The candidate was asked to change into a khaki-colored bathing outfit that all the Denishawn students wore. “Dance for me,” commanded Ruth St. Denis, who was famed for her exotic adaptations of “Oriental” movement and whom the candidate considered “a goddess figure.” In the living-room-sized studio, the young woman improvised an energetic waltz to the accompaniment of Denishawn’s bored-looking, bushy-browed, cigar-smoking pianist, Louis Horst.
The candidate wasn’t one of the blond, languid lovelies Denishawn was known for, and she was, St. Denis said, “too old” to become a good dancer. But Horst muttered something about her having “a special quality.” Ted Shawn, St. Denis’s professional and personal partner, agreed. There was something about the smoldering “untamed little black panther,” as Shawn later recalled, that made an impression.
The young woman was, of course, Martha Graham, who would, over the next 75 years, become a featured member of Denishawn, start and star in her own company, open her own school, choreograph 181 works, and invent a movement technique and creative sensibility that helped to transform concert dance globally.
Graham died 32 years ago, but in biography, performance, and dance studies, she is returning for an encore.
Her Denishawn audition is described in Neil Baldwin’s Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern, which Knopf published in October 2022. And later this year, FSG will release Deborah Jowitt’s Errand Into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham.
The Martha Graham Dance Company, which in April presented a series of performances at New York’s Joyce Theater, is beginning a three-year celebration of the company’s 2026 centennial including performances in the United States and Europe. In September and October, in galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dancers from the Graham company will perform some of her 1930s solos in conjunction with the exhibit Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s.
The New York Public Library, which is processing a large Graham archive received in 2020, is reviewing applications for dance-research fellowships related to Graham’s legacy.
Higher education has been intertwined with modern dance since its early years. In the mid-1920s, Graham taught at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Forget ballet turn-outs, Graham told her students. A scholarship student who became her rehearsal assistant and demonstrator, Baldwin writes, recalled Graham demanding that the student “sit cross-legged, close her eyes, and visualize the Kundalini serpent power coiling up her spine, from the sacral plexus to the many-petaled lotus crown at the top of her head, and breathe deeply.”
“She was an incandescent teacher,” the student recalled. “She set us on fire!”
In 1934, Graham, along with Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm, founded the Bennington School of the Dance. It was directed by Martha Hill, who became the first director of dance at the Juilliard School, where she and William Schuman, Juilliard’s president, decided training would be equally split between ballet and modern dance.
The Bennington School became the American Dance Festival, which moved to Connecticut College in 1948 and then to Duke University in 1978. It has grown to include classes not just in modern and contemporary dance, but also ballet, hip-hop, jazz, African, and other forms, and it has been integral to the training and performance of generations of dancers and choreographers from around the world.
Through licensing agreements, the Graham Company’s more than 50 university partners, as it calls them — including Slippery Rock University, the State University of New York at Purchase, the University of Hartford, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Valencia College — perform works by Graham and by one-time members of her company like Erick Hawkins and May O’Donnell. And although Graham was born in the 19th century, her reach is felt in 21st-century training and performance at dance schools, conservatories, and colleges, where current students can trace their teachers’ teachers’ teachers to Graham as an artistic great-great-grandmother.
The centennial plays into “a moment in which the whole idea of modernity and modernism is up for re-evaluation,” in dance and in culture at large, says Linda Murray, curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library. “That’s a trend I see in scholarship.”
With a war in Europe and stark political polarization, scholars see in mid-20th-century America a reflection of today, she says. Also of interest to them is the female agency so prominent in Graham’s work, which stands out particularly in an era when male ballet stars are called out for sharing vulgar texts and photos of female colleagues.
For the most part, says Murray, modern-dance companies have done well in resolving overt gender tensions, in part because they were frequently founded or co-founded by women artists like St. Denis, Graham, and Humphrey, who unabashedly explored female passion and power. If anything, dance scholars and biographers explain, in Graham’s world, it was men, not women, who were first seen as interlopers and later felt they had to get out from under her shadow to establish themselves on their own terms — not just Graham’s dance partner, lover, and husband, Hawkins, but Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor too.
