Martha Graham

In her lifetime she received honors including the Key to the City of Paris and Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown.

Martha Graham studied at Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts and Santa Barbara High School. Training under Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn is recorded. Yvonne Rainer, Anne-Marie Reynaud and Bessie Schonberg are recorded as having studied under Martha Graham. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is dance. Employment is recorded with New York University. Work by Martha Graham is recorded in the collections of Stichting Kunst in de Publieke Ruimte in Arnhem. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, National Medal of Arts, Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Women's Hall of Fame.

• Name — Martha Graham • Born — 11 May 1894 • Birthplace — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 1 April 1991 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Movement — Modern dance • Awards — Kennedy Center Honors (1979) Presidential Medal of Freedom (1976) National Medal of Arts (1985) • Field — Dance and choreography

Graham was born in Allegheny City, later to become part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1894. Her father, George Graham, was an "alienist", a practitioner of an early form of psychiatry. The Grahams were Presbyterians. Her father was a third-generation American of Irish descent. Graham's mother, Jane Beers, was a second-generation American of Irish, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry, and who claimed to be a tenth-generation descendant of Myles Standish. While her parents provided a comfortable environment in her youth, it was not one that encouraged dancing. The Graham family moved to Santa Maria, California, when Martha was fourteen years old. In 1911, she attended the first dance performance of her life, watching Ruth St. Denis perform at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. In the mid-1910s, Martha Graham began her studies at the newly created Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, at which she would stay until 1923. In 1922, Graham performed one of Shawn's Egyptian dances with Lillian Powell in a short silent film by Hugo Riesenfeld that attempted to synchronize a dance routine on film with a live orchestra and an onscreen conductor.

Graham left the Denishawn establishment in 1923 in order to become a featured dancer in the Greenwich Village Follies revue for two years. In 1925, Graham was employed at the Eastman School of Music where Rouben Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama. Among other performances, together Mamoulian and Graham produced a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly thereafter and Graham chose to leave also, even though she was asked to stay on. In 1926, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance was established, in a small studio on the Upper East Side of New York City. On April 18 of the same year Graham debuted her first independent concert, consisting of 18 short solos and trios that she had choreographed. This performance took place at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan. She would later say of the concert: "Everything I did was influenced by Denishawn." On November 28, 1926, Graham and others in her company gave a dance recital at the Klaw Theatre in New York City. Around the same time she entered an extended collaboration with Japanese-American pictorialist photographer Soichi Sunami. Graham was on the faculty of Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre when it opened in 1928. One of Graham's students was heiress Bethsabée de Rothschild with whom she became close friends. When Rothschild moved to Israel and established the Batsheva Dance Company in 1965, Graham became the company's first director. Graham's technique pioneered a principle known as "contraction and release" in modern dance, which was derived from a stylized conception of breathing. In conjunction with the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the German government wanted to include dance in the Art Competitions that took place during the Olympics, an event that previously included architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature. Although Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, was not appreciative of the modern dance art form and changed Germany's dance from more avant-garde to traditional, he and Adolf Hitler still agreed to invite Graham to represent the United States. However, the United States was not represented in the Art Competitions as Graham refused the invitation by stating: I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible. In addition, some of my concert group would not be welcomed in Germany. Goebbels himself wrote her a letter assuring her that her Jewish dancers would "receive complete immunity". Graham nevertheless rejected the invitation. Stimulated by the occurrences of the 1936 Olympic Games, and the propaganda that she heard through the radio from the Axis powers, Graham created American Document in 1938. The dance expressed American ideals and democracy as Graham realized that it could empower men and inspire them to fight fascist and Nazi ideologies. American Document ended up as a patriotic statement focusing on rights and injustices of the time, representing the American people including its Native-American heritage and slavery. During the performance, excerpts from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation were read. These were passages that highlighted the American ideals and represented what made the American people American. For Graham, a dance needed to "reveal certain national characteristics because without these characteristics the dance would have no validity, no roots, no direct relation to life". In 1938, the Roosevelt family invited Graham to dance at the White House, making her the first dancer to perform there. In the same year, Erick Hawkins became the first man to dance with her company. He officially joined her troupe the following year, dancing male lead in a number of Graham's works. They were married in July 1948 after the New York premiere of Night Journey. He left her troupe in 1951 and they divorced in 1954. On April 1, 1958, the Martha Graham Dance Company premiered the ballet Clytemnestra, which would become a success. With a score by Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh, this ballet was a large scale work and the only full-length work in Graham's career. Graham choreographed and danced the title role, spending almost the entire duration of the performance on the stage. The ballet tells the story of Queen Clytemnestra, who is married to King Agamemnon. Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter Iphigenia on a pyre, as an offering to the gods to assure fair winds to Troy, where the Trojan War rages. Upon Agamemnon's return after 10 years, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon to avenge the murder of Iphigenia. Clytemnestra is then murdered by her son, Orestes, and the audience experiences Clytemnestra in the afterworld. The ballet had a limited engagement showing at the 54th Street Theatre on Broadway, conducted by Robert Irving, voice parts sung by Rosalia Maresca and Ronald Holgate. Graham collaborated with many composers including Aaron Copland on Appalachian Spring, Louis Horst, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Carlos Surinach, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Graham's mother died in Santa Barbara in 1958. Her oldest friend and musical collaborator Louis Horst died in 1964. She said of Horst: "His sympathy and understanding, but primarily his faith, gave me a landscape to move in. Without it, I should certainly have been lost." Graham resisted requests for her dances to be recorded because she believed that stage performances should only be experienced live. There were a few notable exceptions. For example, in addition to her collaboration with Sunami in the 1920s, she also worked on a limited basis with still photographers Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s, and Barbara Morgan in the 1940s. Graham considered Philippe Halsman's photographs of Dark Meadow the most complete photographic record of any of her dances. Halsman also photographed in the 1940s Letter to the World, Cave of the Heart, Night Journey and Every Soul is a Circus. In later years her opinion changed. In 1952 Graham allowed taping of her meeting and cultural exchange with famed deaf-blind author, activist and lecturer Helen Keller, who, after a visit to one of Graham's company rehearsals became a close friend and supporter. Graham was inspired by Keller's joy from and interpretation of dance, utilizing her body to feel the vibration of drums and of feet and movement moving the air around her. • Illustration — Martha Graham with Bertram Ross (1961) In her biography Martha, Agnes de Mille cites Graham's last performance as having occurred on the evening of May 25, 1968, in Time of Snow. But in A Dancer's Life, biographer Russell Freedman lists the year of Graham's final performance as 1969. In her 1991 autobiography, Blood Memory, Graham herself lists her final performance as her 1970 appearance in Cortege of Eagles when she was 76 years old. Graham's choreographies span 181 compositions.

