Martha Graham

Dancer

• Born: May 11, 1894
• Birthplace: Allegheny (now in Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania
• Died: April 1, 1991
• Place of death: New York, New York

American dancer and choreographer

Graham is generally accepted as the greatest single figure in American modern dance and the symbol of modern dance in the popular mind. She was also the first choreographer consistently to employ African American and Asian dancers and to incorporate the spoken word into her dances.

Area of achievement Dance

Early Life

Although her name is virtually synonymous with modern dance, Martha Graham (GRAY-uhm) did not have a single dance lesson until she was twenty-two years old. Her father, George Graham, was a doctor who specialized in nervous disorders and, consequently, was intrigued by physical movement. He warned his daughters never to be dishonest because he would know they were lying by the tension in their bodies. Although he would not allow Martha to study ballet because of the social taboos of the era and on the pretext that it would interfere with her schoolwork, Martha credits her father with being her first dance teacher, for he taught her the importance of the body’s language and of honesty.

George Graham was the son of an Irish immigrant, while Martha’s mother, Jane Beers Graham, could trace her heritage back to Miles Standish and the Mayflower. Martha’s upbringing consisted of a strict Puritan code of ethics, and she and her two younger sisters were required to attend church and daily prayers. As an outlet for their mischievousness, however, the sisters were permitted to play “dress up” and to create their own plays. Because she was a physically plain child, this early role playing gave Martha a means of escape as well as a means of channeling her explosive temper. As an adult, she would create her own brand of glamour, but the temper and the subsequent tantrums would only become more pronounced.

The young Graham was a voracious reader who appeared to be mesmerized by the drama of life and called to reveal its mysteries. One of these mysteries was the impact of ritual, and when the Grahams hired a nanny, Lizzie Pendergast, who took the girls with her to Roman Catholic mass, Graham was fascinated by the ceremony and the music.

When Graham was in her teens, her sister Mary was diagnosed with asthma, and, in an effort to seek a better climate, Jane Graham moved with the girls to Santa Barbara, California. Martha immediately acclimated to her new environment and was drawn to the pageantry of the Asian population in the area. This pageantry, coupled with the recollected Catholic mass, would eventually become the root of her creations.

Although she was still not allowed to study dance formally, Graham was active in other areas; in high school, she edited the literary magazine, acted in the school play, and played basketball. Many of these interests decreased in importance, however, when in 1911, Graham saw her first ballet, a performance by Ruth St. Denis at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. Graham memorized some of the moves, tried them at home, and sealed her fate. Even though her parents would not give their blessings to this chosen profession, Graham took her first step toward her career by giving up sports so that she would not injure her legs.

In 1913, Graham enrolled in an arts-oriented junior college, the Cumnock School. With her father’s reluctant assent, she studied acting, play writing, and dance. During her years at the Cumnock, two events took place that affected the course of her future. In 1914, George Graham died, leaving enough investments for his daughters to finish their educations, and, in 1915, Martha’s idol, Ruth St. Denis, and her husband Ted Shawn opened a dance school in Los Angeles.

Immediately after being graduated from the Cumnock School, Graham auditioned for and was accepted to the Denishawn school. Denishawn was the most innovative training available, because St. Denis believed in teaching holistic dance, not merely ballet. Although Graham adored St. Denis, the feeling was not reciprocated, and she was sent to study with Shawn. While working with Shawn, she performed the lead in Serenata Morisca, memorizing the steps after seeing them demonstrated only four times, and it became her trademark piece, transforming her from a student into a professional.

By 1918, she had become Shawn’s principal teacher, and a dance he created especially for her marked her entry into modest fame. The dance was Xochital, about an assault on an Aztec maiden. Putting her emotional being into the performance, Graham was a terrifying figure of wildness and fury in defending her virtue, and often her partners were bleeding as they came off stage. She performed the number from coast to coast for two years, until it was scheduled for a European tour and St. Denis appropriated the role for herself.

Because of their artistic and temperamental differences, Graham and Shawn came to despise each other, and Graham looked for a way out. In spite of the animosity, she studied and worked as a teacher and principal dancer with Denishawn for almost eight years until an offer to return to New York in 1923 permitted her to strike out on her own.

Life’s Work

The liberating offer was from the Greenwich Village Follies, a vaudeville revue. At long last, Graham was encouraged to create her own dances within the exotic parameters of glamour required by the Follies management. Although the position garnered her a certain amount of fame and financial comfort, she knew it was not her life’s work. She felt destined to be an “artist,” which in her view translated as “worker”; in 1925, she left Broadway to teach and, more important, to learn in the newly created dance department of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.

Founded by George Eastman, the inventor of the Kodak camera and a patron of the arts, the school became the launching pad for Graham’s creative genius. Since she was given autonomy, she threw out the old, standardized modes of teaching dance and began to experiment with and through her students.

Using several of her most gifted disciples as a company, the true Graham emerged in 1927 with Revolt, which related human injustice to other humans, followed closely by Heretic and Vision of the Apocalypse. Discarding the traditional flow of ballet, her dancers used spastic jerks, trembling, and falls to the floor to illustrate their themes. The press and the public were shocked. This was not entertainment, they believed; this was disturbing, which was exactly the response Graham had hoped to elicit.

