Martha Graham

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Martha Graham (1894-1991), American dancer, choreographer, and teacher, was the world's leading exponent of modern dance.

Martha Graham was born in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA, in May 1894. Her family moved to California when she was 10. Graham became interested in dance when she saw Ruth St. Denis perform in 1914. Overcoming parental restraint, Graham enrolled in the Denishawn Studio. This small, quiet, shy, thin, but perceptive and hardworking girl impressed the leader of the studio, Ted Shawn, and toured with his troupe in a production of Xochitl, based on an Aztec Indian legend. In 1923 she left this company to do 2 years of solo dancing for the Greenwich Village Follies.

In 1925 Graham became dance instructor at the Eastman School of Music and Theater in Rochester, N.Y. She began experimenting with modern dance forms. "I wanted to begin," she said, "not with characters or ideas but with movement…. I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge." She rejected the traditional steps and techniques of classical ballet, for she wanted the dancing body to be related to natural motion and to the music. She experimented with what the body could do based on its own structure, developing what was known as "percussive movements."

Graham's first dances were abstract and angular, almost "cubist" in execution. "Like the modern painters," she said, "we have stripped our medium of decorative unessentials." The dances were performed on a bare stage with only costumes and lights. The dancers' faces were taut, their hands stiff, and their costumes scanty. Later she added scenery and costumes for effect. The music was contemporary and usually composed especially for the dance. Whereas Isadora Duncan, the first modern dancer, had used music to inspire her works, Graham used music to help dramatize hers.

Martha Graham's process of creation usually began with what she called a "certain stirring." Inspiration might come from classical mythology, the American past, biblical stories, historical figures, primitive rituals, contemporary social problems, Zen Buddhism, the writings of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the poems of Emily Dickinson the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, or the puberty rites of Native Americans. After the initial inspiration she developed a dramatic situation or character to embody the emotion or idea. She then found music, or commissioned new music from her longtime collaborator Louis Horst, to sustain the inspiration while she created movements to express it.

The purpose of Graham's dance was to evoke a heightened awareness of life, to develop psychological insights about the nature of man. Dance was to her an "inner emotional experience." Her themes were often overtly psychological. Characters in her dance plays were divided into two complementary parts, each representing an aspect of the psyche. Her stage sets were filled with huge phallic symbols, as in Phaedra, a rite of sexual obsession.

Martha Graham introduced a number of other innovations to modern dance. She established the use of mobile scenery, symbolic props, and speech with dancing and was the first to integrate her group racially, using blacks and Asians in her regular company. She replaced the traditional ballet tunic or folk dress with either a straight, dark, long shirt or the common leotard. Using the stage, the floor, and props as part of the dance itself, in all she produced a whole new language of dance.

In 1926 Graham introduced this new language of dance in her first solo recital in New York. Her first large group piece, Vision of the Apocalypse, was performed in 1929. The most important early work was a revolutionary piece called Heretic.

Graham toured the United States for 4 years (1931-1935) in the production Electra. During this trip she became interested in the American Indians of the Southwest. One of the first products of this interest was Primitive Mysteries. Her increasing interest in the American past was seen in her dance on the American pioneer women, Frontier (1935), and culminated in her famous Appalachian Spring (1944), in which she recreated in dance what composer Aaron Copland had done in his music. Among her other accomplishments during the 1930s was her performance of the principal role in Igor Stravinsky's American premiere of Rite of Spring (1930). She was the first dancer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship (1932), and she danced for President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House in 1937.

Graham founded the Dance Repertory Theater in New York in 1930. She helped establish the Bennington School of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, where her teaching made Bennington the mecca for avantgarde dance in America. With the later establishment of the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York, she taught a large number of modern dancers who have spread her ideas, techniques, and style to the rest of the world.

Graham danced her last role in 1969, but she continued to choreograph. In 1976 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A year before her death, in 1990, she choreographed Maple Leaf Rag, a show that featured music by Scott Joplin and costumes by Calvin Klein. Today, her name is synonymous with modern dance. She died April 1, 1991, known as one of the 20th century's revolutionary artists.

