Martha Graham

Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, which later became part of Pittsburgh. Her father, George Graham, practiced an early form of psychiatry then known as alienism, and her mother, Jane Beers, claimed descent from Myles Standish. The family relocated to Santa Maria, California, when Graham was fourteen. A performance by Ruth St. Denis at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles in 1911 marked her first exposure to dance. She subsequently enrolled at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded by St. Denis and Ted Shawn, where she studied and worked until 1923. In 1922, while still at Denishawn, she appeared in a short silent film directed by Hugo Riesenfeld that attempted to synchronize a filmed dance routine with a live orchestra and an onscreen conductor, performing one of Ted Shawn's Egyptian dances alongside Lillian Powell.

Graham departed Denishawn in 1923 to join the Greenwich Village Follies revue as a featured dancer, a position she held for two years. Her Broadway career spanned from 1923 to 1968 and encompassed a range of productions, including the Radio City Music Hall Inaugural Program, Benefit: Spanish Refugee Appeal, and La Nativite, as well as starring roles in A Time of Snow and Martha Graham and Company. In 1925, she joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music, where she collaborated with Rouben Mamoulian, then head of the School of Drama, on a short two-color film called The Flute of Krishna featuring Eastman students. When Mamoulian left the institution, Graham chose to leave as well despite being asked to remain. She joined the faculty of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre when it opened in 1928.

In 1926, Graham established the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance in a small studio on the Upper East Side of New York City. On April 18 of that year, she gave her first independent concert at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan, presenting eighteen short solos and trios of her own choreography. Later that same year, on November 28, she and her company performed a dance recital at the Klaw Theatre in New York City. Around this period she began an extended collaboration with Japanese-American pictorialist photographer Soichi Sunami. The technique Graham developed over the course of her career introduced a foundational principle called contraction and release, derived from a stylized conception of breathing, which became central to modern dance practice.

In 1936, the German government invited Graham to represent the United States in the Art Competitions held in conjunction with the Berlin Summer Olympic Games. She declined, stating that she could not identify herself with a regime that had persecuted artists and deprived them of the right to work, and noting that some members of her company would not be welcomed in Germany. Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote to her personally, assuring her that her Jewish dancers would receive complete immunity, but Graham rejected the invitation regardless. The propaganda she encountered from the Axis powers during this period contributed to her creation of American Document in 1938, a work incorporating excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and addressing themes of Native American heritage and slavery alongside broader American democratic ideals.

Also in 1938, the Roosevelt family invited Graham to perform at the White House, making her the first dancer to do so. That same year, Erick Hawkins became the first man to dance with her company, officially joining her troupe the following year. Graham and Hawkins married in July 1948 following the New York premiere of Night Journey. He left the troupe in 1951, and the two divorced in 1954. On April 1, 1958, the Martha Graham Dance Company premiered Clytemnestra, a full-length ballet with a score by Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh. Graham choreographed the work and danced the title role, remaining onstage for nearly the entire performance. The ballet had a limited engagement at the 54th Street Theatre on Broadway, conducted by Robert Irving, with voice parts sung by Rosalia Maresca and Ronald Holgate. That same year, Graham's mother died in Santa Barbara.

Among the composers with whom Graham collaborated were Aaron Copland on Appalachian Spring, as well as Louis Horst, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Carlos Surinach, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Horst, her oldest friend and musical collaborator, died in 1964. One of Graham's students was heiress Bethsabée de Rothschild, who established the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel in 1965; Graham served as the company's first director. Graham also worked on a limited basis with photographers Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s and Barbara Morgan in the 1940s, and considered Philippe Halsman's photographs of Dark Meadow the most complete photographic record of any of her dances.

Over the course of a career spanning more than seventy years of dancing and teaching, Graham became the first dancer to travel abroad as a cultural ambassador and the first recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction among dancers. She also received the Key to the City of Paris and Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She died on April 1, 1991.