Judith is a solo dance work made by Martha Graham to a score by William Schuman, first given on January 4, 1950, at the Columbia Auditorium in Louisville, Kentucky, as a 'dance concerto' in which Graham herself danced as the sole visible performer against an orchestra playing behind a translucent panel. The piece retells the deuterocanonical story of the widow Judith, who seduces and beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes to save her city, and marks the first time Graham drew a solo heroine from biblical rather than Greek myth.
What is danced
The article gives no scene-by-scene breakdown of steps; it describes structure and staging rather than a vocabulary of movement. What is established is that Graham alone performed the entire piece across 'five uninterrupted movements' of Schuman's score, positioned in front of the orchestra rather than in a conventional wing-to-wing stage picture, so the work functions as a single continuous solo rather than a sequence of discrete numbers. Costume change was itself part of the choreographic design: Graham described dresses standing on stage 'as part of the scene itself,' replaced in view of the audience as Judith's state of mind evolves, culminating in a blood-red cloak donned after the murder. Noguchi's serpentine bracelet and rams'-horn headdress were worn into the movement itself, adding weight and silhouette to a solo built around a single body's transformation from widow to avenger.
Context
By 1950 Graham had already built a repertory of myth-based solos and ensembles (Night Journey among them, made two years earlier with the same composer), and Judith represents a deliberate turn from Greek to Hebrew source material, framed explicitly by Graham's own insistence that she did not want the figure to read as 'inhuman or goddess-like.' The 'dance concerto' format, proposed by a patron of the Louisville Philharmonic Society, was itself an experiment in placing a solo modern dancer in the position normally held by a concerto's solo instrument, staged in direct collaboration with a live orchestra rather than to recorded or pit music.
Staging history
The original set by Charles Hyman was replaced almost immediately by a new design from Isamu Noguchi, who also contributed the jewelry and headdress; Jean Rosenthal designed the lighting. The article notes Graham returned to the same heroine twice more, in Legend of Judith (1962) and a further Judith (1980), making the 1950 solo the first of three works she built around the same biblical figure.
How to watch it
Watch for the absence of a conventional set change: the dresses are staged as objects waiting to be worn, and the shift into the blood-red cloak after the killing is the clearest visual marker of Judith's transformation. Note the orchestra's semi-visibility behind a translucent panel and Graham's placement in front of it — a staging choice built for the 'dance concerto' conceit rather than for narrative concealment.
Credits
- composer: William Schuman