Martha Graham

1

To nondancers Martha Graham may be vaguely known as that angular, arty woman with a head like a skull who moves in spasms and jerks. To her colleagues, she stands acknowledged as one of the few great living choreographers, one of the dozen greatest dancers. Virgil Thomson considers her the most powerful actress in the American theatre, while Katharine Cornell, who might have some claim to that title herself, makes a more sweeping statement. “She is not only the greatest American artist in the theatre, but in any field.”

Graham is one of the few people who have found an original way of communication, it is not a readaptation or personal development of the old way. It is a new way. This happens only occasionally in painting and music. It is noteworthy of Graham that in twenty years of invention she is still what she was at the beginning: the most unpredictable, the most searching, the most radical of all choreographers. Furthermore, no dancer that I can name has expanded technique to a comparable degree. She has, herself alone, given us a new system of leverage, balance, and dynamics. She is one of the great costume designers of our time, as revolutionary in the use of material as Vionnet. In point of view and subject matter, in choice of music and scenery, she cuts across all tradition. And for each new phase, there was needed a whole new style. Her idiom has shown as great a variety as Picasso’s.This enormous span of achievement has covered twenty years and none of it has been easy. Some people mocked, and many turned away. The public and critics have been in turn outraged, exasperated, stimulated, adoring. No one has ever been indifferent.

From the beginning Graham knew what she wanted to do and did it. She was born in Pittsburgh of Scotch Presbyterian parents, and raised in Santa Barbara, California. Her father was a physician who specialized in mental ailments. So from an early age she grew accustomed to the idea that people move as they do for reasons. Her father, for instance, used to detect lying by the manner in which people held their hands. He did not wish her to dance. She had to wait until he died before she started training.

She entered the Denishawn School in Los Angeles while attending the Cumnock School and came under the spell of Ruth St. Denis. Thereafter she never took any aspect of dancing flippantly. When she was graduated from high school, she joined the troupe as a student and performed tangos with Ted, Japanese flower arrangements with Miss Ruth, and music visualizations to Doris Humphrey’s choreography. I saw her during this period. I remember her hurtling through the room to Schubert, or sitting bare-legged on the polished floor with smoldering watchfulness. The mask of her face was like porcelain over red-hot iron. One felt that the gathering force within might suddenly burst the gesture, the chiffon, the studio walls, the pretty groupings of graceful girls. The intensity she brought to bear on each composition was not comfortable to watch. She went with the troupe on a European tour. Ted Shawn built an Aztec ballet around her which gave her the opportunity to vent some of her ebullience. In this she had the chance, for instance, to gnaw on his leg. No one subsequently, they told me, ever did this so well.

It was during this tour that she came under the influence of Louis Horst, the Denishawn musical director, who in manner was something like Dr. Johnson and in appearance a cross between Silenus and Micawber. He urged her to try her own wings. So she up and left, and with great courage came to New York and started out on her own. Horst left the home fold shortly thereafter.

Denishawn viewed this double departure poorly. Girls did not rebel this way. Not since Miss Ruth herself dressed up as an Egyptian cigarette ad in 1906 and gave Oriental mysticism a new lease on life by undulating in a roof-garden restaurant had a young woman broken with tradition so flagrantly. For the last two decades dancing had been Russian, which was art; American, which was commercial (tap, acrobatic, ballroom, or musical-comedy, the last a vague term applicable to anything successfully cute); Duncan, which while emotionally good for voting girls was last losing favor; or Denishawn, which combined the best features of all. Graham had the audacity to think that there might be still another way, stronger and more indigenous.

Martha put in a couple seasons in the Greenwich Village Follies. Then, with a little money saved, she started serious experimenting. She taught at the East man School of Music, entering the project with great diffidence. But Horst believed she had genius. He accepted, however, no easy revelations. The technique, the choice of subject, the music, the old manner went, He brought her music. He brought her books. He took her to study the Indian corn dances. He played for classes. He composed for her concerts. He comforted and quieted her pupils. He organized her appearances, sitting up nights addressing folders or working over the account books. He scolded and forced and chevied. The relationship was full of storm and protest.

“You’re breaking me,” she used to say. “You’re destroying me.”