Further Reading

One biography is Agnes DeMille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (1991). A biographical study is LeRoy Leatherman, Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as an Artist (1966). Merle Armitage, ed., Martha Graham (1966), is an anthology of articles discussing Miss Graham's contributions and significance to modern dance. See also Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (1941).

Graham, Martha (b Allegheny, Pa., 11 May 1894; d New York, 1 Apr. 1991). US dancer, choreographer, teacher, and company director. The towering figure of 20th-century American modern dance, she was its single most important influence. The technique she developed, antithetical to classical ballet in every sense, spread throughout North America and Europe, while her intensely dramatic personal choreography encouraged dancemakers everywhere into greater freedom of expression. She began studying at the Denishawn school in 1916, at the comparatively late age of 22, and joined the Denishawn company, where she remained until 1923. She performed with the musical revue Greenwich Village Follies (1923-5) before taking up teaching at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. On 18 Apr. 1926 she gave her first solo recital in New York at the 48th Street Theater. A year later she founded the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, which became the leading school of its kind in the world. Her system of teaching stresses the importance of the lower back and pelvis in generating movement, and also the importance of breathing, the stylized method of which became known as the principle of contraction and release. Her choreography, with its earthbound dynamic and angular shaping, was revolutionary, although later her style softened into a more fluid and lyrical line. Her company was born out of her school; initially all women, they began to perform in 1929. They started touring to Europe in the 1950s and made their London debut in 1954. Her ballets, more like danced plays, drew their inspiration from Greek mythology (Medea in Cave of the Heart, Jocasta in Night Journey, Clytemnestra), Native American folklore (El Penitente), real-life historical figures (Emily Dickinson in Letter to the World, the Brontë sisters in Deaths and Entrances, Joan of Arc in Seraphic Dialogue) and were characterized by explorations into the troubled psyches of her characters, particularly the female ones. In Lamentation (mus. Kodály, 1930), for example, she explored grief; Frontier (mus. Horst, 1935) celebrated the pioneer women who settled in the American West, a theme she returned to again, most notably in Appalachian Spring (1944), one of her first works to feature male dancers. She was capable of humour too, as in Every Soul is a Circus (1939) and Acrobats of God, and of great lyricism, most significantly in Diversion of Angels. Graham the choreographer was inextricably linked to Graham the dancer, and she continued to perform until 1969, when she was 74.

She worked closely with her collaborators, including the music adviser Louis Horst and the designer Isamu Noguchi. Among those she taught, and later danced with, were the choreographers Bertram Ross, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Robert Cohan. In the 1957 film A Dancer's World she explained her artistic philosophy and illustrated her system of teaching. In 1975 she choreographed Lucifer for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, a work which also marked her first collaboration with the fashion designer Halston. She created 181 works in total. Author of The Notebooks of Martha Graham (New York, 1973) and her autobiography Blood Memory (New York, 1991). In 1976 she received the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the US. A list of her works includes Primitive Mysteries (mus. Horst, 1931), American Document (mus. Ray Green, 1938), El Penitente (mus. Horst, 1940), Letter to the World (mus. Hunter Johnson, 1940), Deaths and Entrances (mus. Hunter Johnson, 1943), Herodiade (mus. Hindemith, 1944), Appalachian Spring (mus. Copland, 1944), Cave of the Heart (mus. Barber, 1946), Errand into the Maze (mus. Menotti, 1947), Night Journey (mus. William Schuman, 1947), Diversion of Angels (mus. Dello Joio, 1948), Seraphic Dialogue (mus. Dello Joio, 1955), Clytemnestra (mus. Halim El-Dabh, 1958), Episodes: Part 1 (mus. Webern, 1959), Acrobats of God (mus. Surinach, 1960), Phaedra (mus. Robert Starer, 1962), Circe (mus. Hovhaness, 1963), The Witch of Endor (mus. Schuman, 1965), Cortege of Eagles (mus. Eugene Lester, 1967), A Time of Snow (mus. Dello Joio, 1968), The Lady of the House of Sleep (mus. Starer, 1968), The Archaic Hours (mus. Lester, 1969), Mendicants of Evening (mus. David Walker, 1973), Myth of a Voyage (mus. Hovhaness, 1973), Lucifer (mus. El-Dabh, 1975), Frescoes (mus. S. Barber, 1978 or 1979), Acts of Light (mus. C. Nielsen, 1981), The Rite of Spring (mus. Stravinsky, 1984), Persephone (mus. Stravinsky, 1987), Night Chant (mus. Carlos Nakai, 1988), American Document (mus. John Corigliano, 1989), Steps in the Street (reconstruction, mus. Wallingford Riegger, 1989), and Maple Leaf Rag (mus. Joplin, 1990). Following her death the Martha Graham Dance Company continued under the direction of Ronald Protas, who set up the Martha Graham Trust to license her work to dance companies and schools. Graham's works are now in the repertoires of several major ballet companies, including Dutch National Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. In 2000 the company suspended operations due to financial problems; in 2003 it resumed under new direction.

