The season’s choicest esthetic turnout packed a Manhattan theater last week. Next morning the dance critics of the New York Times and Herald Tribune beat their gloved hands together and hurled nosegay adjectives. Martha Graham, after an absence of more than a year, had scored again on Broadway.
Many conservative dance enthusiasts regard Martha Graham as a dangerous revolutionist. Tired businessmen, when there are any present, find her intricate, concentrated dancing anything but relaxing. But most balletomanes agree that she is the ranking U.S. dancer and one of the most gifted of modern choreographers. With a stageful of props that might have come out of surrealist painting, Graham and her troupe do the subtlest of choric portraits and satires. So perfect is her own sense of timing that she can get a laugh by moving a finger.
Martha Graham’s dancing differs from the traditional ballet in much the same way as that of the late, great Isadora Duncan. It is less formal, less orthodox, less showy, more intensely expressive, with emphasis on contemporary subject matter. Graham approaches her art with barefoot, Protestant simplicity, thinks of her choreography in terms of drama rather than pirouettes and entrechats. Like Protestant Duncan before her, she strongly influences orthodox ballet. Her concerts are always thronged with orthodox ballerinas and choreographers in search of new ideas.
Martha Graham’s master dance is probably the ballet Letter to the World, a dreamlike, spiritual biography of New England Poetess Emily Dickinson, in which her desires, inhibitions, joys and sorrows are evoked with an amazing eloquence of posture. At last week’s concertGraham offered a new psychological production, the fantastic, lunar Deaths and Entrances.
Follies to Fanatics. Daughter of a Pittsburgh nerve specialist, Martha Graham showed her first predilection for the ballet by dancing down a church aisle at the age of two. Brought up in California, she was apprenticed while a high-school student to famed Dancer Ruth St. Denis. Martha Graham subsequently toured the U.S. as a partner of Ted Shawn and was a featured soloist with the Greenwich Village Follies.
In the late 1920s, anxious for a more serious medium, she trained her own troupe and gave her first Manhattan recital on $11.50 in cash and about $800 in credit. Even then the Graham box office (as it has done ever since) showed a profit, and the Graham reputation began to grow. In 1930, Russian Choreographer Léonide Massine and Conductor Leopold Stokowski picked her for the leading female role in the U.S. premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. She did choreography in Broadway shows for Katharine Cornell, worked with Archibald MacLeish on his verse drama of the financial crisis, Panic.
Meanwhile, encouraged by an almost fanatic following of young enthusiasts, year after year she went on evolving her own special choreographic art.
Today Martha Graham spends a good deal of her time teaching in a downtown Manhattan studio, counts many topnotchers among her pupils. A pert, slim, dark-haired woman of enormous energy, she looks, offstage, more like a business executive than a ballerina. Like most dancers (who worry incessantly about their figures) she is a food faddist and a near-teetotaler. Her public has learned to like her the hard way, expects no compromises.
Says she: “Some people like me, some many consider me a menace.”
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com