Martha Graham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Categories: American choreographers | American dancers | American socialites | Americans of Scots-Irish descent | Modern dancers | Modern dance | People from Pittsburgh | Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients | Sarah Lawrence College faculty | United States National Medal of Arts recipients | Kennedy Center Honors recipients | Kennedy Center Honors dancers | 1894 births | 1991 deaths
|
For the supercentenarian, see Martha Graham (supercentenarian).
Image:Martha Graham and Bertram Ross.jpg
Martha Graham, shown here with Bertram Ross
Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American dancer and choreographer regarded as one of the foremost pioneers of modern dance, and is widely considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Graham invented a new language of movement, and used it to reveal the passion, the rage and the ecstasy common to human experience. She danced and choreographed for over seventy years, and during that time was the first dancer ever to perform at The White House, the first dancer ever to travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and the first dancer ever to receive the highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the key to the City of Paris to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said "I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable."
Biography1920sGraham toured with the Denishawn company for years before she moved to New York City in 1923 where lived in Greenwich Village, and had some success as a dancer on Broadway with the Greenwich Village Follies. Although, she was able to make an impressive sum of money, she also felt dissatisfied. At the age of thirty she accepted a teaching position at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where she directed a newly formed dance department. She enjoyed having her own students to teach but she chafed against the limits and the bureaucracy of the school. She returned to New York City and began to teach dance out of a classroom in the back of Carnegie Hall. During this time she began to choreograph some of her earliest dances. On April 18, 1926, she gave the first performance of her own dance company. This was an important milestone for the young dancer but even she recognized her early performances as derivative of her work with Denishawn. As she continued to choreograph, her dances increasingly became her own, each one pushing herself and the art form further. With early dances such as "Revolt" (1927) and "Fragments" (1928) Graham found her voice. Her breakthrough was in 1929 with "Heretic", in which Graham appeared as a sole dancer dressed in white facing a wall of opposing dancers dressed in black while a simple, stark, Breton song was pounded out on the piano by Louis Horst. Horst would go on to become a life-long collaborator. 1930's "Lamentation" saw Graham as a solo dancer on a bare stage encased in a tube of stretch jersey fabric, rocking with pain and anguish. Graham's early dances were not generally well-received by audiences who were not sure what they were seeing. The works were spare, powerful and modern, devoid of the dreaminess and glamour of the works of the previous decades. The dances were often based on strong, precise movement and pelvic contractions, and were charged with beauty and emotion. It was a stirring period of revolution for Graham in which she would begin to establish a new language of dance which was different from everything that preceded it and which would leave everything that came after it indelibly changed. In the 1930s, Graham taught at Bennington College and New York University where Martha Hill directed the dance departments. In 1951, Graham became a founding member of the dance division of the Juilliard School, also directed by Martha Hill. A new era in danceImage:Martha Graham 1948.jpg
Photo by Yousuf Karsh, 1948
In 1936, Graham made her defining work, "Chronicle", which signalled the beginning of a new era in contemporary dance. The dance brought serious issues to the stage for the general public in a dramatic manner. Influenced by the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, it focused on depression and isolation, reflected in the dark nature of both the set and costumes. In 1926, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance was established. One of her 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, groomed its first generation of dancers, and created dances for the company. In 1948, Graham married Erick Hawkins (a principal dancer in her company), who was younger than she was. Although Graham as not really interested in marriage as an institution, she felt that after eight years of living with Hawkins that marriage would be an appropriate step. Her largest-scale work, the evening-length Clytemnestra, was created in 1958, and features a score by the Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh. 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's lighting designer Jean Rosenthal died of cancer in 1967. Graham actually despised the term "modern dance" and preferred "contemporary dance." She thought the concept of what was "modern" was constantly changing and was thus inexact as a definition. For a majority of her life Graham resisted the recording of her dances and would not allow them to be filmed or photographed. She believed the performances should exist only live on the stage and in no other form. At one point she even burned volumes of her diaries and notes to prevent them from being seen. There were a few notable exceptions. For example, she 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 Meadows" 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 thinking on the matter evolved and others convinced her to let them recreate some of what was lost. Graham started her career at an age that was considered late for a dancer. She was still dancing by the late 1960s, and turned increasingly to alcohol to soothe her own despair at her declining body. A younger generation who had heard of her legend went to her later performances and were confused about what all the fuss was about. Her works from this era included roles for herself which were more acted than danced and relied on the movement of the company dancing around her. Graham's love of dance was so profound that she refused to leave the stage despite critics who said she was past her prime. When the chorus of critics grew too loud, Graham finally left the stage. In her biography Martha Agnes de Mille cites Graham's last performance as the evening of May 25, 1968 in a '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. Those who had the privilege of seeing her perform in her prime have attested to her precision, form and mesmerizing brilliance as a dancer on stage. Though she is arguably one of the most important choreographers in the history of dance (and perhaps one of the most important artists of the 20th century) she always said that she preferred to be known and remembered as a dancer. In the years that followed her departure from the stage Graham sunk into a deep depression fueled by views from the wings of young dancers perforing many of the dances she had choreographed for herself and her former husband Erick Hawkins. 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. 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. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 by President Gerald Ford (the First Lady Betty Ford had danced with Graham in her youth). Graham choreographed until her death from pneumonia in 1991 at the age of 96. In 1998, Time listed her as the "Dancer of the Century" and as one of the most important people of the 20th century. QuotesAccording to Agnes de Mille: "I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. ... I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly,"
|
