The scholar Elizabeth Kendall has written that "Lamentation (image)" is both a piece about the emotion of grief and a visual homage to contemporary architecture, most notably the new skyscrapers that were beginning to fill the New York skyline. Her famous solo, "Lamentation," for example, was a portrait of a grieving women, sitting alone on a bench and moving to an anguished Kodaly piano score. During the early 1930s, her work was focused on emotional themes. In her first reviews, as a result, Graham was often accused of dancing in an "ugly" way.īut critics and audiences soon became accustomed to Graham's innovative style of movement and she developed a following among serious dance patrons, scholars and critics. This method of muscle control gave Graham's dances and dancers a hard, angular look, one that was very unfamiliar to dance audiences used to the smooth, lyrical bodily motions of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Based on her own interpretation of the Delsartean principle of tension and relaxation, Graham identified a method of breathing and impulse control she called "contraction and release." For her, movement originated in the tension of a contracted muscle, and continued in the flow of energy released from the body as the muscle relaxed. Though the dances Graham created in the late 1920s were derivative of Denishawn pieces, by 1930 she was beginning to identify a new system of movement and new principles of choreography. Horst taught Graham about musical form and encouraged her to work with contemporary composers rather than making dances to eighteenth and nineteenth-century music, as her solo dance predecessors had done. Horst introduced Graham to the work of the great German modern dancer, Mary Wigman, and to the innovations of the school of modern painting, including the works of But his closest association was with Martha Graham, whose artistic vision he remained devoted to throughout his lifetime. For a period of time in the 1930s, he was the accompaniest for almost all of the leading dancers in New York City. Horst was a major figure in the modern dance scene of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. She soon began working with Louis Horst, whom she knew from Denishawn, where he had been the musical director and resident accompaniest. Shall we say her dances are motion pictures for the sophisticated."īy 1927, Graham had resigned from the faculties of the Eastman and Anderson schools and was working full-time as a dancer and choreographer in New York City. The program was heavily derived from the Denishawn repertory, featuring Graham in exotic solos and her students in a ballet ballad called "The Flute Of Krishna." A review from The Dance, described Graham as "clad in a heavy gold kimona, making patterns with her body against a screen of brilliant lacquer.Martha Graham presents a series of pictures that fire the imagination and make a hundred stories for every gesture. On April 18, 1926, her company, featuring students from Eastman, debuted in New York City. In order to support herself during this period, she took teaching positions at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY and the John Murray Anderson School in NYC. In 1925 she left the Follies to begin an independent career. In the next three years, she became a part of the Greenwich Village art scene, and saw the work ofĮleanora Duse, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Max Reinhardt. Graham left Denishawn in 1923 to take a job with the Greenwich Village Follies, where she gained a reputation for her ballet balleds. She often worked as Ted Shawn's partner, and became the co-star of "Xochtil," his famous duet about an Indian girl and an Aztec emperor. During the next seven years, Graham evolved from a student, to a teacher, to one of the company's best-known performers. Graham finished her secondary schooling, attended a school of dramatics for three years, and then in 1916 began studying at Denishawn. In 1908, the Graham family moved to Santa Barbara, California. In later years, Martha Graham often repeated her father's dictum: "movement never lies." Graham was particularly interested in the way people used their bodies, an interest that he passed on to his eldest daughter. Her father was an "alienist," the term then used to describe a physician who specialized in human psychology. Martha Graham was born in 1894 in a small city outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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