“Something greater is coming,” he promised, and drove her harder. “Every young artist,”he explained once, “needs a wall to grow against like a vine. I am that wall.”

Graham’s early recitals were given in 1926 with a few pupils on Sunday nights in New York. This was a stirring period in American dance history - a period of revolution and adventure. There were at least ten soloists working in New York and a score or more imitators developing their experiments. Every Sunday throughout the winter season, at least two dance concerts were given. Me all turned out on bloc for every occasion, wrangling and lighting in the lobbies as though at a political meeting.

I am glad I participated in the period of the originators. There are a force and a wonder in first revelation that have no duplication. Greater dancers may be coming, greater and more subtile choreography; but we worked when there was no pattern and no precedent. We made it all as we went along, and every concert was a perilous test for all of us, a perilous, portentous challenge. We risked everything. Every one of us had thrown overboard all our traditions—ballet, Duncan, Denishawn — and was out to remodel the entire medium. There were no rules. We worked alone. We struck sparks from one another. It was a kind of gigantic jam session and it lasted nine years, until the end of WPA. There are brilliant young dancers today, but no one with the power of Graham or Humphrey, and all of them are imitative of the styles in the thirties.

2

BALLET is largely a series of poses, linked with the lightest and most flowing movement, it strives always to conceal effort. The great jumps derive their effect solely from their apparent ease in conquering gravity and human inadequacy. Graham thought that effort was important since, in fact, effort was life, and she thought dial the use of the ground rather than (he escape from it was vital. And because effort starts with the nerve centers, it follows that a technique developed from percussive impulses that How through the body and the length of the arms and legs, as motion is sent through a whip, would have enormous nervous vitality. These impulses Graham called “contractions.” She also evolved suspensions and falls utilizing the thigh and knee as a hinge on which to raise and lower the body to the floor, thus incorporating the ground into the gesture proper for the first time.

All this differs radically from ballet movement, where the arms and legs are used as separate revolving members on a steady spine, and where all effort is concealed. It is different from the Von Laban—Wigman technique (which Graham had never seen), and it is probably the greatest addition to dance vocabulary that has been made in this century, being comparable to the rules of perspective in painting or the use of the thumb in keyboard placing. In a purely abstract sense her code of technique may well be more beautiful than any of her compositions; it is certainly more durable because it has gone into the vocabulary of the dance.

Compare her findings with the achievements of other single historical figures, Camargo in her lifetime is supposed to have invented the entrechat quatre or jump with two crossed beatings of the legs, and to have shortened the classic skirt to ankle length. Heinel is credited with the double pirouette. Vestris, the greatest male dancer of the eighteenth century, expanded the leg beatings (batri) from four to eight and evolved pirouettes of five or six revolutions. The father of Maria Taglioni put her up on full point although others had been making tentative efforts along this line. Legnani exploited the fouetté pirouettenot her own invention. None of these altered the basic principles or positions of ballet technique. Anna Pavlova is credited by Swetlow, her biographer, with adding the trill on points. Each of these is a minute advancement for a lifetime of experimenting. Fokine, Balanchine, and Tudor have shown enormous invention, but none of them departed basically from ballet stance or ballet coördination.

It may be argued that Duncan created a new way of moving. But this is not strictly true. She refused, rather, to accept the old way and evolved a personal expression that was based on simple running, walking, and leaping. She worked almost without dance technique. Her influence has been incalculable, but her method was too personal for transference.

In ideas, Graham always led the field. She was doing dances of revolt and protest in the posh days of 1929. She was searching religious ritual and American folkways when revolution became the young radicals’ artistic line in 1931-1933. The Communists then suddenly discovered that they were Americans with grass roots down to the center of Moscow and put every pressure on Graham to make her their American standard-bearer. But she was nobody’s tool. She was already through with folkways and making experiments in psychology, and while other concerts were padded with “American Suites” and “Dust Bowl Ballads,” Graham began to turn out her superb satires, “Every Sold Is a Circus" and “Punch and the Judy,” which foreshadowed some of Tudor’s work and a very great deal of Robbins and de Mille. The dance world seethed with satire and Martha concerned herself with woman as artist and then woman as woman, inaugurating her poetic tragedies “Letter to the World,” “Deaths and Entrances,” and “Salem Shore,” and developing the firsi use of the spoken word in relation to dance pattern. Everyone else began to do biographics; Graham delved deeper and deeper into anthropology “Dark Meadow.”She began to search Greek mythology for the key woman’s present discomforts —“ Labyrinth,”“Cave of the Heart,”“Night Journey.”Nowadays the doctors sit out front biting their nails and taking sharp note.

