Martha Graham

NAME Martha Graham

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer, widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. She revolutionized dance with her innovative techniques and is considered the “Mother of Modern Dance.”

BIRTH Martha Graham was born on May 11, 1894, in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (later to become part of Pittsburgh). She was born into the turn of the century industrial atmosphere that she would later remember as "spun entirely of evening and dark thread". (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Graham came from a 10-generation American family. Her father, Dr. George Graham, was a physician who specialized in mental diseases and nervous disorders—known in the Victorian era as an "alienist," an early form of psychiatrist. He was 15 years older than Martha's mother and was a third-generation American of Irish descent. 

Her mother, Jane Beers Graham, was a second-generation American of Irish, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry who claimed to be a tenth-generation descendant of Mayflower pilgrims. 

The family consisted of Martha, her parents, two younger sisters Mary and Geordie, and initially a brother William who died in infancy.

CHILDHOOD Martha was the eldest of the Graham daughters and grew up in a largely female household composed of her mother, maternal grandmother, and nanny Elizabeth Pendergrass. Elizabeth was interested in theater and helped fuel Martha's love of the arts by assisting the children in putting on plays. Martha's father taught her the fundamental principle that would guide her career: "Movement never lies. You will always reveal what you feel in your heart by what you do in your movement". This was, as Graham later claimed, her "first lesson as a dancer". The strict Presbyterian household provided discipline and self-restraint, which would later contrast with liberation through dance. 

When Martha was fourteen, the Graham family moved to Santa Barbara, California, for better air conditions due to her sister Mary's asthma. California became "a world of flowers, Oriental people, people with Spanish blood, a life completely different from our life in Pittsburgh. It became a time of light and freedom and curiosity". (1)

EDUCATION Graham attended the Cumnock School in Los Angeles

In 1911, at age seventeen, Martha attended her first dance performance, watching Ruth St. Denis perform at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. This experience was transformative: "From that moment on, my fate was sealed. I couldn't wait to learn to dance as the goddess did". (1)

In 1916, at the relatively late age of twenty-two for a beginning dancer, Martha began her formal dance education at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts in Los Angeles, founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. The school was the first professional dance institution in America that would produce a professional company. Graham remained at Denishawn until 1923, studying various dance techniques including folk, Asian, and Native American dances. By 1918, she had progressed to teaching at the school, and from 1919-1923, she performed with the Denishawn company.

CAREER RECORD 1923 Graham left Denishawn to become a featured dancer in John Murray Anderson's Greenwich Village Follies revue

1925 She was employed at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where she taught and experimented with new forms of movement.

1926 On April 18, 1926, Graham debuted her first independent concert at the 48th Street Theatre in Manhattan, consisting of eighteen short solos and trios that she had choreographed. This date marks the founding of the Martha Graham Dance Company, making it the oldest dance company still in existence in America.

APPEARANCE Martha Graham stood just five feet three inches tall, but her presence on stage made her seem taller, almost towering. Slender yet sturdy, her body was deceptively strong, capable of meeting the grueling demands of her groundbreaking technique. She carried an austere elegance, with intense, angular features that she used to project raw emotion. Her disciplined physique and penetrating gaze gave her an appearance at once gaunt, powerful, and unforgettable.

Martha Graham c 1940 by Los Angeles Daily News

FASHION n her personal life, Graham had a classic and elegant style. On stage, she revolutionized dance costuming, moving away from the elaborate, flowing gowns of ballet. Her costumes used simple, stretchy fabrics like jersey to reveal and enhance the movement of the body. 

Graham had a keen eye for costume design and personally designed many of the costumes for her company. Some of her most famous costume designs included the "tube dress" for Ekstasis (1933) and the iconic jersey body cover in her solo Lamentation (1930). She collaborated with renowned costume designers including Edythe Gilfond, who designed costumes for works such as Every Soul is a Circus (1939) and Deaths and Entrances (1953).

Later in her career, Graham worked with legendary fashion designer Halston, who designed costumes for her Rite of Spring (1984) and Tangled Night (1986). She also collaborated with Calvin Klein, who designed costumes for what would become her last fully-choreographed ballet, Maple Leaf Rag (1990). These collaborations demonstrated Graham's lifelong understanding of the power of costume to enhance and reveal the dancer's body in specific ways. (2)

CHARACTER Graham was known for her fierce determination, intensity, and demanding nature. Graham was a perfectionist and a singular artistic visionary who commanded complete respect from her dancers. She was often described as being emotionally complex, both a creative genius and a sometimes difficult individual.

