Martha Graham

Martha Graham (1893-1991), American choreographer, dancer, and teacher, the major and most influential figure in American modern dance for more than 50 years.

Born May 11, 1893, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Graham received her early training as a dancer under Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in the Denishawn school and company. After two years of dancing in Broadway productions, she was director (1924-1925) of the dance department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and turned to creating dances of her own. She gave her first recital in 1926.

In her early work, Graham rejected the ornate style of Denishawn productions in favor of sparse staging. Graham's austere costuming and staging, as well as the angularity and severity of her movements, caused some initial bewilderment and antagonism, although she also won much immediate recognition. As her highly individual and expressive style developed, she became one of the leading figures in contemporary dance. She trained young dancers for her company, developing a technique—the most consistent and thorough in American modern dance—that included the contraction and release of different parts of the body; close relation of breathing to feeling and movement; austere, angular body lines; and close contact with the ground.

After 1934 Graham used only music, especially composed for her dances, by such composers as the Americans Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring,1944) and William Schuman (The Witch of Endor,1965). Her longtime associate and music director Louis Horst composed the scores for her Primitive Mysteries (1931) and El Penitente (1940). In her later works Graham made full, often symbolic, use of the traditional resources of the theater, including lighting, stage sets and properties, and costuming. Her stage settings (often abstract and sculptural) were executed by notable artists, particularly the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Graham's more than 150 works vary in mood from the witty Every Soul Is a Circus (1939) to the frenzied Deaths and Entrances (1943), based loosely on the Brontë family with Emily as the heroine. Graham's concerns ranged from American themes, in Letter to the World (1940), a study of the life of the poet Emily Dickinson, to psychologically interpreted Greek mythology, in Clytemnestra (1958). She retired as a dancer in 1970.

In 1984, at the age of 90, she choreographed Rite of Spring by the Russian American composer Igor Stravinsky. Graham died in New York City on April 1, 1991.

Some of the sources that inspired Graham's choreography are discussed in The Notebooks of Martha Graham (1973). The film A Dancer's World (1957) contains demonstrations of her teaching method; in 1984 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded a grant to her company to compile an archive of films of her dance.

See also Modern Dance; Choreography.