The Deity of Modern Dance Martha Graham: 1894-1991

By Martha Duffy

Martha Graham finally retired from the stage at 75, but the decision came hard. A philosophical friend suggested she must remember that she was not a goddess but a mortal. "That's difficult," Graham replied, "when you see yourself as a goddess and behave like one."

When she died last week, at 96, after a two-month battle with pneumonia, dance lovers -- from young members of her company to the thousands she trained and nurtured -- could hardly believe that she had succumbed to any physical weakness. She was the reigning deity of modern dance. If she did not invent it -- there are always forerunners in any movement -- she embodied it, propagated it, imposed a clear discipline and aesthetic on a new, inchoate art. By the 1950s she was the biggest dance celebrity in the country. She could inflame almost any audience, and she was a genius at dealing with donors and the press. Her personal flair -- her Easter Island mask of a face, her extravagantly theatrical wardrobe -- made her slightest gestures, onstage or off, indelible.

The hallmark of her choreography, as well as her performances, was fierce concentration and intensity. She went for the biggest, broadest gesture, the most vivid rage, the most startling image of love. What interested her was not the airiness and elevation of ballet. She made the earth her touchstone and reveled in the downward pull of gravity.

It was a revolution in motion equal to that of abstraction in painting. All modern choreographers are in her debt (some, like Merce Cunningham, because they rebel against her), but her influence goes beyond dance. Bette Davis, who called her "a straight line, a divining rod," learned how to fall down a flight of stairs in her classes; Richard Boone (Have Gun Will Travel) how to fall as if he had been shot. The kids who jazz-dance the night away are moving from the gut and the torso; those powerful thrusts began in her works.

She was born into a comfortable, 10-generation American family in Allegheny, Pa. (now part of Pittsburgh). Her father, a doctor, was a strong influence on her personality. He frowned on dancing, yet he once admonished her, "Martha, you must never lie to me, because movement never lies, and when I see your body I'll know you are lying." She never forgot that, and a passionate integrity drove her every gesture. Extravagant she might be, or austere, but never false.

Her early dance inspiration was surprising: Ruth St. Denis, who charmed audiences with free-form creations perfumed with the exoticism of the Orient. Entranced, Graham joined the Denishawn company, but left in 1923 to try Broadway dancing. By 1926 she had formed a group, which performed in New York. The masterpieces began to flow, as they would over several decades. There was a cluster of distinctively American works, such as Letter to the World, about Emily Dickinson, and the ever vernal Appalachian Spring. Though a quintessential modernist, she was attracted to doomed classical heroines: Clytemnestra, Medea, Alcestis, Phaedra.

In the '20s she began a long liaison with composer Louis Horst, who became her musical mentor. In 1948 she was briefly married to Erick Hawkins, a thrilling dancer who later founded his own enduring company. She never lacked for acolytes: Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who offered their classically trained bodies to her training, and the late designer Halston, who cosseted her and dressed her like the goddess she was in her later years.

In the studio she could be harsh. She spoke in a whisper that was louder than a shout. On occasion she laughed heartily at her students' efforts. "With Martha," Richard Boone once said, "you get it right away or jump out the window." Glen Tetley, a protege in the 1950s, went on to become a ballet choreographer. Just before his first major premiere, he developed crippling back spasms; no one else knew his role. Graham solved the problem. Spying him in a cafeteria, she walked over and slapped his face hard. "You stand up there and go out and dance," she commanded. "It was the shock I needed," says Tetley.

Her dancers worshiped her. Says Tetley: "It was like belonging to the most wonderful religious sect. With Martha you were not only training the body but opening the soul." Shelley Washington, who danced for Graham in the '70s, recalls some sources of her magic: "She was a fabulous storyteller -- there was such vitality and imagery."

After Graham stopped performing, she was still in the spotlight: marching on Washington to plead for government grants, attending fund-raising galas where she spoke mesmerizingly about her life. Her father became a regular player in these little monologues as she summoned up her childhood self riding beside him in the buggy while he made his rounds. Perhaps it was then that the seeds of an artistic revolution were sown, that the secret lies in an indomitable commitment to honesty in motion.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York