By 1930 Martha Graham’s group had expanded to over twenty and she was a charter member of the Dance Repertory Company, founded by Helen Tamiris, and including Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman and their groups. That year Graham danced “ Heretic.,“ the first landmark. In the second season she produced “Primitive Mysteries,”based on the Catholic-American concept of the Virgin, a work unsurpassed by her or anyone else. Thereafter she gave an annual series of New York concerts and toured in all the major cities. She had a brisk whirl on the opening program of Radio City and she starred in special performances of Stravinsky’s “Sucre du Printemps" under the auspices of the League of Composers, with choreography by Léonide Massine. She staged the dances and movement in Katharine Cornell’s “Rape of Lucretia" and “Romeo and Juliet.”She has earned her living throughout by teaching, an occupation that has gone on all her professional life without respite, winter and summer.

The group which started with three pupils from the Eastman School expanded to over twenty in three years. She added men to the ranks in the middle thirties, but in the early days she took only women. Those girls are not to be thought of as the usual adolescent, illiterate dance student. They were all adults; many held degrees of one sort or another and had deliberately chosen this form of dancing as opposed to the traditional. Among their ranks they have numbered great soloists, Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, Dorothy Bird, Anita Alvarez, Anna Sokoloff, Pearl Lang, May O’Donnel, Yuriko. They embraced every possible sacrifice in order to serve their work, and lived like ascetics. There was no whoop-de-do whatever connected with this form of dancing. The discipline was merciless; many of them endured real privation.

The girls were paid $10 per season. The boxoffice receipts barely covered the advertising and rental, never the rehearsal costs. To meet their own expenses, some of them waited on table. None of them were adequately fed or housed. Their leader worked them until midnight every night except Sundays and holidays, when she kept them all day as well. But the girls danced with the ardor of novitiates. They took the stage with a conviction rare in the theatre. The quality of their group performance was incandescent.

Graham not only rehearsed the girls and herself to the point of utter exhaustion, changing or recreating whole sections until the very eve of a performance; she always ripped up her costumes and spent the entire night before in a fever of sewing. Incidentally, she cut and stitched her cost times hersell with the aid of a sewing woman. Apparently she had to do this as a nervous catharsis. Contrary to all rules governing athletes, she never slept for two nights before an appearance. Martha spared no one.

3

WHEN Graham first performed “Primitive .Mysteries in 1930 the audience rose and screamed. John Martin of the Now York Times dealt in terms he had hitherto reserved for Duncan. “ Probably the finest single dance composition ever produced by an American,”said the Herald Tribune. For this work she was granted half a Guggenheim fellowship. (Being a dancer, although the greatest, she was naturally not entitled to the usual grant awarded a painter, or writer, or scientist.) She went to Mexico.

The winter following the Guggenheim trip, I had occasion to visit her in her studio on 9th Street, She said to come late and see the end of rehearsal — about eleven o’clock. (She had to work at night. Most of her girls had jobs during the day.) I came late. This was the first time I had actually seen her in the throes. At the conclusion of rehearsal, the girls were dismissed and Martha went into her little sleeping cell and didn’t come out. Louis said I was to wait, that Martha was out of sorts. I waited the better part of an hour. Then Louis suggested, in a dispirited way, that I might as well go in as not.

Martha’s room was about live feet, broad, as I recall it, and it contained a bed, a chest of drawers, and an armchair. Louis more than filled the armchair. I took a box. In the center of the bed was a tiny huddle buried in a dressing gown. The only visible piece of Martha was a snake of black hair. Every so often the bundle shivered. Otherwise there was no sign from that quarter.

Louis droned on, “Now, Martha, you’ve got to pull yourself together. You can’t do this. I’ve seen you do this before every concert and it won’t do. You’re a big enough artist to indulge yourself this way, fall apart the week before and still deliver on the night. But the girls can’t. They are not experienced enough. You destroy their morale. You tear them down. They’re not fit to perform.'’

