A Century ago, dancer Martha Graham began teaching a small studio above the Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. This is the start of a dance revolution. Graham was not the first dancer who threw ballet shackles and looked for new ways of moving as the world moved in the early 20th century: the free-obscurity Isadora Duncan was walking in his European salons; Loie Fuller experimented with costumes and light effects; Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, trained by Graham, explored the dance with the styles of India, Egypt and Japan. But Graham has become the real godfather of modern dance, developing a technique that will be the foundation of many training in dancers around the world, and Starkly Modernist Choreography who will teach dance in a new direction.
Where the ballet jumped into the sky, Graham was rooted in the ground. Where the classical rear stood straight, Graham changed the spine and tilted the pelvis to deep contracting, connecting some highest power areas. In Graham’s most popular images of dancing, he wore an entire skirt kicked in a semicircle as he reached high or away from space, but also on psyche. You can feel his gravity just by looking at the picture. Masha Maddux, who joined the Graham Company in 2007 (Graham himself died in 1991 with the age of 96) describes the procedure: “It was prevented. It was very deep, veryvisceral, theatricalized and with a certain bite.” And what does it feel like to dance? “Liberating!”
But as Graham’s company prepares to celebrate its centenary in 2026, what is unique to such a legendary performer, so the main history of dance, is that his work is rarely seen in the UK. “I don’t understand why,” said Yolande Yorke-Edgell, whose London-based company Yorke Dance Project has shown many short Graham. Aaron S Watkin, artistic director of the English National Ballet (ENB), also felt when he moved to London after working in Europe. “I’m thinking, she’s the mother of modern dance, she’s very -Conic and famous, but almost no one does it.”
Yorke-Edgell, however, may have begun a trend. Last year, his company conducted a 1947 piece of Graham in the Maze, a journey inspired by Minotaur (with real and metaphorical demons); Ballerina Natalia Osipova then took it for her solo project. And now the ENB plays the same piece. “It’s like a 15-minute introduction to Marta Graham, all you want,” Watkin said. For a autumn tour, the Yorke dance project was mounted by another piece of Graham, deep songs, an anger, desperate solo made in response to the Spanish Civil War. So, finally, there’s more Marta Graham on the menu.
Born in 1894 in Pennsylvania, Graham later moved to California with his family. His father, a doctor and psychiatrist, gave him what he called the first dance lesson. “The motion does not lie,” he told him. After dancing with St Denis and Shawn’s Denishawn Company, Graham took a job with the Greenwich Village Follies Musical Revue, but it was certain that his form of art might be more than Maddux said he called “in the following hobby”. Graham soon founded his school and company, creating heavy work inspired by Greek mythology, history, the American West and our rich inner world (such as mourning in 1930, a study of sadness), with strong female characters ahead.
Lots of important artists went through his studio, from other dance pioneers such as Merce Cunningham, who performed at Graham’s company before bringing his own trailblazing path to modern dance, Madonna, who took classes when he first arrived in New York. It is Graham who has given a rebellious student to study moniker Madame X, a name Madonna used for an album title several decades later. Graham is a force, no doubt, personally and on stage. In her pics, dark hair slipped back into a chignon, she appeared the seriousness, and she was also enthusiastic. Or as Maddux puts: “It’s not the kind of person who gives civilized. So if the emotion is raw he is not restrained.” Yorke-Edgell, who encounters Graham at an audition, describes him as the kind of energy that vibrates. “He just had this existence; a total commitment to his art form,” he said, remembering what former Graham dancer and teacher Robert Cohan would say: “When he left the stage, he took the stage with him.”
Back in the current day, at the East London Studio of East London, Maddux teaches Dancers Minju Kang and Rentaro Makes a mistake in the Maze, trying to pass some of that Graham Energy. Nakaki is the character Minotaur, with a horn headpiece attached to a little he holds in his teeth. ) Between Nakaki and Kang it is a battle of will instead of blowing. The shapes they make are like a wooden, every movement defined, solid, economical; There is no visual noise. When Kang threw his leg straight to the ceiling, rotating his whole body, it was very important. But then the famous Graham contractions are running on torso like internal excitement. Some of the geometries are like Jazz Dance, but the context and the energy make it feel differently different.
On the side of the studio, the dancer Emily Suzuki practiced a step, her face was strongly focused. He simply turns away from facing the front to the side, but the resistance to the body needs to be exactly for it to work. “It’s like pulling in the same direction,” Maddux told him. “Maybe his mind or his heart wants to solve something, but he physically says no. It’s a very emotional internal dialogue.” This is not just one step on the side. These ideas are clear to see when you watch. The dancers’ faces do not betray the emotion, the point is that the dance makes it for you. “We are trying to cultivate a physical voice traveling and project far away,” Maddux said. “To use the movement to be able to crank the volume to your whole body.”
However, much is happening psychologically for dancers at the same time. “They have to do some deep emotional excavation,” Maddux said. But for Graham, the motion itself can give you the feelings you need to describe. “Something here is so deep that the fear states that the audience responds,” Maddux said. You are not “acting” emotions, he says: “You have to internalize it and then let it fall. I call it a can of soda, you know, shake it until …”
Having recently seen three different dancers in the main role in the task, what is interesting is that while Graham’s choreography is distinguished and certainly, every interpretation is a bit different. “It’s like an amazing paper for the top woman,” Watkin said. “It’s like a character, it’s like making a whole-length onegina or manon.”
Feeling high drama, Watkin admitted, may feel a bit dated. But, at the same time, the unique choreography is cut off. The designs are also noticeable, and dance integrally. A V-shaped sculpture by Isamu Noguchi for climbing the maze is like a portal or gateway the protagonist steps. In the iconic mourning, performed by the Yorke Dance Company, the dancer sat inside a stretch of cloth pipe. “You need to keep achieving the whole time,” Yorke-Edgell said, so that tension becomes a natural part of the dance. Graham designed his own costumes, such as the amazing -yellow, green and black striped clothes recently worn by the singer (and classical trained dancers) FKA Twigs to perform the 1932 piece of Graham’s Satyric Festival.
FKA Twigs said the opportunity to do Graham’s work was “like the winning of a Grammy”, so was the stellar power of his legacy. Why should we still watch Graham’s dance – and maybe even watching more – a century? “I think because there is purity in his technique,” Yorke-Edgell said. “It’s all back to humanity of his work,” Maddux suggests. Graham wrote in the blood memory of his memoir that the essence of dance was the scene of the soul. “I hope that every dance I do is showing something to myself or some amazing -a wonderful thing that can be someone,” he said. But I want another quote of him pointing to the powerful power of his art: “Dancers are the messengers of the gods.”
