She invented a modern dance technique with her name
Martha Graham (1894–1991) danced and taught for over seventy years, building the Graham technique into modern dance’s backbone. First dancer at the White House, cultural ambassador abroad, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, she turned contraction and release into a new American language of the body.
Born 11 May 1894 in Allegheny City, later part of Pittsburgh, she was daughter of George Graham, an “alienist” practising early psychiatry, and Jane Beers, in a Presbyterian household of Irish and Mayflower-tinged ancestry. At fourteen the family moved to Santa Maria, California. In 1911 she saw Ruth St. Denis at Los Angeles’s Mason Opera House—her first dance performance—and soon entered the new Denishawn School founded by St. Denis and Ted Shawn.
She left Denishawn in 1923 for two years as a featured dancer in the Greenwich Village Follies. In 1925 she worked at the Eastman School of Music under drama head Rouben Mamoulian; together they made the short two-colour film The Flute of Krishna with Eastman students. When Mamoulian departed, Graham left too, choosing an independent path over institutional security. Her own centre opened in 1926 in a small Upper East Side studio, and on 18 April she gave her first independent concert of 18 short solos and trios at the 48th Street Theatre. When Germany invited her to the 1936 Berlin Olympic arts events, she refused even after Joseph Goebbels promised her Jewish dancers immunity, and answered in 1938 with American Document, a dance about democratic ideals. That year the Roosevelts made her the first dancer to perform at the White House, and Erick Hawkins became the first man in her company; they married in July 1948. Clytemnestra, premiered on 1 April 1958 to a score by Halim El-Dabh, was her only full-length work, and Aaron Copland wrote Appalachian Spring for her. In 1965 she became first director of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, founded by her student Bethsabée de Rothschild.
Foreign cities stacked civic and imperial decorations on her, from a Paris city key to a Japanese crown order. She died 1 April 1991, having outlasted fashions while her technique of contraction and release, built on a stylised idea of breathing, remained required vocabulary in conservatories. Modern dance’s American chapter is hard to narrate without her name in the first paragraph.
Source: Martha Graham