Martha neither showed her face nor moved. “The winter is lost. The whole winter’s work is lost. I’ve destroyed my year. This work is no good.”

“It is good, Martha,”said Louis, persuasively.

“It is not good. I know whether it’s good or not. It is not good.”

“It may not be so successful as ‘Mysteries’ but if has its own merits.”

“I’ve lost the year. I’ve thrown away the Guggenheim.”

“One cannot always create on the same level. The Sixth Symphony followed the Fifth, but without the Sixth we could not have had the Seventh.” (This was sound thinking and I stored it away in my own breast for future comfort.) “One cannot know what one is leading into. Transitions are as important as achievements.”

“Oh please, please, leave me alone,” begged the little voice.

Louis got stern. He rose; he loomed. “Martha, now you listen to me. You haven’t eaten all day. Get your clothes on and come out for some food.”

Martha tossed the blanket a bit. The snake whisked from one side to the other.

Louis got his ulster. Louis got his cap, a flat one with a visor which sat on the top of his white hair. Louis put the coat on Max, his dackel. Louis wheezed out his disapproval. “It’s not worth it. Every concert the same. It’s not worth it. She’s put us all through the wringer. She destroys us.”

“But, Louis,” I said, paltering down the street after him and peering up around his coat. “She is a genius.” lie snorted. “Would you consider working with anyone else:”

At this he stopped. “That’s the trouble. When you get down to it, there is no other dancer.”

The date of this conversation was 193L2. I p until last year he played for her classes, conducted her orchestra, comforted her girls. lie still stood beside her, hand in hand, to take the bows at those times, more frequent in her life than in most, when the power and the glory are present and spectators and performers are wrapped in mantles of bright communication.

Louis believed in Martha the most, reserving for her a respect and devotion he gave no one else, but he helped us all. His classes in choreography were for years the only ones of their kind in this country. Outside of the creators themselves, he had had a more constructive influence on the dance than anyone else, possibly excepting John Martin of the New York Times.

4

IRA HAM always believed, I think, that she would have general popular recognition, but. lirst she served her conscience; as sternly as any of her New’ England Calvinistie forebears, she worked in the fear of God. This may sound humorless. It was not, but masterpieces, whether humorous or tragic, do not come spontaneously. They are earned.

She has worked harder than any other human being I’ve ever known. She taught between four and six hours every day, and not only master pupils, but varicosed ladies from Kansas City and lumpy adolescents from (lie Bronx. She taught and si Ml teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Neighborhood Playhouse, at Bennington College, and regularly in her own studio. It is costly to be a pioneer in any field; it is virtually impossible in the theatre without a fortune. Martha has never had a fortune. This, however, did not stop her.

The whole responsibility of school management, costumes, and personnel devolved upon her. It is true her students assisted in teaching and in other departments, but this only meant that her books were sometimes looked after by young men w ho couldn’t quite add, and that the costumes were stored and cared for by young women with a great deal else on their minds. She has never been able to afford a full-time wardrobe mistress. Louis Horst, used to take the brunt of business responsibility. More recently, the actual booking has been controlled by professional managements, among them Sol Ilurok.

But the ultimate responsibility was Martha’s. This left her no time for leisure. Her social life was stolen. She took about three weeks vacation a year — during which she went to California to visit her mother. The rest of the time, month in and month out, she was tit it.

The pre-concert period was, of course, frenzied. Then came the season in New’ \ork when Martha danced the whole performance eight times a week, a program that would kill any normal performer of twenty. On the Monday morning following the close of the New York season she was up at nine o’clock starting the spring course. Friends protested. Friends worried. But 1 he rent had to be paid. After the spring course came the summer course and Bennington College and the summer composition, Then for three weeks Mother, followed by the autumn course and usually a concert tour. Then the winter composition and the preparation for the New York performance. This was her program in 1930. It is her program, with small variations, in 1950.

The center of all this turmoil one might suppose would be a virago, a wild-eyed harridan. Well, she could be. If she thought her prerogatives were questioned, she was a very bold woman to cross. She has walked to the footlights, and with blazing eyes addressed the conductor (not Louis): “If you do that again, I shall publicly set you right, in front of the audience.”He believed her and minded.

