210 Resonate
Case Study: Martha Graham
Showed the World How She Felt
more than three hundred years, when it originated as an
elegant spectacle in the royal courts of Europe. Ballet
was a highly controlled dance form, characterized by
grace and precision of movement—but not freedom
of expression.
Graham was ready to discard traditional ballet. She
invented a revolutionary new language of dance, an
original way of moving with which she revealed the joys,
passions, and sorrows common to human experience.
In place of graceful soaring leaps through space, she
introduced stark, angular movements, blunt gestures,
and stern facial expressions as she sought to lay bare
fundamental human moods and feelings. Her dances
were meant to be challenging and disturbing.
15
This new kind of dance wasn’t to everyone’s liking, as it
was neither beautiful nor romantic. Graham was often
the object of ridicule and the butt of hostile jokes.
Women in America had won the right to vote only a few
years earlier, in 1920, and many people were still uncom-
fortable with the image of the “new woman” who sought
a career and voted. It was acceptable to be a high-
kicking, scantily clad chorus girl, but a woman who ran
a dance company and created works that commented
on war, poverty, and intolerance seemed unnatural
and suspicious.
16
She was protesting. Stark. And American. Some called
her ugly, others called her revolutionary. But Graham
was resolute in her desire to communicate how she felt.
Although primarily known as a dancer, Martha Graham
was also a powerful communicator. She developed char-
acteristics that anyone who aspires to become a great
presenter must cultivate and nourish. She stood out by
moving against the grain of society. She persevered in
spite of seemingly overwhelming obstacles. She fought
against and overcame her fears. She respected and con-
nected deeply with her audience. And she never held
back from communicating her deepest feelings.
Graham spent her life challenging what dance is and
what a dancer can do. She looked upon dance as an
exploration, a celebration of life, and a religious calling
that required absolute devotion.
13
Graham became a dancer against the odds. She grew
up in an environment where dance was frowned upon
as a career. When she finally began to study dance with
the idea of making it her profession, she was consid-
ered too old, too short, too heavy, and too homely to
be taken seriously. “They thought I was good enough
to be a teacher, but not a dancer,” she recalled. But she
knew what she wanted to do and pursued her goal with
the intensity that marked her entire life. Dance was her
reason for living. Willing to risk everything, driven by a
burning passion, she dedicated herself absolutely to her
art. “I did not choose to be a dancer,” she often said. “I
was chosen.”
14
To Graham, traditional European ballet seemed deca-
dent and undemocratic. Classical ballet dated back
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“There is a vitality, a life force,
an energy, a quickening that
is translated through you into
action, and because there is
only one of you in all of time,
this expression is unique. And
if you block it, it will never
exist through any other
medium and it will be lost.”
Martha Graham
Martha Graham
Dancer, Martha Graham Company
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212 Resonate
Graham believed that the secret, emotional world
made visible by a dancer’s movement could not always
be expressed in words. She wanted her dances to be
“felt” rather than “understood.”
17
Graham drew inspira-
tion from the ugly side of life and put it on display. Each
of her dances had a special significance to her, because
they expressed a fear she had conquered in her own life.
In 1930, Graham premiered a haunting solo dance of
mourning called Lamentation. www These rare photos
show her sitting on a low bench, wearing a tubelike
shroud with only her face, hands, and bare feet showing.
In the dance, she began to rock with anguish from side
to side, plunging her hands deep into the stretchy fabric,
writhing and twisting as if trying to break out of her own
skin. She was a figure of unbearable sorrow and grief.
She did not dance about grief but sought to be the very
embodiment of grief.
Graham recalled, “One of the first times I performed it
was in Brooklyn. A lady came back to me afterwards
and looked at me. She was very white-faced and she’d
obviously been crying. She said ‘you’ll never know
what you have done for me tonight, thank you’ and left.
I asked about her later and it seemed that she had seen
her nine-year-old son killed in front of her by a truck.
She had made every effort to cry, but was unable to.
But when she saw Lamentation she said she felt that
grief was honorable and universal and that she should
not be ashamed of crying for her son. I remember that
story as a deep story in my life that made me realize
that there is always one person to whom you speak in
the audience. One.”
18
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Change Your World 213
Graham moved in a way that gave anger and grief back
to her audiences. She had a genius for connecting move-
ment with emotion. She could make visible all those feel-
ings that people have inside them but can’t put to words.
Communicating in any medium is hard work. Graham’s
dances did not come easily to her. When the idea for a
new dance was starting to take form, it was “a time of
great misery.” Graham worked late into the night, propped
up in bed, writing down thoughts, observations, impres-
sions, quotations from books—anything that could help
feed her imagination. “I would put a typewriter on a little
table on my bed, bolster myself with pillows, and write
all night.”
19
She read widely as she searched for ideas and inspira-
tion, studying psychology, yoga, poetry, Greek myths,
and the Bible. Gradually, the ideas that filled her note-
books would begin to reveal a pattern, and she would
write out a detailed script.
20
In her work, Graham repeatedly portrayed a woman
called to a high destiny and forced to overcome fear
before she could answer the call. This was personal, as
Graham herself believed that she had been given “lonely,
terrifying gifts”—a sort of divine command to penetrate
the interior of the human spirit, no matter what comfort-
less truths she might find there.
21
In 1955, the U.S. government asked Graham to tour
major cities in seven countries as a cultural ambassador.
She gave lectures at each stop but was a very nervous
presenter. In the biography, Martha, author Agnes de
Mille describes the scene. “She hung onto the barre,
clung to the walls. She couldn’t think what to do with
her hands, with her robes, with her feet.” Finally, she
escaped into her dressing room and locked the door.
22
But Graham tried again and again, and she overcame her
fear. Eventually, the State Department officials named
Graham “the greatest single ambassador we have ever
sent to Asia.”
23
Until she was ninety, Graham continued to deliver
lectures, which she had developed into an art form. A
striking figure with a seductive voice, poetic insights,
and a faultless sense of timing, she learned how to hold
an audience spellbound.
24
You could say that by trying to discover herself, she
founded the world of modern dance. During her long
journey, she invented a new way of moving, a unique
dance language that has thrilled audiences all over the
world and enlarged our understanding of what it means
to be human.
25
All of us are unique. We each have our own pattern of
creativity, and if we do not express it, it is lost for all
time. Graham defied customs, broke through barriers,
and presented new ideas. She was loved and reviled, yet
persistent in overcoming her fears to communicate what
she felt in her soul. By remaining committed to commu-
nicating how she felt, she changed dance for all time.
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