“Men are never really the point of Graham. … It’s always her world, her perspective.” The men “are there to serve the narrative” of the heroines. Take the 1947 work Cave of the Heart, loosely based on a tragedy by Euripides. “It’s all about Medea,” Murray says, “even when Medea’s not dancing.”
The centennial offers a marketing opportunity that would be foolish to pass up, says Gary Galbraith, a professor of dance at Case Western University and a former principal dancer with the Graham and Jose Limón companies. But it’s more than that. With a foundational company’s centennial, he says, “as an industry, you take pause for a second and think, ‘Wow, what have we accomplished?’”
Graham’s is the oldest extant dance company in the United States and is believed to be the first to racially integrate. In collaborating with artists and designers of various skin colors and ethnicities, says Stefanie Batten Bland, an assistant professor of theater and dance at Montclair State University, “she was bold in her time.”
The pandemic, Galbraith says, triggered “a monster reset” among artists trying to find meaning in their work and glancing back at their fields’ pioneers. A generation of young, competition-geared studio dancers with impressive ballet, tap, jazz, and sometimes modern or contemporary skills were locked down into existential isolation. That has made at least some of those budding artists particularly alert to questions of purpose, meaning, and the origins of their artform.
In Graham, whether or not they are drawn to her technique or choreographic preoccupations, young dancers see raw, insistent power and determination. As women first exercised the right to vote, Graham asserted a female performer’s right to treat serious moods and matters forcefully.
Graham’s reach is felt in 21st-century training and performance at dance schools, conservatories, and colleges, where current students can trace their teachers’ teachers’ teachers to her.
She evolved from Denishawn-style displays of alluring but somewhat fetishized cultural otherness to deeply researched mythological, historical, philosophical, literary, spiritual, and psychological interpretive odysseys. Her choreography, in various periods, is steeped in ancient history, Pueblo and other Native and Latin American cultures, antifascist politics, Americana, and Japanese Noh-influenced ritualized meditations on memory, aging, love, and regret.
She built from her own body outward a foundational technique centered around breath-linked abdominal-pelvic contraction and release; spirals around a spinal axis; harnessing and pulling against gravity in controlled falls and geometrically enticing floor movement; sinuous and planar workings of the bare foot and forceful hand.
Technique, for Graham, was not an end in itself. It “prepares your body to speak in dance,” she said. Just as important as her technique, Graham tunneled inside her own psyche and then strove to universalize her experience, particularly primal female experience, in what Galbraith calls a theatrical “landscape of the mind.”
Graham and her contemporaries were immersed in Greek drama, Nietzschean philosophy, Jungian psychology, and its associated Joseph Campbell-derived narrative framework around archetypal quests. A piece like the half-hour Cave of the Heart is conceived around the tragedy of Medea but is also a more general meditation on all-consuming and ultimately destructive love.
“There’s the physical map that the dancers learn, then interpretive substance that fills the physical map, then intellectual study to find their own expression,” says Eilber. “Read the Greek plays. Learn about Medea. It’s more of an internal study, of figuring out how to open your own veins, if you will, being vulnerable, revealing yourself. Martha was a tyrant if she thought you were posing or putting up a facade. She wanted you to bring your own personal power to any given role.”
When Eilber became artistic director, Graham’s work was considered obsolete. “It’s old and nobody really cares,” was the general feeling, she recalls. Hell, even modern dancers didn’t care about their art form’s history and, in contrast to ballet, had cared less and less with each passing decade.
In the second half of modern dance’s 20th century, modern choreographers were ditching the art form’s tradition of psychological, sociological, and historical drama for experiments in chance; visual adventures combining dance with image projections, electronic sound scores, and new costume and set materials; celebration of pedestrian and mass motion; convoluted multibody contortions; street-theater and site-based reveries; contact improvisation; avant-garde audience interaction; and gymnastic endurance.
“It had always been about revolt,” says Eilber. “Every generation was supposed to reject what had come before and create something completely new.” That, they found, was how to excite audiences and funders.
