page_title: La hija de Cólquide
section_title: Dark Meadow
hierarchical_section_title: La hija de Cólquide / Dark Meadow
context_page_description: La hija de Cólquide is a ballet score composed by Carlos Chávez in 1943–44 on commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation for Martha Graham. The title refers to the mythological character Medea, daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The ballet spawned several subsidiary works in Chávez's catalog including his Third String Quartet. When Graham eventually choreographed it, she wrote a new scenario and gave it the title Dark Meadow.
context_section_description: Graham's dance scenario falls into four sections (Jowitt 1998):
  Remembrance of Ancestral Footsteps
  Terror of Loss
  Ceaselessness of Love
  Recurring Ecstacy of the Flowering Branch
  Noguchi's set reflects the four-part structure by featuring four stones or phallic herms in a desert landscape, while smaller, symbolic props are often brought onstage by She of the Ground, who also turns the set pieces to signal changes in the action (Jowitt 1998).
  The writings of Carl Jung strongly influenced Graham's enigmatic conception, which links one of her most consistent themes—an artist-seeker entering a dark place and undergoing an ordeal, as a result of which she is reborn and enlightened—with the ancient Greek myth of Persephone, in which a woman's changing passions correspond to the changing of the four seasons. Within this framework, the heroine (One Who Seeks) is instructed by an earth mother (She of the Ground), and a personification of the male (He Who Summons). A dance chorus of five women and either three or four men, or of five men and four women (They Who Dance Together) strike archaic poses and stamp primitive dances, perform unison erotic (and yet formal and angular) duets, connecting fertility rites to human sexuality. The second section is a solo dance for One Who Seeks, in which she first walks upon and then winds herself in a long piece of dark fabric. In In "Ceaselessness of Love", He Who Summons pursues her and they dance a duet (Jowitt 1968; Jowitt 1998; Kisselgoff 1977).
caption: The Return of Persephone (1891), by Frederic Leighton
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