“I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements . . .I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.”Born in 1894 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Graham spent most of her formative years on the West coast. Her father, a doctor specializing in nervous disorders, was very interested in diagnosis through attention to physical movement. This belief in the body’s ability to express its inner senses was pivotal in Graham’s desire to dance. Athletic as a young girl, Graham did not find her calling until she was in her teens. In 1911, the ballet dancer Ruth St. Denis performed at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. Inspired by St. Denis’ performance, Graham enrolled in an arts-oriented junior college, and later to the newly opened Denishawn School. Denishawn was founded by Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn to teach techniques of American and world dance. Over eight years, as both a student and an instructor, Graham made Denishawn her home.
–Martha Graham
Working primarily with Ted Shawn, Graham improved her technique and began dancing professionally. In “Xochital”, a dance made specifically for her by Shawn, Graham danced the role of an attacked Aztec maiden. It was the wildly emotional performance of this role that garnered her first critical acclaim. By 1923, eight years after entering Denishawn, she was ready to branch out.
She found her chance dancing in the vaudeville revue Greenwich Village Follies. At the Greenwich Village Follies, Graham was able to design and choreograph her own dances. Though this work provided her with some economic and artistic independence, she longed for a place to make greater experiments with dance. It was then that she took a position at the Eastman School of Music, where she was free of the constraints of public performance. At Eastman, Graham was given complete control over her classes and the entire dance program. Graham saw this as an opportunity to engage her best pupils in the experiential dance she was beginning to create.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/martha-graham/about-the-dancer/497/
Martha Graham introduced a modern dance/contemporary technique of contraction and release, which is still practiced today. she had lots of great dance opportunities and training throughout her life to develop her technique and choreography, for example her work Ted Shawn, the Eastman School of Music, where she had the freedom to explore dance further in her own way. her choreographies often involve herself and her dancers oftem look like her, all have very similar faces and hair etc.
ReplyDeletethis is one of Graham's more famous pieces 'Lamentation' about pain, where we see Graham in a tube of materrial which is the main choreograpgic device.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb4-kpClZns