Graham, Martha

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).

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Graham, Martha

(born May 11, 1894, Allegheny county, Penn., U.S.—died April 1, 1991, New York, N.Y.) U.S. dancer, teacher, choreographer, and foremost exponent of modern dance. She studied from 1916 with Ted Shawn at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, then left in 1923 for New York, where she founded her own school in 1927 and a performing company in 1929. She choreographed more than 160 works, creating unique “dance plays” and using a variety of themes to express emotion and conflict. Many are based on American themes, including Appalachian Spring (1944); other works include Primitive Mysteries (1931), El Penitente (1940), Letter to the World (1940), Cave of the Heart (1946), Clytemnestra (1958), Phaedra (1962), and Frescoes (1978). She collaborated for many years with Louis Horst, her musical director, and with Isamu Noguchi, who designed many of her sets. She retired from dancing in 1970 but continued to teach and choreograph. Her technique became the first significant alternative to classical ballet, and her influence extended worldwide through her choreography and her students.

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Graham, Martha (1894–1991) modern dancer, choreographer; born in Allegheny (now Pittsburgh), Pa. Prevented by her strict father from going to dance school when a girl, after he died she enrolled in the Denishawn School of Dancing in Los Angeles in 1916. She then toured with their company, making her professional debut in 1920. From 1923 to 1925 she appeared with the Greenwich Village Follies, a dance group in New York City, and taught at the Eastman School of the Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. For some years she had been working out her own ideas about choreography and she gave her first solo recital in 1926, in New York City. From then on, working at first with pick-up groups, and by the 1930s with a fairly regular company, she began to develop a radically new approach to dance: spare and angular in certain movements yet using exotic costumes far removed from classical ballet; improvised through tapping inner feelings and psychology, yet controlled down to the last facial expression and finger movement. The music for many of the early pieces was composed by Louis Horst, her longtime collaborator (1926–48); later she would commission new works from major composers such as Aaron Copland and William Schuman, just as she would commission sets from artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder. In the 1930s she choreographed several works drawing on Mexican Indian themes, such as Primitive Canticles; she then turned to works inspired by the lives of historical women, such as Joan of Arc (Seraphic Dialogue) and Emily Dickinson (Letter to the World); from 1946 on she did a number of works derived from Greek mythology—most powerfully, the evening-long Clytemnestra (1958). By the 1950s she was internationally recognized as the leading American choreographer of interpretive dancing, yet she always considered herself a dancer first and usually cast herself as the central figure in her works until her final performance in 1969. She continued as a teacher and choreographer almost to her death. Demanding and autocratic, she nevertheless inspired a devoted following, among both her students and public; she was the recipient of continual financial grants and personal honors. Many of the most prominent dancers and choreographers of the 20th century got their start in her company, including her first husband, Erick Hawkins.