Graham, Martha (1894-1991), became a leading American dancer and choreographer (creator of dances). She pioneered a movement called modern dance. Graham defined dance as “making visible the interior landscape.” She used the entire body in dance movement to reveal the inner, true feelings of the characters she portrayed. Her movements were not always “pretty,” because the feelings she tried to express included fear, jealousy, anger, and hatred. Early in her career she sometimes shocked audiences with her sharp, angular poses and her abrupt, jerky actions.
Graham was born on May 11, 1894, in a suburb of Pittsburgh. She danced with the Denishawn company from 1916 to 1923. In the early 1930’s, Graham began to choreograph dances for her own company based on primitive ritual and on American life. In the 1940’s, she began interpreting the feelings of women. Her dances were inspired by the lives of the American poet Emily Dickinson and the English novelists the Brontë sisters. Graham was also influenced by the great figures of Greek mythology as interpreted by the psychoanalytic theories of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Perhaps the greatest of her Greek dances was Clytemnestra (1958), a study of guilt and redemption. But along with such tragedies, she also created the joyous Appalachian Spring (1944) and the sparkling comment on dancers and their discipline, Acrobats of God (1960). Graham wrote an autobiography, Blood Memory (1991). She died on April 1, 1991.
