer than a man of the soil. Each danced meticulously but their performances tilted the work’s optimism towards Currier and Ives nostalgia.

As the Revivalist, Christopher Dolder danced on automatic pilot until the great, accusatory solo outburst: forceful, intense but obviously the only thing about the role that interested him. Denise Vale had the stature and dignity of the Pioneering Woman but not quite the weight she wields in the world so new to the Bride.

Performances of “Maple Leaf Rag” and “Temptations of the Moon” (both with previously reviewed forces) completed this final program by the Graham company in Costa Mesa.