After a dismaying period in which the Graham company almost succumbed to infighting and lawsuits, then dug its way out of a $6-million deficit, “our job was to say to the entire field, ‘Wait a minute, we have works of genius in our history, and we have to figure out how to celebrate them, how to curate them.’”
Under Eilber’s leadership, the company took cues from how museums and opera companies curated and reframed their content, and Graham classics have become mid-century retro-chic. That includes full works but sometimes also excerpts. For instance, Dark Meadow Suite offers highlights from a 1946 Jungian plunge in which Graham cast herself as “One Who Seeks” and Hawkins as “He Who Summons.” That excerpt approach is far from heretical. Excerpts, recombinations, revisions, renamings, re-costumings, set changes, and other programmatic shifts — sometimes accompanied by tantrums and tears late into the night of a dress rehearsal — were not uncommon for Graham.
The company regularly commissions new works by contemporary young choreographers like Annie Rigney and the duo Baye & Asa. Critics sometimes question whether that dilutes the troupe’s identity, but Eilber and her colleagues are trying to keep the Graham “brand” from ossifying, emphasizing the company’s creatively dynamic and generative history.
This year’s premiere of Baye & Asa’s Cortege 2023, a meditation on vicious cycles of violence, draws inspiration from Graham’s Cortege of Eagles (1967), which explores the grief of Hecuba and the Trojan women. In a long-term project commemorating 9/11, the company commissioned choreographers, including Kyle Abraham, Aszure Barton, Michelle Dorrance, Larry Keigwin, Lar Lubovitch, Richard Move, Yvonne Rainer, Sonya Tayeh, and Doug Varone, to create Lamentation Variations, which draw from a signature solo work of Graham’s from 1930.
The Graham troupe has also reached out to younger audiences through educational partnerships, performance-contextualizing discussions, and social media, including a 2009 Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge in which contestants riffed off videos from Graham’s 1958 masterpiece, linking the ancient Greek tragic themes to contemporary life.
This, like the excerpts, is in keeping with the Graham ethos. For all the austere liturgical and pagan imagery in her choreography, Graham was neither a Luddite nor an anti-commercial crusader. She danced and choreographed for Vaudeville, the Greenwich Village Follies, Broadway, Radio City, film, and TV.
Whether in 1923 or 2023, if you’re a determined hardscrabble artist, a gig is a gig, and while staying true to the artistic vision, you’ve also got to pay the bills. Early in her career, even with the gigs, Graham sometimes had to borrow money from her own dancers to pay for upcoming production expenses. Her energy, and the demands she put on herself and her dancers, were immense. During a six-week tour in 1936, Jowitt writes, Graham performed in 10 or 11 works in each engagement, then gave interviews or the occasional lecture.
Nickolas Muray, from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division archives of the New York Public Library
To describe in that manner a Depression-era artist who must have sometimes wondered where her next meal would come from reads cruelly, but Graham saw such exposure, even at the risk of caricature, as necessary to her art and career, and she carefully cultivated her stern, purposeful persona.
As the decades brought a steady income and ever-grander international plaudits, but also arthritis, loneliness, depression, and alcoholism, Graham’s carefully cultivated persona hardened, grew more extreme. She was happy, says Eilber, to go with “that reputation as the dowager empress, the high priestess. She had her works on stage to speak for her, and she was fine being a celebrity and having people come and genuflect.”
But after Graham’s death, to sustain the art, Eilber and her colleagues had to humanize Graham the idol. “That’s been our main battle,” Eilber says, because the idol “is not who she was. She was sexy, flirtatious, brilliant, eloquent. She could read you like a book by watching you walk across the floor.”
“Martha always wanted to leave behind a legend, not a biography,” said the choreographer Agnes de Mille, Graham’s friend and biographer. In their deep archival dives and interviews, Baldwin and Jowitt only enhance the legend by humanizing and contextualizing her.
Baldwin, an emeritus professor of theater and dance at Montclair State University and author of biographies of Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, richly explores Graham’s youth in Allegheny, Pa., (now part of Pittsburgh) and, later, Santa Barbara, Calif., where she was academically strong, with keen interest in literature and drama, but was also captain of the Santa Barbara High School girls’ basketball team. The family’s loss of her toddler brother Billy to illness left a lifelong emotional wound, as did the death of Graham’s father, a psychiatrist (or alienist, as the specialty was then known), from heart failure when Graham was 20. Shortly after his death, she left for the Cumnock School, its guiding belief “that art and life are one and the same thing.”
