Opinion: Pioneering artists: The life and legacy of Martha Graham

Los Angeles Times

08-03-2025

Over the course of the course of the 20th century, perhaps no artist of modern dance was as surprising — and boundary-defying — as Martha Graham. Producing work for upwards of 70 years, Graham is credited for establishing a characteristically different movement technique, rooted largely in the physical actions of contraction and release.
One hundred eighty works later, the Graham style has become synonymous with effervescence, vitality, and dynamism, thanks in large part to the broad diffusion of its repertory across top dance companies domestically and internationally.
Graham's early childhood dance experiences were, naturally, the chief influences on the choreography she later developed. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1894, Graham relocated to California at an early age.
She spent her formative years under the tutelage of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denies at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles, and later performed professionally with its company. Graham thereafter brought her talents to New York City, starring in John Murray Anderson's 'The Greenwich Village Follies' in a Broadway debut. Despite these successes, however, Graham had an intrinsic creative impulse, and she eventually distanced herself from established dance institutions.
In the early 1920s, Graham directed her first independent show, which featured three dancers. The number of such 'muses,' as she often understood them to be, quickly proliferated, with 16 female dancers comprising her ensemble by the decade's end. Like audiences and critics nationwide, these dancers had been attracted to the eccentric and bold style that defined the Graham technique.
By the 1930s, she was producing an expansive array of works, including 'Lamentation' (1930), 'Panorama' (1935), 'Chronicle' (1936), and 'American Document' (1938). Although each work was remarkably distinctive, they were all united by their powerful commentary on the social values of the time, pulling from storied experiences to illustrate a normative set of expectations dictated by an altogether new understanding of modern American dance.
It is unsurprising, then, that the 1930s also provided the groundwork for growing discovery and appreciation of Graham's work. During that time, Bennington College, a liberal arts institution in Vermont, offered Graham a position as a professor of dance, which she held for four years. There, she met Erick Hawkins, her future husband and the first man to perform in what had been Graham's female company of dancers.
Their synergy inspired an unprecedented creative output, kindling works such as 'Every Soul is a Circus' (1939), 'Letter to the World' (1940), and 'Dark Meadow' (1946). It was also during these years, in the late 1930s and spanning the 1940s, that a collection of notable dancers elected to work with Graham, including Merce Cunningham, Anna Sokolow, and Sophie Maslow.
In the 1950s, and throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the U.S. Department of State facilitated national tours featuring her company's works. Eventually, further financial support from outside entities enabled the Graham Company to perform internationally as well as domestically. By this time, Graham no longer starred in the works she produced, though her choreographic output remained consistently high. The school affiliated with her company, which was founded in 1926, remained similarly successful.
Graham's final works, produced in the last 20 years of her life, featured perhaps the most remarkable assemblage of dancers yet, including prominent modern artists like Takako Asakawa and Peter Sparling and notable ballet dancers, such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Dame Margot Fonteyn. Energized by what she considered abundant young talent, Graham continued to choreograph until her death in April of 1991.
Graham's death, however, did not mark the end of her long and rewarding career. Her choreography fundamentally transformed modern dance, compelling up-and-coming artists to test the boundaries of movement-based expression. As New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff asserts, 'Martha Graham's name remains a virtual synonym for modern dance,' and such will likely be the case for decades more to come.