(1894-1991), dancer, choreographer, and pioneer in the development of American modern dance. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Graham discovered her vocation as a teenager in southern California when she witnessed a performance by Ruth St. Denis. Enrolling at the Denishawn school in Los Angeles, Graham studied the exotic styles popularized by St. Denis and other "art" dancers of the period and eventually joined the Denishawn company as a soloist.

Discontented with exoticism, Graham broke with Denishawn in 1923 and settled in New York. With composer Louis Horst, who became her accompanist and longtime collaborator, she now set out on the journey that established her as the leading figure of modern dance. The dances she began to create in the 1920s were spare, stark, angular, and abstract--movement stripped of inessentials, an art engaged with modernity. A recurring theme, masterfully captured in Heretic, pitted the outsider against society; other dances stressed ritual (Primitive Mysteries), the American experience (Frontier), and antifascism (Deep Song). Her stagecraft was as uncompromising as her vision; until 1935, she used no sets and only the simplest of dresses--long jersey "tubes" of her own design. Equally uncompromising was her technique, which she based on the principles of "contraction" and "release" and developed into the most influential system of training in modern dance.

From 1927 until 1938, Graham choreographed exclusively for women. But with the appearance of men in her society of vestals, the focus of her work changed. The anxiety of female desire now became her great theme, and in works based on ancient myth like Night Journey and Clytemnestra, she treated it as an archetypal dilemma of the human condition--a measure of Jung's powerful influence over artists of the 1940s and 1950s. Her treatment of design also changed; working with sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who created most of her sets between 1944 and 1967, she remade the stage as a timeless landscape of the mind--minimalist, erotically suggestive, and visually arresting.

Although Graham continued to choreograph, the 1960s brought a waning of her creative powers and the end of her influence over younger choreographers. With each passing season, however, her legend grew, as did that of her company, which has outlived all other modern dance groups since its founding in the late 1920s. This remarkable longevity, a tribute to Graham's vision, tenacity, and willpower, has kept her greatest works before the public, establishing her preeminent position among the makers of what is today called "historic" modern dance.

Just as Graham's technique influenced modern dance training for decades, so her company was the breeding ground for numerous modern dance choreographers, from Anna Sokolow, May O'Donnell, Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, Erick Hawkins, Pearl Lang, and Robert Cohan, who largely followed in her direction, to Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, who went their own ways to become the outstanding figures of the subsequent generation.

Bibliography:

Don McDonagh, Martha Graham: A Biography (1973); Ernestine Stodelle, Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham (1984).

Author:

Lynn Garafola

See also Dance.

Graham, Martha, 1894-1991, American dancer, choreographer, and teacher, b. Pittsburgh. Her family moved from Allegheny, Pa., to Santa Barbara, Calif., when she was 14. After 1916, Graham attended the Denishawn School, Los Angeles; in 1920 she made her debut in Ted Shawn's Xochitl, which was created for her. She left the Denishawn company in 1923 to dance in musical revues and to make her independent debut (1926). Graham first appeared with her own group of dancers in 1929, began her tours after 1939, and became, according to many critics, the seminal figure in modern dance. Her choreography, which requires great discipline and flexibility to perform, is highly individual, stark, and angular. Her dances became more explosive and less abstract in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as she achieved her mature style.

