Martha Graham had begun incorporating women from Greek myth and literature into her choreography as early as 1946, but was reluctant to name them as such. At the creation of Cave of the Heart, Graham identified herself as “One Like Medea” and her dance partner Hawkins as “One Like Jason” (Jewitt, 2024). In Errand into the maze, neither the protagonist (Ariadne) nor the Minotaur are named as such. Yet we understand their presence. In the myth, Ariadne carries a thread: on stage, it becomes a rope. The length of the rope and the irregularity of its layout alone suggest the labyrinth. As for the creature of fear, with which the protagonist is confronted three times, Noguchi has partially masked it with a bull’s head, which would evolve in the 1980s into a golden headdress in the shape of a bull’s horns.

The protagonist walks towards a suggestive V-shaped wooden frame. Some see it as a tree, others as a woman’s crotch; Graham and Noguchi referred to it as “the pelvis”. At first alone, she seems to be fighting internal emotions, contracting, trembling (Jewitt, 2024), giving the sensation of emotions occupying the whole space of the scene. In the choreography, we notice a movement that is still being learned in Graham’s class: “[it] involves standing on one leg and, over and over, circling the other slightly bent leg forward and then oppositely to the back to create a figure eight. Performed with the dramatic intent that Graham brought to it in Errand into the Maze, it suggests someone preparing for violence, whipping herself on.” (Jewitt, 2024).

After the confrontations, the dancer subdues the creature, which falls to the ground in surrender. In her work with myths, Martha Graham makes time elastic, allowing different events and places to appear simultaneously. Sometimes the dance stops, while others dilate time (Conley, 2016). In the case of Errand into the Maze, the protagonist still dances when the curtain falls. Martha Graham was influenced by Jung’s theories of psychological archetype; her heroine’s dance can then be seen as a journey into the self, and, in the landscape created by Isamu Noguchi, a journey through the landscapes of mind and body.

The dancers’ bodies maintain dynamic relationships with the stage and sets (Conley, 2016). But, after the loss of the originals in Hurricane Sandy, does the meaning and understanding of the work remain the same? In particular, we might wonder about the new scope of the dramatic intent of Martha Graham’s work between the first version in 1947 and Errand’s premiere in 2013: what changes for the audience, what changes in the dancers’ expression? (Conley, 2016)