Martha Graham Took Classic Ballet and Turned It Into Modern Dance. It’s Still Moving Us 100 Years Later

This previous fall, in a sunlit studio in Manhattan’s West village, the Martha Graham Dance Company was rehearsing a manufacturing of Cave of the Heart, a fiery one-act ballet created in 1946. 

4 barefoot dancers, wearing black, reenacted the legend of Medea—a psychological research of lovesick jealousy based mostly on an historical Euripides play. The piece, initially titled Serpent Coronary heart, begins because the sorceress is rejected by her lover, Jason, and the story follows her as she seeks vengeance. In contrast to conventional ballerinas who seem weightless as they dance en pointe, supporting themselves on the information of their prolonged toes, the Martha Graham dancers mirrored their firm’s weighty, hyper-stylized aesthetic. Their palms had been cupped or clawed, their toes flexed, their backs hunched as they moved via a sparse set of prop stepping stones and an ominous, spiky steel sculpture to the soulful music of American composer Samuel Barber. 

Established in 1926, the Martha Graham Dance Firm is the oldest skilled dance troupe in the USA. As a part of its worldwide centennial celebration, the corporate visited 4 European cities final fall, performing classics like Cave of the Coronary heart alongside newer commissions. A kind of items—We the Individuals, created in 2024 by choreographer Jamar Roberts—depicted a protest, set to music by African American folks artist Rhiannon Giddens.

Named by Time journal in 1998 because the “Dancer of the Century,” Graham broke from classical ballet’s rounded fluidity with sharp, angular actions conveying ardour, humor and rage. She was born in 1894 in Pittsburgh, one in every of three daughters of a doctor who specialised in treating folks with nervous issues (what we name a psychiatrist as we speak). The household ultimately moved to California, the place Graham started finding out on the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. The varsity was experimental for its time, weaving collectively classical ballet coaching and different dance traditions from all over the world. 

However when Graham based her personal firm within the Nineteen Twenties, American artists had been nonetheless primarily borrowing from European lineages. Even the ingenious Denishawn Faculty relied on the standard ballet coaching and aesthetics that Graham would strip away. “We actually had but to totally develop our personal types of American self-expression,” says Janet Eilber, inventive director of the Martha Graham Firm since 2005. “However that is the period when the greats of American jazz emerge. [Aaron] Copland and [George] Gershwin are on the lookout for the American sound. Hemingway and Faulkner are altering narrative fiction. What all these artists are doing of their fields, Martha was doing for dance.” 

Graham discovered an important spark of inspiration in a brand new and controversial manner of portray: abstraction. Somewhat than presenting lifelike pictures, artists had been utilizing daring shade strains and shapes to evoke an emotional response. In her memoir, Blood Memory, Graham recalled seeing a portray in 1922 by Wassily Kandinsky, which she described as “a streak of purple going from one finish to the opposite.” The strategy validated Graham’s personal inventive imaginative and prescient: “I knew I used to be not mad, that others noticed the world, noticed artwork, as I did.” She remembered pondering, “I’ll try this sometime. I’ll make a dance like that.”

A lot as Pablo Picasso’s cubist figures shattered the bounds of portray to point out a number of viewpoints without delay, or Duke Ellington’s complicated chords and rhythms remodeled jazz, Graham developed a brand new language for her medium. By bending elbows into a tough level, shaping arms right into a diagonal line and carving the torso into contraction, Graham created a sensual artwork type. “As a result of physique language transcends cultures and ages,” Eilber mentioned of the Martha Graham model, “it’s solely recognizable, whether or not we’re performing in South Korea or in Cedar Rapids.” 

On the coronary heart of Graham’s strategy is a method of contraction and launch. Deep, targeted respiratory varieties the supply of this choreography, which manipulates the pelvic muscle mass to create signature curved strikes. To coach, dancers grasp rhythmic stomach and diaphragmatic workouts earlier than transitioning the approach to standing and finally transferring via house. 

“Graham’s approach is so uncooked,” mentioned Xin Ying, a principal dancer with the corporate, who got here to attend the Martha Graham Faculty from Sichuan, China, in 2010 with barely any trendy dance coaching. Whereas she had some early problem understanding English, she simply grasped Graham’s theatricalized physique actions. “Martha needs you to make use of your feelings, push your respiratory to an excessive,” she mentioned. “While you cry, for instance, you’re not utilizing common respiratory. You’re both sobbing or laughing, contracting your stomach muscle mass.” 

Through the European tour final fall, Xin danced the lead function of Medea in Cave of the Coronary heart. In key parts of the dance, Xin wore designer Isamu Noguchi’s iconic Spider Gown, a full-body sculpture created for the unique Forties manufacturing. The cage-like costume is bodily demanding for the dancer sporting it. The costume is unwieldy: Eilber says a performer “should maintain it completely horizontal as she steps throughout the stage” to mission vengeance and triumph, and ensure the prongs don’t get tangled in her skirt. As Eilber places it, “The choreography requires her to make the entire costume shiver, shake with emotion, however she will be able to’t shake too onerous, or the spines break off!”

Whereas classical ballet portrays sleek figures like princesses and swans, Graham typically targeted on messy anti-heroines like Medea. Her supply materials ranged from Greek mythology and the Hebrew Bible to the Brontë sisters and the American frontier. In 1936, after declining an invite from Nazi Germany to characterize the USA at a world dance competition held through the Berlin Olympics, Graham unveiled Chronicle, her response to European fascism, on the Guild Theater in New York Metropolis. In a single scene, a cadre of black-clad feminine dancers march in lockstep round a dominant girl in white. Maybe Graham’s most well-known work is the 1944 Appalachian Spring. In contrast to a lot of her different items, this story of a newlywed pioneer couple on their wedding ceremony day is hopeful and straightforward to comply with, with a Copland rating that comes with the acquainted Shaker tune “Simple Gifts.” 

In 1976, Graham turned the primary dancer to obtain a Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Gerald Ford. (Betty Ford, the primary woman, was a former Graham scholar.) Thirty-five years after Graham’s loss of life in 1991, her affect continues to unfold, not solely via her firm however via former college students like Alvin Ailey and Merce Cunningham, who created famend corporations of their very own. Generations of celebrities, from Bette Davis and Kirk Douglas to Madonna, studied with Graham so they might discover ways to use their our bodies as devices. Graham additionally had a profound affect on costume and set design via her collaborations with among the most imaginative artists of her period. A current centennial exhibition at The Church, an arts middle in Sag Harbor, New York, showcases objects from Graham’s productions, together with units by Noguchi and costumes by designers Halston and Donna Karan.

On the fall rehearsal, Lloyd Knight, a British-born principal dancer with the corporate, was making ready for his function as Medea’s lover, Jason, whose rejection of the sorceress units off the tragic chain of occasions. “One of many best issues about Graham’s work is you get a full expertise,” Knight mentioned, describing the manufacturing’s music, costumes and set design. “You get the Graham choreography, but additionally every thing on the stage is heightened. It’s the very best artwork all coming collectively.”