Graham's dances often draw upon historical and mythological subjects. After World War II, she created works based increasingly on Freudian and Jungian themes and centered on the female figure. Her works include Primitive Mysteries (1931), Letter to the World (1940), Deaths and Entrances (1943), Appalachian Spring (1944), Cave of the Heart (1946), Seraphic Dialogue (1955), Phaedra (1962), and Archaic Hours (1969), created the year she retired from dancing. Because so many of her students themselves became choreographers and leaders of companies, her influence on modern dance is especially widespread. Her own troupe, the oldest dance company in the United States, faced problems a decade after her death. Internecine struggles caused the closure (2000-2002) of the Martha Graham Dance Center, but a legal decision in late 2002 allowed the company to regroup, and they began to perform her dances again in early 2003.

Bibliography

See her Notebooks (1973) and her autobiography, Blood Memory (1991); biography by D. McDonagh (1973); E. Stodelle, Deep Song (1984); A. de Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (1991); R. Tracy, ed., Goddess: Martha Graham's Dancers Remember (1996).

A twentieth-century American dancer and choreographer. A celebrated practitioner of modern dance, she founded the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City.

Quotes:

"America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage."

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is on a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

"Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great because of their passion."

"We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance."

"Nothing is more revealing than movement."

• Genres: Avant-Garde

Biography

Martha Graham was one of the most influential dancers and choreographers in the history of modern dance. Her fiery spirit and passion, and her complex movements, had a revolutionary effect in the evolution of modern dance as an emotional mode of expression. In a 1970s interview, actress Bette Davis, who studied briefly under Graham, said, "I worshiped her. She was all tension lightning. Her burning dedication gave her spare body the power of ten men." Born in Pittsburgh and raised from the age of 12 in Santa Barbara, California, Graham grew up in a very comfortable home. Her father was one of the scientists to study the effect and persistence of personality traits. Shortly after graduation from the University of Cumnoch, where she studied theater and dance, Graham joined the prestigious Denishawn School and Dance Company in Los Angeles in 1916. During the ten years that she danced for the company, she explored a wide range of dance styles including folk, experimental, classical, Occidental, Oriental, and Native American. While dancing in Denishawn productions, Graham developed many lasting relationships. Two years later, she left Denishawn to teach at the Eastman School in Rochester, New York and pursue an independent career as a dancer; in 1926, she began working with Louis Horst, a composer and former music director at Denishawn. They continued collaborating until Horst's death in 1964.

Graham danced her debut recital at the 48th Street Theater in New York on April 18, 1926. She continued to dance until 1970, when she appeared in Cortege of Eagles at the age of 76. She remained active, however, as a choreographer, producing new ballets for Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, until her death in 1991. Opening the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in 1929, Graham choreographed her first non-solo ballet, Heretic, two years later. In order to raise funds, she modeled furs and taught classes that included students Bette Davis and Gregory Peck. In the mid-'30s, Graham turned down an invitation to dance at the Olympic Games in Germany, protesting the political views of Hitler and the Nazis. Graham's greatest period began in 1939 when Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins joined her company. Although she and Hawkins were married in 1948 after living together for eight years, their marriage fell apart within a year. In 1955, Paul Taylor joined her company. Four years later, Graham collaborated with influential choreographer George Balanchine on a new ballet, Episodes. Beginning in 1944, Graham worked with Japanese-American sculptor and set designer Isamu Noguchi. Their use of imaginative three-dimensional sets had a profound effect on the visual aspects of modern dance. Toward the end of her life, Graham was honored with many important awards including the Medal of Freedom in 1976 and the Legion d'Honneur, from the French government, in 1984. Graham was choreographing a new ballet, The Eye of the Goddess, for the Olympics in Barcelona when she died. ~ Craig Harris, Rovi

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