Martha Graham
May 11, 1894 — April 1, 1991
Martha Graham was the most influential figure in the history of modern dance — a choreographer, teacher, and performer who invented a new language of movement that made her the American counterpart to Picasso or Stravinsky, an artist who permanently altered her art form.
Roots and Revelation
Born on May 11, 1894, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Santa Barbara, California, Graham did not begin formal dance training until she was twenty-two — considered impossibly late for a professional career. She studied at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles, founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and quickly became their star pupil. But by the late 1920s she had grown frustrated with their exotic, decorative approach. She founded her own company in New York and began stripping away everything she considered artificial: the pretty poses, the romantic narratives, the reverence for classical line. What replaced them was raw, angular, and searching.
A New Movement Language
Graham's signature technique was built around the central axis of the torso — specifically the action of contraction and release of the pelvis and spine. Where ballet trained the body to disguise effort and float, Graham's dancers used gravity, fell to the floor, breathed visibly, and expressed anguish, ecstasy, and grief through the whole body rather than the extremities. Works like Lamentation (1930), in which a solo dancer explored grief while confined in a tube of jersey fabric, shocked and electrified audiences. Her landmark Appalachian Spring (1944), with music by Aaron Copland, became an American masterpiece and earned her a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation decades later.
Did You Know?
Martha Graham was so famously secretive about her age that even friends and colleagues didn't know it for decades. She continued to perform her own choreography until she was seventy-five years old. After retiring from the stage, she reportedly fell into a deep depression and nearly died — but recovered and returned to choreography at age seventy-six, creating some of her most significant late works in her eighties.
Legacy and Reach
Over her career, Graham created more than 180 works, trained nearly every major American modern dancer of the twentieth century — including Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Alvin Ailey — and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976. Her company, the Martha Graham Dance Company, continues to perform her work today; she died on April 1, 1991, in New York City, at age ninety-six, still active creatively. She remains the standard against which American dance is measured.