Furthermore, she can be formidable when it takes great courage to be so. The Nazi government invited her to the 1936 Olympic Games— the only American artist so honored. This would have meant world-wide publicity and a whacking sum of money that she badly needed. Martha received the representatives courteously and replied, “But you see half my group is Jewish.”

The Germans rose screaming in protest,. Not one of Martha’s group would be treated with incivility. Their status as American citizens and as her pupils would ensure their protection.

“But,”said Martha, “I also am an American citizen and their friend and sponsor. And do you think I would enter a country where you treat your citizens and their people in such a manner?”

“It would be too bad,”said the Germans, “if America was represented by any but the best.”

“It would be too bad for you,"said Martha, “because everybody would know exactly why.”

Martha told me this herself and added cheerfully that she knew she was listed at the German consulate in New York for immediate attention when opportunity offered. No dancer from the United States went to Germany that year.

5

STRANGELY, the impression she makes when you meet her is essentially feminine, even girlish. She is small— five feet three inches. On the stage she seems tall gaunt, and powerful. She looks starved. But her body is deceptively sturdy. She has a very strong back and thighs, and she has the feet of a bushmnn. Lacking the speed and brilliance of a ballet dancer’s, her feet have an animal-like strength and suppleness that make you feed she could, if she chose, bend her knees and clear the traffic. She has a split kick, straight up, 180 degrees. She is well turned out, almost to the degree of being crotchsprung. (I am not speaking sartorially. She is that as well.) It was on her own body that she built her technique.

Her arms are long and inclined to be both brawny and scrawny; the hands are heartbreaking, contorted, work-worn, the hands of a washerwoman or an instrumentalist. All the drudgery and bitterness of her life have gone into her hands. These are the extremities, roped with veins and knotted in the joints, that seem to stream light when she lifts them in dance.

But it is the face one sees first and last, the eyes and voice that hold one. The shape of the face is Mongoloid with skin drawn taut over the bones. Her head is skull-like. The cheeks are hollows. In the eye-sockets, the great doe-like orbs glow and blaze and darken as she speaks. Her eyes are golden yellow flecked with brown, and on occasion of high emotional tension seem to project slightly from the lids while the iris glows like a cat’s. The little nose is straight and delicate. The mouth is mobile, large, and generally half-opened in a kind of dreamy receptivity. The skin of her glistening teeth, the skin of her lips, the skin of her cheeks and nose, are all exposed and waiting with sensitive delight, like an animal’s face or the surface of a plant as it bends toward light, every bit of surface breathing, listening, experiencing. The posture is just this, a delighted forward thrust that exposes the mouth. In more than one way she resembles Nefertiti: the long passionate neck, the queenly head, the bending. accepting, listening posture.

Her laughter is girlish and light. She has a sly wit that reminds one in its incisive perception of Jane Austen or of Emily Dickinson, whom she so greatly reveres. She loves pretty female things, and she manages to dress with great chic on an imperceptible budget, having the happy faculty of always appearing right for the occasion. Her hair is black and straight as a horse’s tail. Her voice is dark and rusky breathy, like most dancers’. Her speech — who shall describe Martha’s speech? The breathless, halting search for the releasing word as she instructs a student, the miracle word she always finds?" The gentle “You see, it should be’ like this" as her body contracts with lightning, plummets to the earth, and strikes stars out of the floor. “Now you try it. You can do it.” Thus Diana to the ratcatchers. No one can remember what she says, the words escape because they are elliptical. She talks beyond logic. She leaps from one flame point to another. People leave her dazed, bewitehed. Young men fall in love with her after every lunch date. Young women become votive vestals. This gets tedious. They tend to clutter up the hallways, clamoring for Martha’s wisdom. And patiently, seriously, Martha gives it. She makes each one feel capable of greatness.

She speaks to frenetic virgins of their fretful problems, and she is not only big sister but mother earth. She talks vocation problems with anyone– even nondancers. She lays a steadying hand on the back of all young men starting on the black and uncharted path of the male dancer. She has something of the quality of a nun or a nurse. She gives the sense of boundless strength, the reassurance that although circumstances may be tragic, they are not outside nature. No one could say she is the healthy out-of-doors type. She is a thoroughly neurotic woman, leading a most unusual life, but she has faith — faith in the integrity of work and in the rightness of spirit. This she can communicate. Time and again she has said the word that has picked me up, dusted me off, and sent me marching.