In situating Graham’s work within American modernism, Baldwin folds into his narrative helpful capsule biographies of Graham’s collaborators and influences, as well as the broader cultural forces at play.
Horst, who was married and had an on-and-off affair with Graham, is a featured player in her story, encouraging and educating her, catering to her artistic whims and genius, talking her up when she was insecure, talking her down when she was at wit’s end, and joshing with her to lighten her mood. Hawkins, too, is a particularly vivid personality in Baldwin’s account, from meeting Graham in the late 1930s, when Hawkins came to Bennington with Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, to the agonized 27-page letter Hawkins wrote her a dozen years later when they uncoupled once and for all. (Mark Franko’s 2012 book from Oxford University Press, Martha Graham in Love and War, is also helpful reading for those interested in that period and relationship.)
Baldwin explains the influence in Graham’s circle of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche and the artist Wassily Kandinsky, and describes the sometimes-tense but fruitful dynamics of her collaborations with the artist and set designer Isamu Noguchi, the composers Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, and many others. He also examines in illuminating detail the impact that travels by Graham and Horst to the New Mexico pueblos had on works like Primitive Mysteries (1931) and El Penitente (1940).
Jowitt, a former dancer and choreographer, an acclaimed longtime dance critic for The Village Voice, and a former teacher for decades in the dance division of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, explores Graham’s career with more emphasis on deep interpretive description of the choreography. For instance, in a section on Graham’s Deaths and Entrances (1943), a meditation on the Brontë sisters, Jowitt describes how Hawkins proceeds “to face her and, holding her hands, press her down to her knees; he then sinks down to kneel beside her, twisting their arms into a cage as he does so.”
In contrast, Graham’s encounters in that dance with Merce Cunningham, who, Jowitt has explained, often plays the lyrical poet or clown figure to Hawkins’ manly lover/antagonist, “are briefer and gentler. He moves in a larger, calmer, airier way than Hawkins and more in keeping with her.” When the two men wrestle, “Graham stands at the back, not seeing them, thinking them. On the other hand, an occasional movement of hers can convey a number of emotional states or decisions: She picks up her skirt on either side and walks along, her arms glued to her sides, but the outward flick of her wrists makes the fabric repeatedly spread out, then drop again; although the action is almost mechanical, it can make you think of a bird whose wings can be spread only so far.”
Baldwin’s biography ends in the early 1950s when the ascent toward modernism arguably concludes. For Jowitt, the last four decades of Graham’s career were a bittersweet maturation worthy of detailed analysis. Jowitt delves into works like Voyage (1953), which she interprets as an investigation into Graham’s relationship with Hawkins. Three men become three sides of one man, “his youthful zest, his ruthlessness, his sweetness — and the lust that lay beneath these. Unusually for Graham, the male personas not only lured her, they invaded and dominated her.”
With her experienced critic’s eye, Jowitt offers a feel for how Graham company personnel of different eras exemplified and helped shape the choreographer’s vision. In the huge two-hour culmination to her Greek Cycle, Clytemnestra (1958), for example, Graham “cast the principal characters sagely,” Jowitt writes. “Small, innocent-appearing Yuriko played Ismene, the younger of Oedipus’s two daughters, and tall, enigmatic Matt Turney was Cassandra. Sharply pretty Ethel Winter assumed the role of the abducted Helen of Troy … and Paul Taylor easily conveyed the louche sensuality of Aegisthus.”
Baldwin and Jowitt impressively tie the modern choreographers’ bookish philosophizing to the works on stage — how Schopenhauer helped the artists to free themselves from the merely beautiful in search of the sublime, for instance, or how they built upon Nietzsche’s distinctions between Dionysian instability and Apollonian balance. Hawkins drew on his education in classics at Harvard University, and for Acrobats of God (1959) the 65-year-old Graham explored themes of rebirth drawn from yet another play by Euripides, Theodore Morrison’s 1950 book-length poem The Dream of Alcestis, and perhaps, Jowitt speculates, an 1869 painting by Frederic Leighton and an 1871 poem by Robert Browning. The immense intellectual power and curiosity of artists who also pushed themselves to their physical limits is humbling.
