Graham, Martha

Graham, Martha (1894–1991), dancer, choreographer, founder of the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Marthe Graham School of Dance in New York City.During an extraordinarily long career, Graham was one of America's most honored cultural figures, her name synonymous with modern dance. A visionary, she developed a new and wholly unique dance technique and vocabulary of steps and movements. Her theory of movement derived from the primary human activity, breathing, and the body's visible contraction and release when breathing is exaggerated by strong emotions. Her choreography, which eschews the gravity‐defying lightness of classical ballet, is filled with tension, power, and strength. Graham's nearly two hundred works included highly charged retellings of Greek myths such as Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), and Clytemnestra (1958); theatrical interpretations of ceremonial rites (Lamentation [1930], El Penitente [1940]); episodes from America's cultural landscape (Frontier [1935], Appalachian Spring [1944]); and dances with a literary or biographical context (Letter to the World [1940], Deaths and Entrances [1943]). A self‐described storyteller, Graham in many of her works created a new kind of theater fusing words and music, decor and movement.

Graham collaborated with such composers as Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Menotti, Paul Hindemith, and Aaron Copland, but her most celebrated and long‐lasting collaboration was with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988). For works such as Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart, and Clytemnestra, Noguchi designed innovative sets and props, including three‐dimensional sculptural forms that the dancers might move around or through, carry, manipulate, and even wear. Graham was also a noted teacher, and many of her students and members of her company went on to form their own troupes, including Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp.

Bibliography

Agnes de Mille , Martha: The Life and Works of Martha Graham, 1991.
Martha Graham , Blood Memory, 1991.

Trudy Garfunkel