section In the years that followed her departure from the stage, Graham sank into a deep depression fueled by views from the wings of young dancers performing many of the dances she had choreographed for herself and her former husband. Graham's health declined precipitously as she abused alcohol to numb her pain. In Blood Memory she wrote, It wasn't until years after I had relinquished a ballet that I could bear to watch someone else dance it. I believe in never looking back, never indulging in nostalgia, or reminiscing. Yet how can you avoid it when you look on stage and see a dancer made up to look as you did thirty years ago, dancing a ballet you created with someone you were then deeply in love with, your husband? I think that is a circle of hell Dante omitted. [When I stopped dancing] I had lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded. My face was ruined, and people say I looked odd, which I agreed with. Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma. Graham not only survived her hospital stay, but she rallied. In 1972, she quit drinking, returned to her studio, reorganized her company, and went on to choreograph ten new ballets and many revivals. Her last completed ballet was 1990's Maple Leaf Rag.

Graham choreographed until her death in New York City from pneumonia in 1991, aged 96. Just before she became sick with pneumonia, she finished the final draft of her autobiography, Blood Memory, which was published posthumously in the fall of 1991. She was cremated, and her ashes were spread over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico.

The Martha Graham Dance Company is the oldest dance company in America, founded in 1926. It has helped develop many famous dancers and choreographers of the 20th and 21st centuries including Erick Hawkins, Anna Sokolow, Merce Cunningham, Lila York, and Paul Taylor. It continues to perform, including at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in June 2008. The company also performed in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, with a program consisting of: Appalachian Spring, Embattled Garden, Errand into the Maze, and American Original. Among the dancers who passed through her company in 1978 was the singer Madonna, a few years before she became famous. The singer, who greatly admires Graham, was nicknamed "Madame X" by her, which would be the name of her 14th studio album in 2019.

Graham's original female dancers consisted of Bessie Schonberg, Evelyn Sabin, Martha Hill, Gertrude Shurr, Anna Sokolow, Nelle Fisher, Dorothy Bird, Bonnie Bird, Sophie Maslow, May O'Donnell, Jane Dudley, Anita Alvarez, Pearl Lang, and Marjorie G. Mazia. A second group included Yuriko, Ethel Butler, Ethel Winter, Jean Erdman, Patricia Birch, Nina Fonaroff, Matt Turney, Mary Hinkson. The group of male dancers was made up of Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, David Campbell, John Butler, Robert Cohan, Stuart Hodes, Glen Tetley, Bertram Ross, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Mark Ryder, and William Carter.