I have always known what kind of teacher she was, and many times I asked if I might study with her.

“Certainly not. Find your own way. I won’t let you lean on me.” This refusal was repeated at regular intervals down the years.

“Marlha, you have genius. You know where you’re going.”

“I don’t know where I’m going. None of us knows that. And some day I’m going to give you a good smack.”

“Martha,” I said another day, beating my breast over a soda. “I have no technique and I have no time or energy to acquire any.”

“Technique!” Her voice rang with scorn. “I can see technique at Radio City. From you I ask something greater — what cannot be learned in any class, I ask reaffirmation.”

This kind of talk was all very well from her. She was one of the biggest technicians of her time. But she never got her values confused. She hoped I wouldn’t.

After every concert I went to her for analysis. In very exhaustion I went to her when at one point I was truly ready to quit, and she said, “But if you don’t do your dances, no one ever will. In all of time, these dances can only be done by you and now. It is not for you to evaluate them or your own gifts or personality. It is for you to create. You have no means of knowing your own worth.”

And when I had some success I went back to her and said, “There is no contentment or happiness in the work. When I look at what I have done, I see only the faults. I get sick with dismay.”

“Yes,” she said, “that is the way it is.”

“But is there never any peace or satisfaction?”

“No,” she cried vehemently. “No satisfaction ever, not for a minute. There is only a kind of divine unrest. It is our privilege to know this.”

As she spoke I thought it was the most desirable thing possible never to find peace of heart.

Why does one believe Martha Graham? Is it the deep sense of obsession in the face, or the sheer integrity of her life? One faces a woman who could not be bought or pushed or cajoled into toying with her principles. Though she has known prolonged and bitter poverty, she has never grown disheartened or faint-spirited or self-pitying. She is a brave and gallant creature. If her words sound contradictory or arbitrary, there is the seal of her life upon them and the weight of her enormous achievement. One cannot turn aside lightly.

Why, then, is she poor? Why isn’t she a commercial success from coast to coast, from country to country? The answer is simple. Outside of opera, dancing is the most expensive form of entertainment; the training and rehearsals necessitate an enormous endowment. Even the great ballet companies are ridden with debt and they cater frantically to all tastes and cut every artistic corner possible. The United States is the only country where there is no civic or national endowment for the performing arts — symphony orchestras excepted. If composers and symphony performers had to pay their own way they would not be able to maintain any very desirable standard.

Were Graham a European, unquestionably she would be a national figure and state-supported like Sibelius or Mary “Wigman. She has proved herself. She is the only dancer outside of the great ballet companies that can sell out a season. But even playing to absolute capacity she loses money because of the union rates of stagehands, truckers, musicians, company managers, press agents. More money goes through her box office than through that of any other comparable figure, but it is paid right out to hirelings, or it is poured back into production. She keeps nothing for her private life, and as she is employer as well as performer, no union guarantees her even a pittance. There is no such thing as rights in choreography.

She still teaches six hours daily and composes at night or in the early morning. She still demonstrates in her classes. She still Guidances every pupil. She still, after twenty-five years of creating, has the vitality to break tradition. In the most evanescent of all professions, she is regarded as an immortal. Dancers for untold generations will dance differently because of her labors. The individual creations may be lost, but the force of her discoveries has been impressed into the vocabulary of inherited movement. I could not have approached what I am without her. Robbins would not be the same, nor Tudor, nor even Balanchine—nor any ballet dancer practicing today —and we come from alien schools. Boys and girls who have never seen her will use and borrow, decades hence, her scale of movement. Technically speaking, hers is the single largest contribution in the history of Western dancing.

Today whenever I walk past the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, I glance up at the studios above. Like as not Martha is up there, particularly at night, alone or with her group, searching, searching and finding, in the strange, sealed, narrow room, a tired-eyed pianist beating out the percussive chords that seem to give her driving power. She will be there, I imagine, as long as she can stand.