|
Isamu Noguchi – the internationally renowned sculptor, artist and set designer – spent his formative years in the Midwest and graduated from LaPorte High School, due to an extraordinary set of circumstances. They began when his mother sent him by ship from Japan to Indiana – alone, at age 13 – to attend the Interlaken School in Rolling Prairie. The boy arrived in July 1918 and, as he later recounted, was “introduced to America in the ideal setting of the Indiana countryside.”
Decades later, the legendary dance choreographer Martha Graham paid tribute in her memoirs to Noguchi, who designed sets for many of her ballets – including the three that will be performed in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. “From the start, there was an unspoken language between Isamu and me,” Graham wrote. “Our working together might have as its genesis a myth, a legend, a piece of poetry, but there always emerged...something of a strange beauty and an otherworldliness.”
Noguchi died in 1988 at age 84. Graham died in 1991 at age 96. The two pioneers of modern art left the New York arts community a legacy that preserves many of their accomplishments – the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum and the Martha Graham Dance Company. And during the 50-odd years they worked together, they revolutionized the staging of ballet and established an unparalleled standard for the presentation of modern dance.
“Graham was the first to push for the integration of dance and music and theater in a modern way,” says Peter Taub, who is the MCA’s director of performance programs. “Since our emphasis at the MCA is on the visual arts, I especially wanted to show the performances that used Noguchi’s sculpture and stage sets.”
What Taub managed to schedule was not one but three ballets, all three resulting from the Graham-Noguchi collaboration: Appalachian Spring, the tale of a wedding day in the country, with music by Aaron Copland; Errand Into The Maze, based on the myth of Ariadne descending into the labyrinth to conquer the Minotaur, with music by Gian Carlo Menotti; and Embattled Garden, an erotic tragic comedy set in the Garden of Eden to music by Carlos Surinach.
The performances – at the MCA theater April 19-21, with a gala opening on April 18 – mark the first time in 15 years that the Martha Graham Dance Company has appeared in Chicago. Each evening performance will include the three dances staged around the original Noguchi sets, which are being shipped out from New York. The Saturday matinee will feature shorter dances and film footage of Graham herself dancing.
“The program will be of special interest to audiences in the Midwest,” Taub says. “Although many people know her by name, few Chicagoans have actually seen the Martha Graham Dance Company. Her first collaboration with Noguchi was on the ballet Frontier. Who knows? Maybe it was influenced by his experiences in the Midwest.”
s a child in Japan, Noguchi grew up with estranged parents. His father was a Japanese poet and his mother an American, a Bryn Mawr graduate who taught English in Japan. She packed her son off to America after reading a magazine article about Interlaken, an experimental school founded in Rolling Prairie, Ind., by Dr. Edward Rumely. According to Interlaken’s philosophy, this was a place where students were to learn by doing, and to find in nature “the strength that nature alone can give.”
The 13-year-old Noguchi traveled alone on his ocean voyage to Seattle, and then by train to Indiana. Unfortunately, that fall the Interlaken school did not open. The United States had entered the Great War, and the school grounds were turned into an army training camp. The other children were sent home. “I was left alone to watch soldiers, trucks, mess halls, barracks,” Noguchi later wrote. “I became a sort of mascot. Winter came and I had no place to go, since my mother could not afford to send me elsewhere. Nobody seemed to be in charge of me.”
Dr. Rumely, the school’s founder and a LaPorte industrialist, became the boy’s guardian and mentor. John Rumely, a younger cousin, told LAKE, “My family felt responsible. Edward Rumely made arrangements with his friends for Isamu’s housing and his education.” During high school, the Japanese-American youth boarded at the LaPorte home of Dr. Samuel Mack, a Swedenborgian minister. Noguchi soon took his mother’s maiden name, Gilmour, and classmates called him “Sam” – Sam Gilmour.
In high school, Noguchi became interested in art; he sketched drawings for the school yearbook as well as place cards for the Rumelys’ dinner guests. After graduation in 1922, Dr. Rumely arranged for a summer apprenticeship with his friend, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who later carved the mammoth presidential monument into the stone of Mount Rushmore. Borglum told the boy he had no talent for sculpture, so Dr. Rumely enrolled him in pre-med studies at Columbia University. That did not last. Soon he returned to the study of art, this time in New York City, and his talent was recognized.
In 1927, Noguchi won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Paris with the famed Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi. To help with travel expenses, the LaPorte graduating class of 1928 commissioned him to do a bronze sculpture, a piece named “Sea Lions,” which they then presented as a gift to the high school. It is the only Noguchi work in LaPorte, displayed prominently inside the school.
Major cities throughout the world have sculptural installations that reflect Noguchi’s uneasy childhood and his dual nationality. In Paris, there are the UNESCO gardens; in Atlanta, “Playscapes;” in Jerusalem, the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden; in Hiroshima, a pair of bridges replacing structures destroyed in the atomic blast and leading to “Peace Park.” In the Midwest, the Snite Museum in South Bend has one Noguchi sculpture, a cast-iron piece entitled “Okame.” The Art Institute of Chicago has several smaller pieces, as well as the Noguchi Fountain at the Columbus Drive entrance.
In his later years, Noguchi maintained studios both in Japan and in New York City. He met Martha Graham at Carnegie Hall through his mother, who had moved to New York and was doing costumes for Graham. When the two began to collaborate, Noguchi captured the symbolic movements of Graham’s dancers, and he evolved a way to use fabric as both costume and prop. For Embattled Garden he created a forest of stylized trees. For Errand Into the Maze, he designed a set that suggested the pelvic bones of a woman, with a long rope winding across the stage and entering this symbolic space.
“He took me to images,” Graham has said, “that I had never contemplated before and gave new life to works I had created.”
| 
subscribe today!