• Illustration — President Gerald Ford awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction to Martha Graham, 1976 During her career, Graham was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography three times- one in 1932, one in 1943, and one in 1944. In 1957, Graham was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 by President Gerald Ford (the First Lady Betty Ford had studied under Graham in her youth). Ford declared her "a national treasure". Graham was the first recipient of the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement in modern dance in 1981, presented by Betty Ford. In 1984, Graham was awarded the highest French order of merit, the Legion of Honour by then Minister of culture Jack Lang. Graham was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 1987. • Illustration — First Lady Betty Ford, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France, Choreographer Martha Graham, Actor Clint Eastwood, Fashion Designer Adele Simpson, and Jazz Pianist Earl Hines Seated in the State Dining Room In 1990, the Council of Fashion Designers of America awarded Graham with the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998, Graham was posthumously named "Dancer of the Century" by Time magazine, and one of the female "Icons of the Century" by People. In 2015, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. On May 11, 2020, on what would have been Graham's 126th birthday, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced it had acquired Graham's archives for its Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The archive consists mainly of paper-based material, photographs and films, including rare footage of Graham dancing in works such as "Appalachian Spring" and "Hérodiade"; her script for "Night Journey"; and her handwritten notes for "American Document".

This excerpt from John Martin's reviews in The New York Times provides insight on Graham's choreographic style. "Frequently the vividness and intensity of her purpose are so potent that on the rise of the curtain they strike like a blow, and in that moment one must decide whether he is for or against her. She boils down her moods and movements until they are devoid of all extraneous substances and are concentrated to the highest degree." Graham created 181 ballets. Ballets by Martha Graham • Year — Performance — Music — Notes • 1926 — Chorale — César Franck • 1926 — Novelette — Robert Schumann • 1927 — Lugubre — Alexander Scriabin • 1927 — Revolt — Arthur Honegger • 1927 — Fragilité — Alexander Scriabin • 1927 — Scherza — Robert Schumann • 1929 — Figure of a Saint — George Frideric Handel • 1929 — Resurrection — Tibor Harsányi • 1929 — Adolescence — Paul Hindemith • 1929 — Danza — Darius Milhaud • 1929 — Vision of the Apocalypse — Hermann Reutter • 1929 — Insincerities — Sergei Prokofiev • 1929 — Moment Rustica — Francis Poulenc • 1929 — Heretic — from folklore — Old Breton song, Tetus Breton, as arranged by Charles de Sivry; added to the United States National Film Registry for preservation in 2013 along with three other Martha Graham dance films • 1930 — Lamentation — Zoltán Kodály — Sets by Isamu Noguchi; added to the United States National Film Registry for preservation in 2013 along with three other Martha Graham dance films • 1930 — 'Harlequinade' — Ernst Toch — Costumes by Graham • 1931 — Primitive Mysteries — Louis Horst • 1931 — Bacchanale — Wallingford Riegger • 1931 — Dolorosa — Heitor Villa-Lobos • 1933 — Romeo and Juliet — Paul Nordoff — Dance sequences for a Katharine Cornell production • 1934 — Dance in Four Parts — George Antheil • 1934 — Celebration — Louis Horst — Costumes by Martha Graham • 1935 — Praeludium — Paul Nordoff — Costumes by Graham (1935), by Edythe Gilfond (1938) • 1935 — Frontier — Louis Horst — Sets by Isamu Noguchi; added to the United States National Film Registry for preservation in 2013 along with three other Martha Graham dance films • 1935 — Course — George Antheil • 1936 — Steps in the Street — Wallingford Riegger — Part of Chronicle • 1936 — Chronicle — Wallingford Riegger — Lighting by Jean Rosenthal • 1936 — Horizons — Louis Horst — Sets by Alexander Calder • 1936 — Salutation — Lehman Engel • 1937 — Deep Song — Henry Cowell • 1937 — Opening Dance — Norman Lloyd • 1937 — Immediate Tragedy — Henry Cowell • 1937 — American Lyric — Alex North — Costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1938 — American Document — Ray Green — Sets by Arch Lauterer, costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1939 — Columbiad — Louis Horst — Sets by Philip Stapp, costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1939 — Every Soul is a Circus — Paul Nordoff — Sets by Philip