SPEAKING VOICE Graham possessed a charismatic and alluring voice. Deep and resonant, it had a certain authoritative cadence that held her audience's attention during lectures and interviews. She was known for speaking while dancing, a training methodology she used in the classroom where she taught students to unite voice with movement.

SENSE OF HUMOUR While often stern and demanding, Graham displayed a sharp wit and sense of humor. She was known for her "bitingly funny" remarks and had a talent for memorable quips. When asked about female impersonators, she referenced Mae West: "I've never really warmed to the idea of female impersonators, but then I sort of have to agree with Mae West, who said, 'What's wrong with it? Women have been doing it for years.'" (3)

She also displayed wit when describing her approach to ballet: "At the time I started in ballet they were dancing 'The Spirit of Champagne' on pointe, in Paris. I thought, 'I don't want to dance the spirit of champagne, I want to drink it!'"

RELATIONSHIPS Graham's most significant romantic relationship was with Erick Hawkins, the first permanent male dancer in her company who joined in 1938. Hawkins, who was fifteen years her junior, married Graham on September 20, 1948, in New York City. However, the marriage was troubled from the start, with Hawkins later calling it "a dumb mistake" citing the age difference and Graham's "jealous fury" over his success. They divorced in 1950 after two tempestuous years, though Hawkins continued to work with the company until 1951. (5)

After their professional separation, Hawkins went on to marry experimental composer Lucia Dlugoszewski secretly in 1962. 

Erick Hawkins

Graham never remarried but maintained close relationships with many powerful women throughout her life, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ladybird Johnson, Betty Ford, and Barbara Bush. She also formed important friendships with female philanthropists including Bethsabée de Rothschild, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and Lila Acheson Wallace.

MONEY AND FAME Throughout her career, Graham faced significant financial difficulties despite her international fame. The Martha Graham Center repeatedly struggled with debt and financial crises. In 1990, the company faced a $1.8 million deficit that prompted an unusually long two-month layoff. After Graham's death, financial problems continued, eventually leading to the temporary closure of the school and company in 2000 due to a $500,000 deficit.

Throughout her career, Graham was more celebrated for her artistic vision than her commercial success.  She received numerous awards and became a revered figure, but financial stability was a constant challenge.

FOOD AND DRINK Like many dancers, she adhered to a disciplined diet to maintain physical fitness. She enjoyed occasional indulgences but remained committed to health-conscious eating.

Graham struggled with alcohol, particularly in her later years. During the late 1960s, as her dancing abilities declined, she began drinking heavily and sank into deep depression after retiring from performing. She described this period: "I lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded". However, she eventually stopped drinking and returned to choreographing, creating ten more complete ballets before her death. (6)

DANCING CAREER Martha Graham’s career in dance lasted more than seventy years, which is rather astonishing when you stop to think about it. She began in 1916 at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles, run by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, two of the great eccentrics of early American dance, who specialized in exotic pageantry and spiritual uplift. Graham quickly became one of their stars, all the while absorbing the seriousness of their artistic mission. After leaving Denishawn in 1923, she had a curious stint with the Greenwich Village Follies—where high art met sequins and feathers—before settling into teaching and experimenting in New York at the Eastman School of Music and the John Murray Anderson School.

By 1926, she had had quite enough of following other people’s rules and founded her own dance company at Carnegie Hall, giving America its very first modern dance troupe. Out of this sprang the Graham Technique, based on the deceptively simple ideas of contraction and release, which turned out to be every bit as demanding as it sounds. Over the next decades she created nearly 180 works, drawing inspiration from modern painting, the American frontier, religious ceremonies of Native Americans, and Greek mythology. Many of her most important roles portrayed great women of history and mythology: Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Medea, Phaedra, Joan of Arc, and Emily Dickinson.

She was not content to work alone, either. Graham collaborated with composers like Aaron Copland, artists like Isamu Noguchi, and even fashion designers like Halston, producing enduring pieces such as Appalachian Spring, Frontier, Clytemnestra, and Errand into the Maze. She officially retired from dancing in 1970—though “retired” in her case meant she merely stopped hurling herself about the stage and focused instead on choreographing and teaching. She kept at it until her death in 1991.

