Commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress, the work premiered on May 3, 1947, at Cambridge High School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Original program notes explain "the action takes place in Jocasta's heart at the instant when she recognizes the ultimate terms of her destiny.
Mark Ryder as the blind Seer (Tiresias) was accompanied by the Daughters of the Night (Furies), a chorus of six women: Pearl Lang, Yuriko, Ethel Winter, Helen McGehee, Natanya Neumann and Joan Skinner.
In the original production, Oedipus hoisted and rotated a painted plywood eye, blue on one side, bloodied on the other, as a portent of his fate.
A series of hourglass- and lyre-shaped stools, of increasing height, are placed diagonally from upstage left to right center stage.
Inspired by the contours of the female pelvis, Jocasta's angled, raised rectangular bed resembles a stack of enlarged human bones.
Schuman’s harsh, dissonant, dramatic music reflects Jocasta's state of mind, underscoring the ballet's eroticism and expected unhappy ending.
Strings and wind instruments dominate the work, for the most part strident, sweeping or shrill, with occasional percussive passages.
"[10] Holding his torso rigid, Oedipus struts and stamps, in a display of strength, the phallic thrusting of various limbs a gesture of his masculinity.
[5] She opens her knees to Oedipus in invitation, only to later close them, drawing an arm across her pelvis in a gesture of shame or remembered sexual pleasure.
"[10] The group repeatedly executes "bison jumps," a jeté leap in contraction with the legs at sharp angles and the arms held back, elbows high above the torso.
[10] The New York Herald Tribune noted, "Miss Graham has created a fine and stirring work…and her own performance as Jocasta is generally a brilliant one..."[1] The Dance Observer's article said, "In the opening dance of tragic resignation, and in her solo bit at the end of the work, Martha Graham has invented for herself movement patterns which are among the most evocative and beautiful in her entire repertoire.
Critic Walter Terry wrote its patterns provided exactly what Graham's "dance style needs most-abrupt, harsh rhythms, staccato phrases that are brief and insistent, long-held steely notes against which she seems to lean and swell.
The New York Herald Tribune's critic "particularly like the glittering yet distorted bed which focused upon and symbolized the nature of the evil tragedy which best Jocasta and Oedipus.
"Graham makes space in this dance for something Freud forgot in his analysis of the Oedipus complex: women's sexual pleasure...what is highlighted in Night Journey is not the son's desire, but the mother's.
Helen McGehee led the chorus, which included Ethel Winter, Mary Hinkson, Linda Hodes, Akiko Kanda, Carol Payne and Bette Shaler.
[20] Graham had misgivings about having her dances filmed, but ultimately relented to producer Nathan Kroll for the making of the documentary A Dancer's World.
After the short was televised in 1956, Kroll asked permission to film two of her most famous ballets, Appalachian Spring and Night Journey.