Martha Graham

Martha Graham
1893-1991
Dancer, choreographer
Martha Graham reached the pinnacle of success in the 1940s, when her innovations in
modern dance were critically and publicly acclaimed, first in New York City, and then
nationwide. Her name has since become synonymous with modern dance in America.
Martha Graham was to modern dance what Pablo Picasso was to modern art: the single
greatest innovator of this century. Like Picasso, hers was a sweeping talent defined by a
variety of styles and interests. In Graham's work Grand Kabuki, Greek theater, German
expressionism, psychoanalysis, Native American ritual, Puritanism, and American history
and poetry combined in explosive fashion. The 1940s were her heyday. She produced
dances of transcendent splendor and worked with some of the world's most famous
composers. During the decade, her experimentation, earlier acclaimed in New York dance
circles, became widely known; as modern dance was popularized, her name became
synonymous with the form.
Background
Graham was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy family who traced their
lineage back to Miles Standish. In 1909 the family relocated to Santa Barbara, California.
Graham maintained she was drawn to dance from an early age. At age sixteen she
attended a dance performance by Ruth St. Denis of the Denishawn dance troupe and
quickly joined the group. One of the first American dance companies and schools,
Denishawn specialized in that which was novel and exotic to American sensibilities:
Greek pageants, Japanese sword dances, sexy Spanish flamencos. While touring with
Denishawn, Graham studied the expressionistic dances of Isadora Duncan and Mary
Wigman. Following their innovations, Ted Shawn, choreographer of Denishawn, wrote
Xochitl, based on a Mexican legend, for Graham. It brought Graham to the attention of
New York producers, and she left Denishawn for a short stint in the Greenwich Village
Follies. Dissatisfied with commercial dance, Graham taught for a time at the Eastman
School of Music in Rochester, New York, where she began the choreographic
experiments that made her famous.
New York Diva
As a choreographer Graham initially returned to simple and primitive movements
walking, running, and skipping and built short "mood" dances from these
fundamentals. Such dances, composed in collaboration with pianist Louis Horst,
established her reputation in New York dance circles. More-ambitious pieces featuring
the dynamic music of modern composers, such as Lamentation (1930), Dithyrambic
(1931), and Primitive Mysteries (1931), formalized the Graham style: highly theatrical
expressions, angular stances, explosive, stylized gestures in the limbs, spare and abstract
stage settings. Graham sought to integrate motifs and innovations in modern art and
psychology into dance. Compelled by Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's analysis of the
unconscious, she attempted to fuse abstracted gestures to psychological states, and her
work was noted for its tension and unsettling qualities. Graham received twenty-three
curtain calls after the debut of Primitive Mysteries. As dance companies toured behind
her work, Graham's fame rapidly spread from New York.
Triumph
Beginning in 1938, with American Document, Graham crystallized the innovations begun
earlier and reached the height of her powers with a series of dynamic, highly ambitious
dances. American Document was nothing less than a condensed history of the United
States, expressed via the conflict between the individual and society. Probing her own
Puritan ancestry, American Document featured the juxtaposition of hellfire sermons by
Jonathan Edwards and highly erotic dance. Graham returned to these themes with Letter
to the World (1940), based upon the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. Letter to the
World reflected the tension between poet and community enshrined in Dickinson's verse:
"This is my letter to the world / that never wrote to me." In 1944 Graham returned to her
exploration of the American character with a triumph: Appalachian Spring. Featuring
music by Aaron Copland (who won a Pulitzer Prize for the score in 1945) and sets by
Isamu Noguchi, Appalachian Spring was an evocative celebration of pioneer life, a
commemoration of the American spirit. Grahamturned to less nationalistic, more
intensely private themes with her next dances: Herodiade (1944), Cave of the Heart
(1946), Night Journey (1947), and Death and Entrances (1943; revived, 1947).
Herodiade, originally a poem by Stphane Mallarm set to music by composer Paul
Hindemith, became in Graham's hands a ceremony of eternal feminine patience. Cave of
the Heart, featuring music by Samuel Barber, and the stage again set by Noguchi, was a
venture into Greek mythology and was as ambitious as classical tragedy. Under the
influence of Jung, Graham wrote the dance to express her belief in a collective "motor
memory" in the body, a primordial genius of the senses she sought to evoke. A noted
psychoanalytically influenced dance was Night Journey, Graham's retelling of the
Oedipus legend. Death and Entrances was perhaps the most ambitious of the
psychological cycle, an attempt to probe, simultaneously, the inner life of the famous
Bront sisters and that of the dancers on stage. Graham used small portable objects to
signify the icons of memory, both collective and individual; the dance itself was filled
with tense body gestures, indicative of tortured repressions. At its most ambitious, Death
and Entrances aimed less at expression than at therapy. Graham had become not only
dance's Picasso, but also its Freud.
Honors
Graham completed her probing of the psyche through mythology with Clytemnestra in
1958. A retelling of Aeschylus's meditation on remembrance, revenge, and regret, the
evening-long dance was a highly acclaimed pageant of color, motion, and violence.
Graham, still starring in her own dances, was sixty-four, and she began to put her more
famous dances on film, including Appalachian Spring (1959) and Night Journey (1960).
Her fame was such that in the next twenty years she received numerous honors, including
the Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor. Nonetheless, her overwhelming
dominance in modern dance inevitably called forth challengers to her position, especially
former students intent on overthrowing her highly structured, overly psychological style.
Former associates such as Merce Cunningham took modern dance into a spontaneous,
decidedly non-Graham direction in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969 Graham danced her last
role, but she continued to choreograph new works, including two in 1975 starring
Rudolph Nureyev, Lucifer and The Scarlet Letter. Despite the eclipse of her style,
Graham continued through the Martha Graham Dance Company to choreograph new
works, including the Maple Leaf Rag, with music by Scott Joplin and costumes by Calvin
Klein, in 1990. She died on 1 April 1991.
Source: DISCovering U.S. History on GaleNet.
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