Her company, the Martha Graham Dance Company, remains the oldest modern dance group in the United States, and her technique is still taught worldwide. In short, she didn’t just influence modern dance; she more or less invented it, then spent a lifetime proving that invention never had to stop.

MUSIC AND ARTS Graham collaborated with many of the greatest composers and artists of her time. Her most famous musical collaborations included working with Aaron Copland on Appalachian Spring (1944), one of her most celebrated works. She also worked extensively with Louis Horst, who served as her accompanist and music director from 1926 to 1948. Other notable composer collaborations included Samuel Barber, Robert Starer, William Schuman, and Gian Carlo Menotti.

In visual arts, Graham's most significant collaboration was with sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who designed over thirty-five sets for Graham works. She also worked with lighting designer Jean Rosenthal and costume designers including the legendary Halston. Graham's interdisciplinary approach influenced and was influenced by artists across all genres, demonstrating her belief that creativity crossed artistic boundaries.

LITERATURE Graham drew extensively from literary sources for her choreographic works. Her notebooks reveal frequent references to T.S. Eliot, Carl Jung, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri. She was particularly drawn to Greek mythology and biblical texts, which formed the basis for many of her major works including Night Journey (based on the Oedipus myth) and Cave of the Heart.

Graham was also influenced by American poets, particularly Emily Dickinson, who inspired her ballet Letter to the World. Her connection to Walt Whitman's philosophy of physical expression and democratic ideals significantly shaped her conception of an American dance form that celebrated the body as a vessel for truth. She often quoted literary sources in her teaching and interviews, demonstrating her broad intellectual engagement with literature.

NATURE Graham had a profound connection to nature that deeply influenced her work and philosophy. Her technique was built on what she called "Earth-based imagery," cultivating a dual awareness of self and environment. She made the earth her touchstone and "reveled in the downward pull of gravity", in contrast to the airiness and elevation of ballet.

Her early work Frontier (1935) celebrated the American landscape and pioneer spirit, while Canticle for Innocent Comedians (1952) was described as her "great hymn to nature" and a work of "luminous strangeness" that paid homage to the elements—sun, moon, wind, Earth, water, and fire. Graham often used natural imagery and seasonal cycles in her choreography, viewing dance as a way to connect the human body to larger natural rhythms and forces.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Graham's life was almost entirely devoted to dance. She did not have any widely documented hobbies or interests outside of her work and her close artistic collaborations.

Graham admired physical fitness regimens such as those promoted by Joseph Pilates, whose method she practiced and recommended.

SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS Graham demonstrated a scientific approach to movement analysis and human anatomy. She developed an innovative anatomical approach to dance, integrating anatomic principles with movement to create safer dance practices. Her technique was built on careful observation of natural phenomena, including breathing patterns, muscular contractions, and the body's response to gravitational forces.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Graham's philosophical outlook was shaped by multiple traditions. Raised in a strict Presbyterian household, she later rebelled against Puritan constraints on physical expression and developed what she called a "physical morality" that celebrated the body as a vessel for truth. She was influenced by Nietzschean philosophy, particularly his concept of revaluation of values, which she applied to American Puritanism. 

Graham incorporated Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, and Zen principles into her work. She was deeply influenced by Jungian psychoanalysis and often explored themes of the unconscious mind in her choreography. Her spiritual philosophy viewed dance as "a gesture toward the truth" and dancers as "athletes of God". She believed that "movement never lies" and that the body was the ultimate expression of inner truth. 

POLITICS  Graham's early works from the 1930s, including Chronicle (1936), demonstrated strong political themes and anti-fascist sentiments, and she famously declined an invitation from Adolf Hitler to perform at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.   

Graham's political positioning evolved over time. In the 1930s, many of her peers were engaged in communist and leftist movements, and her works such as Immediate Tragedy and Deep Song (1936-1939) showed support for the Spanish Civil War. However, she generally remained distant from organized feminist social movements despite championing strong female archetypes in her work. 

Her work and career were deeply intertwined with American political and cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War, she and her company served as cultural ambassadors, performing in over thirty countries to promote American democratic values. 

