Legends in Dance

Martha Graham

Martha Graham’s impact on dance was staggering and often compared to that of Picasso’s on painting and Stravinsky’s on music. Her contributions transformed the art form, revitalizing and expanding dance around the world. She will forever be known as “the Mother of Modern Dance”.

In the Beginning

Martha Graham (1894 – 1991) was born in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 11, 1894. Her father, a doctor specializing in nervous disorders, was very interested in diagnosis through attention to physical movement. This belief in the body’s ability to express its inner senses was pivotal in Graham’s desire to dance. As her doctor father would say, “bodies cannot lie”. When she was ten years old (1904), and after one of her sisters developed asthma, the family moved to California because the weather was better.

Graham became interested in studying dance after she saw Ruth St. Denis (1880–1968) perform in Los Angeles 1911 (1914). Inspired by St. Denis’ performance, Graham enrolled in the arts-oriented Cumnoch School. She attended from 1913-1916 graduating with her studies in theater and dance. She later studied at the new Denishawn School; a collaboration of Ruth St.Dennis (the dance she originally saw and was inspired by) and husband/dancer Ted Shawn. Over eight year period from 1915-1923, as both a student and an instructor, Graham made Denishawn her home. She would later comment that “everything she did was influenced by Denishawn”.

By 1923, she was ready to branch out. She found her chance dancing in the Greenwich Village Follies; A New York based vaudeville and variety show where she danced her own solo routines she choreographed for the shows. Though this work provided her with some economic and artistic independence, she longed for a place to make greater experiments with dance.

In 1925 Graham became dance instructor at the Eastman School of Music and Theater in Rochester, New York. At Eastman, Graham was given complete control over her classes and the entire dance program. Graham saw this as an opportunity to engage her best pupils in the experiential dance style that would revolutionize theories of movement. Beginning with her Eastman College students, Graham opened the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance in 1926 and in 1928 formed the Martha Graham Dance Company.

A new technique is born

Martha knew that all emotion is visible in the torso because of the body chemistry and mechanics. Arch the spine and you have emotion. Every emotion, she believed, starts or is visible in the torso first. Graham believed that through spastic movements, “tremblings”, and falls she could express emotional and spiritual themes ignored by other dance styles such as ballet.

The dances were also intended to evoke a strong response in the audience rather than just be pretty pictures. Many of her dances feature forceful, angular movements originating in spasms of muscular contraction and release centered in the dancer's abdominals. The resulting dance vocabulary is startlingly unlike that of classical ballet in its jagged and angular lines, and its dislocations and distortions that express intensely felt human emotion.

The Graham Technique

The source of all her movement was the breath; the breath through the back or spine. The heart pounds, the lungs fill, the diaphragm lifts. The spasm of the diaphragm is used to spark the gestures. These spasms were called contractions. The point of the movement was not just the result of the contractions but what it did to the rest of the body. The arms and legs moved as a result of this spasm of percussive force, like a cough.

Then there were the falls. Not a yielding to gravity but a melting or sliding to the ground; then the recovery. These were pivotal to the Graham movement vocabulary. The falls looked astonishingly beautiful but were very difficult and painful. They developed the muscles in ways that the body was never intended to for dance. The entire body was put off-balanced, suspended in air.

Then Martha discovered the knee or rather the leg hinge. Not a kneeling or bowing on the knee but a straight body, spine lowered, balanced and cantilevered backward. A dangerous position because the body cannot save itself from falling except by the unflinching support of the remarkable thigh muscles and strong abdominals. And this very sense of peril is what gives the movement the excitement, the danger.

Special People and life of solitude

Martha Graham surrounded herself with artists and visionaries. But these creative people had to endure the tantrums, hysterics, financial uncertainty and the whirlwind that was Martha’s life. Many stood by her throughout her life. Many could not survive the storms.

She was fortunate to have friends that helped encourage her in the early days. A strong and continuing influence in her life was Louis Horst, musical director at Denishawn, who had left the school two years after Graham. He became her musical director, composer and most trusted confidant until his death in 1964.

For sets Graham's formed a long and distinguished collaboration with the noted Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, under whose influence she developed one of her most singular stage innovations, the use of sculpture, or three-dimensional set pieces, instead of flats and drops as was the norm for ballets and operas.

Her personal life had its limitations. She formed strong artistic friendships but little success for a romantic partnership. She was married briefly to her first male dancer she hired for her company, Erick Hawkins, but the marriage did not last. He would become her one tormenting obsession of her life. Every romantic link in her older years would always be compared to her relationship with Erick. He was her great love of her life

Graham danced from 1913 to approximately 1970. In the years that followed her departure from the stage Graham sank into a deep depression fueled by views from the wings of young dancers performing many of the dances she had choreographed and originally danced. Graham’s health declined precipitously as she abused alcohol to numb her pain. After hospitalization with a failed suicide attempt she again began to choreograph and continued creating new works right up until her death in 1991.

Her Legacy

Throughout most of her career, Graham maintained a position as the foremost figure in American modern dance. She strongly influenced succeeding generations of modern dancers, ballet choreographers, stagers of musicals and operas, and creators of dance- dramas. She choreographed 191 dances in the “new dance language”. Many of these pieces are the Modern classics of today.

She is universally understood to be the twentieth century’s most important dancer, and the mother of modern dance. She was not the first, but she was the most significant. And to many, the best of the modern dance movement.

Sources: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/martha-graham/ http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Graham- Marthahtmlhttp://www.biography.com/people/martha-graham-

Vanity Fair magazine, August 1991 pgs 132-150,152-156 Name______Per______

Legends in Dance Martha Graham

Dance Standard: Understanding the historical contributions and cultural dimensions of Dance (3.3)

1. What did her father do as a career? Specializing in what?

2. What did the phrase “bodies cannot lie” mean to her father?

3. Who did Martha see as a performer that inspired her? And in what city?

4. What school hired her to run their dance program? And in what year?

5. Why did she need to develop a new movement style?

6. What are some of the adjectives used to express what Grahams dance vocabulary looked like?

7. According to Graham; what is the source of all movement?

8. Of the three techniques highlighted: contractions, falls, hinges, which two require to have the body off-balanced?

9. Why was her association with sculptor Noguchi so unique?

10. Who was the love of her life?

11. How many pieces did she stage in her lifetime?

12. What will the phrase that will forever be associated with Martha Graham, what is she know as?