The extent of Graham’s bookishness struck Baldwin, especially when he was writing about Cave of the Heart, he says in an interview. He marvels at the volume of “books she took out of the library by the armload,” her voluminous notebooks and journals for that classic work of what Baldwin calls her “epic mythic phase.”
“This just gave me an insight into the omnivorousness of this woman,” Baldwin says. “We’re talking about reams and reams of longhand writing and planning and typing and thinking. … And then she gets into the studio and starts to hack it down minute by minute.” It was at 24 minutes, and she wanted to hone it to 21. It took Baldwin four months simply to track her thinking process for this one dance among scores and scores of dances.
Graham’s on- and off-stage drama as a dance doyenne can also cloud historical memory of what a riveting performer the Denishawn wannabe of 1916 became. An undisputed high point, according to colleagues and critics who witnessed it, was her starring role in the 1930 American premiere of The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Léonide Massine.
“Graham’s unleashed athleticism was a shock onstage to the dancers in her group who thought they knew her best,” Baldwin writes. Graham had held back during rehearsals, saving her fire for the performances. One dancer colleague was “stunned at Graham’s ‘attitude and power … Her hair flying, her legs way in the air.’” Graham rebounded from the floor “as if it were a drumhead.” Another dancer recalled Graham’s limbs windmilling “in front of her like a prehistoric bird whose wings try to raise the body … then into a delirious spin, the feet almost on the points striking the ground like daggers.”
“I hate to say it, but I think she’ll be watered down,” says West.
Graham technique is a powerful but sometimes bitter tonic. West recalls when she and the critic Tobi Tobias, in the summer of 1959, visited a Graham class. “The focus was the neck,” West says. “One hour on the use of the neck. She demonstrated, and it was fabulous … dutiful, serious. Nobody was having fun.”
Stephen Pier, artistic director and a professor of dance at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School, says, “This idea of rigor is fairly foreign to a lot of the young people, but I find our students really turn on to it” because “the rigor gives them superb tools.”
“You can build a dancer from the ground up through that practice,” says Pier, whose career has included performing and teaching both ballet and modern dance. Graham technique is not about feeling good or instantly conveying your own experience, he says. It’s about developing methods to express a wide range of universal human experience.
Mariah Steele, an assistant professor in the dance program at the University of Rochester, says of Graham that many students are “still following in her footsteps, but I think that a lot of people don’t realize that anymore because of the lost history.” While interdisciplinary cultural or gender-studies projects that involve dance are thriving, dance history, in and of itself, is struggling, says Steele, an assessment echoed by professors in other college dance programs.
The term “modern dance” feels old-fashioned to today’s dance students, Steele says, and they don’t always understand that “contemporary dance” is its offshoot. Today’s choreography packs many movements into seconds. Graham’s is more static, gradual, and repetitious, and feels culturally foreign to young dancers.
If students today do think of Graham, says Steele, they see her as an artistic dictator. That’s true in a sense — she was the imperious queen of her studio and her stage. Yet, the Baldwin and Jowitt biographies and conversations with Graham’s former company members make clear that her choreographic method involved a lot of collaboration with her dancers and drawing out their strengths and personality, as Ted Shawn helped draw out Graham’s.
When students are exposed to Graham technique, says Steele, they say, “‘Whoa, this is really hard,’ and they appreciate the virtuosity,” even if they could not appreciate it just from watching videos of Graham movement. Graham technique flows through the generations, whether students realize it or not. Steele, for instance, studied May O’Donnell technique from fourth to 12th grade with Nancy Lushington at the Steffi Nossen School of Dance, in White Plains, N.Y. Lushington performed extensively with O’Donnell, who was in the Graham company in the 1930s. Then, in college at Princeton University, Steele studied with Ze’eva Cohen, who immigrated from Israel to study at Juilliard and performed in the dance company of Anna Sokolow. Sokolow was, you guessed it, also a member of Graham’s company in the 1930s.
