"Movement never lies" and "Look for the truth." Legendary dance artist Martha Graham lived by these rules, which she learned from her father when she was a little girl. She used them to create the Martha Graham Dance Company, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary. To celebrate, the company is on an international tour.
Graham was a force in the dance world: a choreographer, founder of a school in addition to her renowned company, and a leading dancer herself. She was a diplomat and a rebel, a free-thinker and an "animal of discipline," as Mikhail Baryshnikov once put it.
In the early 20th century, when Graham founded her company, most people thought of dance as Swan Lake and Giselle.
"Decorative, escapist, imaginary princesses and swans and flowers," said Janet Eilber, a former member of the company and its current artistic director. "And she wanted to dance about real human beings, real human challenges."
Graham wanted to use dance to tell American stories, which at the time was a revolutionary idea, when so much of American cultural life was focused on Europe. The characters in her Appalachian Spring, for example, are Pennsylvania pioneers: women in bonnets and long dresses, a smitten young couple and a preacher. Created in the 1940s, with music by American composer Aaron Copland, it's a spirited ballet partly intended to inspire hope as World War II was coming to an end.
Graham knew the landscape well, having grown up in Pennsylvania coal country, which she described as "completely bleak" in her autobiography. She had to wear veils over her clothes to keep off the coal dust.
When she was 14, she and her family moved to California, traveling across the country by train. Graham was thrilled. She wrote in her book that her years there "became a time of light and freedom."
"This dichotomy influenced her works for the rest of her creative career," said Eilber. "The dark against light. The oppression against freedom. It's a theme that recurs over and over again."
"I always felt that I had an appetite for life, a great appetite," Graham told NPR member station WFUV in 1974. She said it was her father who laid the foundation for her artistic vision.
"I was looking in a microscope when I was four so that I could tell the difference between water that had wriggles in it and the water that was pure," she said. "And he taught me two laws which have proved invaluable to me. One was, 'You must look for the truth,' and the other is 'Movement never lies.'"
"Contraction and release"
Graham wanted to create dance that was authentic to the human experience. Her technique called for bare feet instead of pointe shoes and gestures that were more sinuous and earthy than classical ballet.
Eilber said she developed her technique by studying people and how their bodies responded to different situations.
"She realized that our emotions ride on the breath when we sob or when we laugh, it comes from an impulse in the center of the torso," said Eilber. "From that idea, she developed her famous contraction and release. The contraction being the exhale and the coiling-in of the spine in the torso, and the release being the inhale and the expansion of energy throughout the body."
Physically, Graham's technique is notoriously demanding. In her narration of this 1975 video, she explains the details of her technique as her company's dancers, including Janet Eilber, demonstrate.
In another film from 1957 called A Dancer's World, she talks about the hard work it takes to appear natural.
In 1930, Graham debuted Lamentation, a solo piece about grief that was unlike anything audiences were used to. The dancer, almost entirely encased in fabric, performs seated on a bench for the entire piece. She sways and bends and flexes her feet. When she moves, the fabric stretches into angular, abstract shapes. It's definitely not decorative.
Graham knew her style went against traditional beliefs about what dance should be. "Simply dreadful" is how one of her acquaintances put it. She wrote in her autobiography that people thought she was a "heretic" for being so emotionally raw on stage. Graham eventually created a work called Heretic about a nonconformist woman who is shunned by her community.
But many critics were entranced, and continue to be, calling Graham "fierce" and "intensely dramatic."
Actors like Bette Davis and Gregory Peck trained with her. So did Baryshnikov and Madonna. Graham represented the United States overseas, performed at the White House and received a Kennedy Center Honor.
One of her great gifts, said Eilber, was how she could read people, whether it was a dancer or a big donor.
"She was able to be, when she was in rehearsal with us, whatever she needed to be. Such a creature of the theater. She knew if you needed her to be a mother, if you needed her to be a flirt or a tyrant or, you know, whatever, in order to draw out of you what she wanted," remembered Eilber. "So that was true in the studio, in rehearsal, as well as if you happened to sit next to her at a fundraising dinner, she would often walk away with a big check."
Her charm, courage and creativity might explain why the Martha Graham Dance Company has endured for a century. Martha Graham died in 1991 at age 96.
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio story.
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