In 1929, beginning with her former Eastman students, Graham initiated her own company, the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. From that point, she was unfailingly experimental and uncompromising, and she was frequently the source of bewilderment and angry resistance. People were rarely indifferent to her, and she was surrounded by debate throughout her career. Whether it was adoration or disgust, it was impossible to view one of her performances without experiencing a definite emotional reaction. Known for her tyranny and her temper, she nevertheless instilled hero worship in her students, who followed her in a cult-like procession. They knew that although she demanded perfection and absolute obedience, she could also be genuinely kind, caring, and surprisingly sentimental.

Thematically, Graham delved into every dark corner of the human mind through physical expression. She was fascinated by rituals, psychological conflicts, and mythology, a subject she considered the ancestor of psychotherapy. Throughout her career, she composed more than one hundred dances and choreographed more than one hundred eighty works, each of which was extremely complex in terms of symbolic meaning and literary allusion.

Although condemned by some for her use of the body and her frank acknowledgment of human sexuality, Graham proclaimed she was tracing the genealogy of the soul of humanity, that she wanted to “chart the graph of the heart.” Holding her work-worn hands skyward and performing in bare feet, she moved to themes that dealt with archetypes and rituals so old that humankind could not understand them because it had forgotten them. Her fame led to world tours, and she traveled extensively in both Europe and Asia. She became an honorary ambassador for the United States and was courted by both the Nazi Party in 1936 and the communists in the 1950’s. She rejected both groups.

Although she excelled as a choreographer, Graham insisted that she was primarily a performer. Thus, when she was forced to retire from the stage in 1969 at the age of seventy-five, the media and her company expected her to wither away. After a cycle of hospitalization and convalescence, Graham recovered, thanks, in part, to the encouragement of a young photographer, Ron Protas, who adored her. Through his care, she regained her will to live, and in her eighties, Graham staged a comeback, including tours of the United States and the Far East and a full return to teaching.

In 1991, after completing a fifty-five-day tour of the Far East with her troupe, Graham contracted pneumonia. Two months later, on April 1, she died of cardiac arrest. She was ninety-six years old.

Significance

Frequently ranked with Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and James Joyce for developing a form of expression that broke the traditional mold, Graham is generally accepted as the greatest single figure in American modern dance and the symbol of it in the popular mind. She invented a new and codified language of dance and began a whole fashion with respect to stage design and costuming, symbolic props, and mobile scenery. During her long career, she won virtually every honor an artist can receive, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor. She performed for heads of state and was granted honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale, among other universities.

Despite the acclaim, it was her groundbreaking style, her refusal to compromise, and her depiction of the American woman on the threshold of a new life for which Graham will be remembered. Seeking the key to women’s present dilemma, Graham laid bare the mythos surrounding the feminine role and in the process created such memorable pieces as Primitive Mysteries, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Appalachian Spring, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Aaron Copland’s score, and Letter to the World, which depicted the inner and outer life of poet Emily Dickinson and was considered by some to be Graham’s masterwork.

Because it deals with myth, ritual, and the unconscious, the substance of her work is intangible and cannot be analyzed; it involves a total sensory impression that can only be experienced. Graham shall remain, in the words of her biographer Agnes de Mille, the “most startling inventor and the greatest performer who trod the native stage.”

Bibliography

Anderson, Jack. Dance. New York: Newsweek Books, 1974. This work is a brief overview of the entire range of ballet history. It includes biographical information on dancers, including Graham, and a selected bibliography.

Balanchine, George. Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. Edited by Francis Mason. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Written by one of the great masters in dance, this work includes plot summaries of ballets, including those devised by Graham. A chronology of significant events in ballet history, an annotated list of recordings, and a selected bibliography are included.

Cano, Nan Deane. Acts of Light: Martha Graham in the Twenty-first Century. Photography by John Deane. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Photographic survey of Graham’s dances examining the narrative, dramatic, and philosophical base for each dance. Also features interviews with members of the Graham dance troupe.

De Mille, Agnes. Dance to the Piper. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. Although this book is de Mille’s autobiography, much information on Graham is included. The two were contemporaries and friends, and de Mille eventually became Graham’s biographer.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Life and Work of Martha Graham. New York: Random House, 1991. This biography of Graham was written by one of the greatest figures in twentieth century dance, an artist who is ideally qualified to discuss Graham and her work.

Kisselgoff, Anna. “Thoughts on the Once and Future Dance Boom.” The New York Times, January 6, 2005, pp. E1-E5. Discussion of dance as a prominent art form in the United States, including a history of dance in the twentieth century and the influence of Graham on American dance.

Lloyd, Margaret. The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. Biographical information on Graham and a discussion of her work are included in this volume. Additionally, the book contains information on the conversion of classical ballet into legitimate theater.

Mazo, Joseph H. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. 2d ed. Highstown, N.J.: Princeton Book, 2000. Mazo features eleven choreographers, including Graham, whom he considers trailblazers of modern dance.

Roseman, Janet Lynn. Dance Was Her Religion: The Sacred Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham. Prescott, Ariz.: Hohm Press, 2004. Roseman finds similarities in the three choreographers’ concepts of dance, with each viewing dance as a form of prayer and a mystical experience.

Terry, Walter. Frontiers of Dance: The Life of Martha Graham. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975. Written by a former student of Graham, this book depicts the life and work of Graham from the early years through the initial stages of her comeback.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: Summer, 1915: Denishawn School of Dance Opens; December 6, 1934: Balanchine’s Serenade Inaugurates American Ballet.

1941-1970: October 30, 1944: Graham Debuts Appalachian Spring with Copland Score; May 30, 1954: Taylor Establishes His Own Dance Company.