President Gerald Ford awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Martha Graham, 1976

SCANDAL One of Graham's most controversial works was Phaedra (1962), which was so sexually explicit that the House of Representatives condemned it as pornographic. The scandal demonstrated Graham's willingness to push boundaries and address taboo subjects through dance.

After Graham's death, major scandals erupted over control of her artistic legacy. Her heir, Ron Protas, became embroiled in legal battles with the Martha Graham Center, leading to his designation as "the most reviled man in dance" by The New York Times. The disputes involved financial mismanagement, unauthorized disposal of company documents, and questions about the legitimacy of Graham's will. These controversies resulted in the temporary closure of the Graham Center and School in 2000.

MILITARY RECORD Martha Graham had no military service but toured with her company to perform for troops and in U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS  Graham's health was intrinsically linked to her identity as a dancer. She maintained extraordinary physical fitness throughout most of her life, continuing to perform until age 76. Graham was a devoted practitioner of Joseph Pilates’ “Contrology” method, which strengthened dancers’ bodies and aided recovery.  However, her later years were marked by declining health, including crippling arthritis that eventually prevented her from dancing.

During the late 1960s, Graham experienced severe depression and alcohol abuse following her retirement from performing. She described this period: "I lost my will to live. I stayed home alone, ate very little, and drank too much and brooded. My face was ruined, and people say I looked odd, which I agreed with. Finally my system just gave in. I was in the hospital for a long time, much of it in a coma". (6)

Graham eventually recovered from this crisis and stopped drinking, continuing to choreograph until her death. 

HOMES Graham's primary residence was in New York City, where she lived and worked for most of her career. From 1926, she worked from a small studio in Carnegie Hall. In 1952, she moved her operations to a studio on East 63rd Street, where she worked with her company until her death in 1991. This studio was demolished around 2000 to build a high-rise apartment house.

At the time of her death, Graham lived in her Upper East Side home, just a block away from the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. 

TRAVEL From 1955 to 1987, Graham and her company undertook numerous State Department cultural diplomacy tours during the Cold War, performing in over thirty countries across five continents. Her State Department tours included a significant 1955-1956 goodwill tour of Asia, visiting Japan, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Israel. These tours continued through 1987, covering over thirty countries across five continents during eight different presidential administrations.

Her final major tour was a 55-day journey throughout the Far East in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, which concluded at Christmas 1990, shortly before her hospitalization and death. Graham approached these international performances with the philosophy: "I'm not interested whether they understand or not. I am only interested if they feel it". (3) 

DEATH Martha Graham died on April 1, 1991, at age 96 in her Manhattan home on the Upper East Side. The cause of death was listed as cardiopulmonary arrest due to congestive heart failure. She had been hospitalized with bronchitis for ten weeks prior to her death, following her return from the Far East tour.

Graham died peacefully according to her longtime companion Ron Protas, who reported that "she was very comfortable and she went peacefully". At the time of her death, she was still actively working on choreographic projects. 

Martha Graham requested that there be no funeral service after her death. Her ashes were spread over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico according to her wishes.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Graham appeared in several significant documentary films that captured her philosophy and technique. The most notable include A Dancer's World (1957), a documentary featuring Graham discussing her approach to dance and philosophy, and The Dancer Revealed (1994), which explored her life and career through rare archival footage and interviews with collaborators.

She was featured in various television programs and interviews, including a famous 1963 onstage interview with dance critic Walter Terry at the 92nd Street Y. Graham was also the subject of Richard Move's performance piece Martha@... The 1963 Interview, which recreated her voice and mannerisms with extraordinary accuracy.

In print media, Graham appeared on magazine covers and was featured in major publications throughout her career. TIME magazine named her "Dancer of the Century", and she was frequently profiled in dance publications and mainstream media as a cultural icon.

ACHIEVEMENTS Founder of the Martha Graham Dance Company (1929).

Creator of the Graham Technique, still taught worldwide.

Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1976).

First dancer to perform at the White House.

Influenced countless dancers, choreographers, and artists.

Collaborated with major figures in music, art, and design.

Left a repertory of over 180 works.

Sources: (1) Google Arts & Culture (2) Mgdance (3) Dance magazine (4) Goodreads (5) Los Angeles Times (6) Late Fruit (7) Transtlantica