Stapp, costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1940 — El Penitente — Louis Horst — Original sets by Arch Lauterer, costumes by Edythe Gilfond, sets later redesigned by Isamu Noguchi • 1940 — Letter to the World — Hunter Johnson — Sets by Arch Lauterer, costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1941 — Punch and the Judy — Robert McBride — Sets by Arch Lauterer, costumes by Charlotte Trowbridge, text by Edward Gordon Craig • 1942 — Land Be Bright — Arthur Kreutz — Sets and costumes by Charlotte Trowbridge • 1943 — Deaths and Entrances — Hunter Johnson — Sets by Arch Lauterer, costumes by Edythe Gilfond (1943) and by Oscar de la Renta (2005) • 1943 — Salem Shore — Paul Nordoff — Sets by Arch Lauterer, costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1944 — Appalachian Spring — Aaron Copland — Sets by Isamu Noguchi; added to the United States National Film Registry for preservation in 2013 along with three other Martha Graham dance films • 1944 — Imagined Wing — Darius Milhaud — Sets by Isamu Noguchi, costumes by Edythe Gilfond • 1944 — Hérodiade — Paul Hindemith — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1946 — Dark Meadow — Carlos Chávez — Sets by Isamu Noguchi, costumes by Edythe Gilfond, and lighting by Jean Rosenthal. • 1946 — Cave of the Heart — Samuel Barber — Sets by Isamu Noguchi, costumes by Edythe Gilfond, and lighting by Jean Rosenthal. • 1947 — Errand into the Maze — Gian Carlo Menotti — Sets by Isamu Noguchi, lighting by Jean Rosenthal • 1947 — Night Journey — William Schuman — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1948 — Diversion of Angels — Norman Dello Joio — Sets by Isamu Noguchi (eliminated after the first performance) • 1950 — Judith — William Schuman — Sets by Isamu Noguchi, lighting by Jean Rosenthal • 1951 — The Triumph of St. Joan — Norman Dello Joio • 1952 — Canticle for Innocent Comedians — Thomas Ribbink • 1954 — Ardent Song — Alan Hovhaness • 1955 — Seraphic Dialogue — Norman Dello Joio — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1958 — Clytemnestra — Halim El-Dabh — Sets by Isamu Noguchi, costumes by Graham and Helen McGehee • 1958 — Embattled Garden — Carlos Surinach — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1959 — Episodes — Anton Webern — Commissioned by New York City Ballet • 1960 — Acrobats of God — Carlos Surinach • 1960 — Alcestis — Vivian Fine • 1961 — Visionary Recital — Robert Starer — Revised as Samson Agonistes in 1962 • 1961 — One More Gaudy Night — Halim El-Dabh • 1962 — Phaedra — Robert Starer — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1962 — A Look at Lightning — Halim El-Dabh • 1962 — Secular Games — Robert Starer • 1962 — Legend of Judith — Mordecai Seter • 1963 — Circe — Alan Hovhaness — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1965 — The Witch of Endor — William Schuman • 1967 — Cortege of Eagles — Eugene Lester — Sets by Isamu Noguchi • 1968 — A Time of Snow — Norman Dello Joio • 1968 — Plain of Prayer — Eugene Lester • 1968 — The Lady of the House of Sleep — Robert Starer • 1969 — The Archaic Hours — Eugene Lester • 1973 — Mendicants of Evening — David G. Walker — Revised as Chronique in 1974 • 1973 — Myth of a Voyage — Alan Hovhaness • 1974 — Holy Jungle — Robert Starer • 1974 — Jacob's Dream — Mordecai Seter • 1975 — Lucifer — Halim El-Dabh • 1975 — Adorations — Mateo Albéniz Domenico Cimarosa John Dowland Girolamo Frescobaldi • 1975 — Point of Crossing — Mordecai Seter • 1975 — The Scarlet Letter — Hunter Johnson • 1977 — O Thou Desire Who Art About to Sing — Meyer Kupferman • 1977 — Shadows — Gian Carlo Menotti • 1978 — The Owl and the Pussycat — Carlos Surinach • 1978 — Ecuatorial — Edgard Varèse • 1978 — Flute of Pan — Traditional music. • 1978 or 1979 — Frescoes — Samuel Barber • 1979 — Episodes — Anton Webern — reconstructed and reworked • 1980 — Judith — Edgard Varèse • 1981 — Acts of Light — Carl Nielsen — Costumes by Halston • 1982 — Dances of the Golden Hall — Andrzej Panufnik • 1982 — Andromanche's Lament — Samuel Barber • 1983 — Phaedra's Dream — George Crumb (his Lux Aeterna) • 1984 — The Rite of Spring — Igor Stravinsky • 1985 — Song — Romanian folk music — played on the pan flute by Gheorghe Zamfir with Marcel Cellier on the organ • 1986 — Temptations of the Moon — Béla Bartók • 1986 — Tangled Night — Klaus Egge • 1987 — Perséphone — Igor Stravinsky — Costumes by Halston • 1988 — Night Chant — R. Carlos Nakai — Set by Isamu Noguchi • 1989 — American Document (new version) — John Corigliano — Guest Artist M.Baryshinikov • 1990 — Maple Leaf Rag — Scott Joplin — costumes by Calvin Klein, lighting by David Finley • 1991 — The Eyes of the Goddess (unfinished) — Carlos Surinach — Sets by Marisol

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