Martha Graham: Pioneer of American Modern Dance

Introduction: Revolutionizing Dance

"Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of the achievement is no easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths." — Martha Graham

Are there ever any outstanding artists who create a new style or possess a completely different vision of expression who are not compulsive, driven, and somewhat disturbed? Or is it precisely these personal characteristics that make them geniuses? Some of the stories told about the great dance innovator Martha Graham's impatience, anger, and obsessive personality are disquieting. Yet she was one of the most important individuals in Western art. As noted by Porterfield, she "was to dance what Picasso was to painting and Joyce was to literature. One of the most influential dancers, choreographers, and teachers of the 20th century, she revolutionized her art, ending the 350-year tyranny of classical ballet with its vaulting leaps, pointed toes, and intellectual precision."

Graham transformed two areas of American dance. First was classical ballet, which dated back several hundred years and included prescribed body positions, defined geometrical relationships among dancers, and, above all, precision. Second were the folk dances of Asia, Africa, and native America, which had long been considered popular art or craft forms rather than high art (Gardner 266). Isadora Duncan had begun to use the entire body as a vehicle for expressing emotional content, and Ruth St. Denis strove to capture the world of pure spirit. However, it was Graham who took the next step and shaped these forms into a serious, repeatable work of art. She did not stop dancing until she passed away at 96 in 1991. Just before her death she wrote in her autobiography:

Early Training and Artistic Beginnings

"I have a new ballet to do for the Spanish government and I am sure it will be a terror and a joy and I will regret starting it a thousand times and think it will be my swan song and my career will end like this and I will feel that I have failed a hundred times and try to dodge those inevitable footsteps behind me. But what is there for me but to go on? That is life."

Graham's eccentricities started at a very young age, as is often common with artists. When she was two years old and sitting in the Presbyterian Church with her parents, she began pirouetting up the aisle to the organ music. She made her theater debut in the high school comedy Prunella (Kendall 158), where she introduced barefoot classic dancing into the school's repertoire for the first time.

When she was a freshman in high school, Graham accompanied her parents to see the early modern dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn perform in Los Angeles and was immediately captivated. She spent the next three summers at their Denishawn dance school and enrolled in the company after completing junior college. In 1920, Shawn created for himself and Graham his most original vaudeville spectacular, "Xochitl," based on legends of the New World (Kendall 167). Shawn had already recognized Graham's outstanding dance and theatrical qualities and wanted to feature them prominently. In the piece, Xochitl dances Salome-like for the emperor, then fights him off as he advances on her in a drunken state. The success of the melodrama was crucial to Graham's future. During her three years at Denishawn, she had begun to develop her new dance movements. "This production gave her the chance to experiment night after night with dynamics — that link between the visible dance shapes and the dancer's inner passion."

By the mid-1920s Graham was a fixture in Greenwich Village, forming her first dance company and teaching body movement to budding actors at the Neighborhood Playhouse. In 1926, Graham gave her first performance with her own small dance company (Gardner 274). The dances were reminiscent of Denishawn: "Three Gopi Maidens," "Maid with the Flaxen Hair," and "Clair de lune" were decorative rather than deep. In fact, Graham later called the dances "childish things, dreadful" (ibid).

Creating a New Movement Vocabulary

Each new work from the late 1920s onward further developed the choreographic movements for which Graham is well known — contraction, release, and spiral. She invented a dance vocabulary of angular lines, a system of leverages, balances, and dynamics, and astonishing abrupt falls to the ground. Her dancers always appeared explosive: torsos clenched and released, bodies coiled on the floor, dancers spiraled upward from kneeling to exultation, defying gravity. The emotions of hatred, lust, greed, betrayal, remorse, madness, and revenge filled the stage.

From her earliest years, Graham created a radical approach that changed the way dance was seen and performed. Not only did she break the rules governing how the body moved through time and space, she also challenged traditional methods of female bodily expression. The first decade of her career was devoted to redefining dance and the female form. Dancer Bessie Schonberg explains Graham's early history of experimentation: "She tried to find … within her that elementary point of beginning. In other words, she kept on peeling the onion all of the time … more and more and more was stripped and stripped away" (Jowitt 40). Graham's credo was "you moved between the shoulders and the knees and that was it" (ibid 41). This new dance form was deeply disconcerting to many audiences in the 1920s. The theater critic Stark Young, for instance, felt her movements were too angular and acerbic — almost Aztec in their lines and mass. Every time he saw Graham dance, "he thought she was going to give birth to a cube" (Londondance.com).

Despite the angular appearance of Graham's actions, Schonberg explained that they were "circular like making a beckoning gesture, as if inviting someone to follow" (Jowitt 42). In addition, Graham often made a whip-like motion forward and backward, her body curving and arching into space. The body also leaped, twisted, bent, and fell backward to the floor. Graham identified a method of breathing and impulse control she called "contraction and release." For her, movement originated in the tension of a contracted muscle and continued in the flow of energy released from the body as the muscle relaxed.

As a young woman, Graham declared she was going to create a system of movement for dance that had never existed before and that people would long remember. She did just that. Although she was already 40 years old when she first established her name, Graham became one of the supreme innovators of the twentieth century (Campbell). She developed approximately 200 dances — a repertoire of astonishing breadth and enormous power — often with herself at the center as performer. However, Graham was never content to be the only one driven and fanatical. Dancer Stephen Hodes once said with affection and admiration: "If she felt you were resistant when she was creating, she'd go at you like a savage animal" (Perron).