That’s the thing about artistic pioneers. Not all modern-dance roads lead back to Graham, but a whole lot of them do.
In an environment deeply suspicious of cultural appropriation, students are put off by the Denishawn-era exoticizing in which Graham started, says Ashley Goos, a visiting assistant professor of theater and director of the dance minor at Miami University, in Ohio. “It’s what my students would call cringey,” she says. Then again, by the 1920s Graham herself cringed at it and began conjuring female heroic figures in more abstract contexts. “That’s how I frame it,” says Goos. “Feminism.”
You’ll be scared the first two years. Then you’re going to love it.
If the Denishawn roots of Graham’s career were uncomfortably Orientalized, says Ursula Payne, a longtime professor of dance and an interim associate provost at Slippery Rock University, scholars can look back on dance history “not just with a critical eye but also with grace in terms of understanding the times they were working in.” Graham and the dancers she trained pushed back hard on those exoticizing traditions.
Graham rejected an offer to perform in Germany for an international dance festival accompanying the 1936 Olympics, hired the dancer Yuriko a year after Yuriko had been released from a Japanese American intern camp, and in the 1950s integrated her company with the hiring of African American dancers Mary Hinkson and Matt Turney, who would be followed by other Black artists like Gus Solomons Jr. Graham also taught dancers like Pearl Primus, who helped bring to American audiences African dance and choreography bearing on the American Black experience.
“There was a legacy of Graham that was translated through the bodies of Black women,” says Payne. That legacy, she says, flowed beyond the Graham company. Georges Balanchine worked with Hinkson and Arthur Mitchell in the 1960s, and Primus (for whom Payne once worked as a personal assistant) staged works for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
At the Joyce Theater during the recent Graham company run in New York, Slippery Rock student dancers performed Graham’s Steps in the Street, part of her antifascist 1936 work, Chronicle. The students’ grappling with the serious and still all-too-relevant theme of the desolation that war leaves in its wake, with Graham technique helping to build the young dancers’ confidence, strength, and stability, “is a great influence for them,” says Payne.
In scholarship, Graham will remain a part of the interdisciplinary blend, predicts Suki John, a professor of classical and contemporary dance at Texas Christian University. Graham and other major modern-dance figures, she says, are key to studies of performance and social media, arts economics, the roles and depictions of women and transgendered people, how cultures influence each other, and a wide array of other topics.
In technique, Graham will also endure, dance professors say. Goos, at Miami University, says her competition-trained students can dazzle with a graceful calypso leap. What’s scarier is facing away from the mirror in modern class. “For some, that’s the first time they will have danced without viewing themselves,” says Goos. “The only feedback they’re getting is proprioceptive.” Often, the choreography they’re used to is physically demanding but emotionally paint-by-numbers. These motions equal sad, those movements equal shy or victorious. For many students, modern dance is “their first foray into something that feels more authentic,” says Goos.
“Pull it in. Suck it up. Stretch more.” Those have been the studio mantras they’ve heard for years. In Graham and other modern modes, students have to dig into a very different part of their artistry, Goos says. The third- and fourth-year students tell their younger program mates, “You’ll be scared the first two years. Then you’re going to love it.”
Holly Evans, a professor in Pace University’s commercial-dance department, is a former Rockette with broad training in ballet, tap, jazz, and modern, including studies with former Graham company dancer Larry White. Among her students are competition-trained dancers with phenomenal techniques and big personalities who land jobs on Broadway and in professional companies like Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Parsons Dance.
But they’ve been so understandably busy competing and performing while in high school that they haven’t had sufficient time to watch dance, study its history, or consider the ideas that have shaped it, Evans says. The dancers will wow you, stringing together five pirouettes. In their jumps, they soar.
But Evans also teaches them dance history — and to fall. Graham technique teaches falls to the left, because for the right-handed majority, the left is the unknown.
“I want you to fall into the unknown with me,” Evans tells them, “because when was the last time you were a beginner?”