What we loosely call modern dance—barefoot and liberated from the symmetries of classical ballet—didn’t originate with Martha Graham, although it’s commonly supposed it did. A generation before she emerged in the late 1920s, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze had established the eurythmics movement at Hellerau, Isadora Duncan had long been swirling and skipping without tutus or pointe shoes, and German Expressionists were ardently beating their breasts and silently screaming.
But it was Graham who most persuasively enlarged the possibilities and consolidated this new vocabulary into compelling theatrical expression. The force and depth of her vision and personality propelled modern dance beyond its avant-garde niche into the heart of mid-twentieth-century American culture, spreading worldwide post-war through the tours her company made in the Cold War period and disseminating its influence through acolytes such as Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Glen Tetley. For five decades, her achievement was the yardstick by which everyone in the field was measured.
Both her life and career were remarkably long: born in 1894, she continued dancing into her seventies and was still choreographing a year before her death at the age of ninety-six in 1991. Over that period her artistry remained underpinned by her belief that the motor of dance was embodied in the pelvic thrust of sexual intercourse and parturition, allied to the power of the torso, encasing the lungs, the heart, the gut, the diaphragm. She was not inconsistent or complicated: there was some truth in one colleague’s assessment that “she lived by working with the dancers. That was it.” Exploration of only two major themes, the soul of America and the Greek myths of womanhood, characterized the majority of her creative output, and an indomitable will always drove her—“the center of the stage is where I am,” she said, with the emphasis firmly on the personal pronoun. “In terms of her ego, she always had to create a tremendous drama around herself,” noted Hawkins, her ex-husband and dance partner: that was both a good and bad thing.
Deborah Jowitt’s new study of Graham’s life and work, titled Errand into the Maze, enters a crowded bibliography. Graham’s own memoir, selective though it is, remains a useful source, as do her notebooks. Among the several biographies in the catalogue, Agnes de Mille’s is outstanding—vivid and astute, informed both by personal acquaintance and an insider’s knowledge of dance. The academic industry has also been busy producing scholarly monographs analyzing her aesthetics and practices.
To all this rich conversation Jowitt contributes no disruptive revelations or smoking guns. She refrains from gossip, remaining almost primly reticent on the matter of Graham’s decline into chronic alcoholism and tight-lipped over her final infatuation with the photographer Ron Protas, whose management of her legacy was contested in a bitter legal battle. The result is not a fun read: the Graham that emerges from these pages is a dedicated artist rather than a monstre sacré, and as a personality, she leaves a misleadingly pallid impression.
What Jowitt has to offer, assembled from archival visual recordings as well as her own memories of performances, is a meticulous and serious chronicle of Graham’s oeuvre, described in almost forensic detail that is short on poetic evocation. Few challenges in writing can be so testing as the attempt to pin the wordless fluidity of dance to the page, and Jowitt sometimes sounds clunkingly literal-minded as she painstakingly rehearses the passage of arms through legs and palms raised heavenwards. Rendered into words, Graham’s imagination ends up sounding distinctly prosaic.
An early influence on Graham’s Presbyterian upbringing was her doctor father, an “alienist,” who followed a primitive school of psychiatry that believed movement betrayed emotion. Perhaps an even deeper influence was the warmth and lushness of her adolescence in Santa Barbara. “California swung me in the direction of paganism,” she said; “I remember running in absolute ecstasy into the sun with my arms open to the wind.” You wouldn’t do a thing like that in smoke-choked Allegheny, where she had spent her earliest years.
By the end of the First World War, having disappointed her father’s hope that she would attend Vassar and opted for a “school of expression instead,” she was making her mark in the Denishawn troupe, committed to a sort of ethnographic tourism inspired by fantasies of the dances of Asia, Mesoamerica, and the ancient world. This set her on course, but by the mid 1920s, she had emancipated herself from the style’s kitschier elements—which would now be scorned as “cultural appropriation”—and settled in the lively bohemia of Greenwich Village. Here she espoused free love, immersed herself in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and began developing her own aesthetic, free of decorative nonessentials and following modern architecture’s insistence that form should follow function. No more titillation, no more prettiness: dance should be soul-stirring and thought-provoking.
It was a manifesto that caught the bleak mood of the Great Depression, and as dancer and choreographer Graham became a New York celebrity, dining with the Roosevelts, parodied by Fanny Brice, and featured on the cover of Vanity Fair. Through the 1930s she insisted “of things American the American dance must be made”—a claim borne out in her historical pageant American Document, her tribute to Emily Dickinson Letter to the World, and the hugely popular Appalachian Spring—but in the 1940s she became increasingly absorbed in Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the timeless figures of Greek myth, powerfully incarnating the psychodramas of Medea in Cave of the Heart, Jocasta in Night Journey, and Ariadne in Errand into the Maze.
Meanwhile her personal life was turning messier and messier. Having drifted away from her solid and reliable musical mentor Louis Horst, she became infatuated with her leading male dancer, Hawkins, fifteen years her junior, and married him. The swift collapse of their relationship precipitated a downward spiral, even as her reputation grew globally. When a back injury obliged her to give up dancing in 1970, she started drinking very heavily and became fractious and autocratic. Her finest creative work was behind her, and her finances were always precarious. She was not one to retire gracefully. A sense of humor was not among her qualities; a sense of her own importance emphatically was: “a little oriental deity, a little goddess, an empress, like a miniature Japanese doll,” said Agnes de Mille.
In Graham’s protracted old age, the White House showered honors on her, critics were unfailingly respectful, celebrities such as Halston, Madonna, and Liza Minnelli did homage, and the media granted her a legendary status reinforced by her regal demeanor. But her time was up—by the 1960s, there were new kids on the block, Martha Graham was a rocking-chair grandma, and modern dance had moved on to something less weighted and pretentious. As Paul Taylor, an apostate from her cult, put it, “all that grandeur seemed like pomposity.” Today her oeuvre survives in the work of the company that still bears her name, but its power is now that of something solemnly archaic rather than viscerally vital. Deborah Jowitt’s book is an honorable tribute to its subject and a valuable record of her history, but one doubts that it will spark reassessment or revival.
