Martha Graham: Gender & the Haunting of a Dance Pioneer

By Victoria Thoms

Martha Graham’s name was internationally recognized as part of the modern dance world, and though trends in choreography continue to change, her influence on dance as an art form endures. In this book, the first extended feminist look at the modern dance pioneer, Victoria Thoms explores the cult of Graham and her dancing through a critical lens that exposes the gendered meaning behind much of her work. Thoms synthesizes a diverse archive of material on Graham from films, photographs, memoir and critique in order to highlight Graham’s unique contribution to the dance world and arts culture in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Aug 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783200924

Victoria Thoms

My research employs an intertextual analysis of the moving gendered body. Using a feminist cultural studies approach I read the dancing body across different interdisciplinary, geographic and historical matrices. This approach has led me to investigate specific women in the concert dance genre. I am presently working toward a monograph length intertextual reading of the work and life of Martha Graham.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Martha Graham as Ghost

Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham died on 1 April, 1991, at the age of 96, after an almost inexhaustible career as a dance artist of international repute. She was an unreservedly compelling performer with enormous personal and physical charisma. Even after her retirement, when she needed to be helped on stage during company curtain calls, she could still command waves of standing ovations with the simple flourish of her arm. Graham began her career with vaudeville in the late 1910s and when she died in New York, almost 80 years later, she was still the artistic director of a globally recognised dance company. She was also an immensely perceptive choreographer and the creator of a potent and unique dance language that continues to be taught throughout the world. Her impact on the culture of the twentieth century is inestimable. Like her contemporaries Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso, she forever altered the perception of her chosen art form. And like both Stravinsky and Picasso, her impact stretched well beyond the confines of this discipline into theatre, films, music, and popular culture.

Always considering herself a dancer above all else, she continued to create and perform compelling dance roles well into her 70s even while riddled with arthritis that turned her body into a shade of its former eloquence. Graham’s autobiography, Blood Memory (1991), movingly describes the devastation of this loss of physical eloquence, I miss the animal strength, the beauty of the heel as it is used to carry one forward into life. This, I think more than anything, is the secret of my loneliness (1991: 15). Yet she goes on to suggest that, even in the throes of ever-increasing physical disability, this failing body has a kind of timeless durability. The body, she suggests, holds in its memory all matters of life and death and love (Graham 1991: 4). This paradox captures the central concern of this book: the complexity of understanding and remembering bodies long after they cease to be. Therefore the book is set amidst the fading yet lingering apparitions of different bodies and different bodies of thought, arguing for the importance of understanding Graham as ghostly. The concept of haunting, derived from Derrida’s thinking on the Marxian legacy in Specters of Marx (1994) as well as other engagements with this conceptual theme (Thoms 2006, Buse and Stott 1999, Gordon 1997, and Spivak 1995) provide a way to analyse the tangled effects of Graham’s life and work. The Graham I theorise here is both solid and simultaneously fleeting, and this allows for a more complex appreciation of her extremely long and often complicated life as a woman and art producer.

Understanding Graham as ghostly allows a number of different perspectives. First, the body, as Graham so poignantly reminds us, is not made for permanence; and while the instability of the body poses problems for critical evaluation, the thinking here welcomes the temporary status of the body. Acknowledging the body as flimsy and unstable negates the desire to hold too tightly something that cannot entirely be captured while at the same time holding it long enough to theorise the forces that have given it its shape. The ghostliness of the body allows us to claim dance as a bodily form of cultural production that is precisely not stable while stressing its material political effects.

Furthermore, the body is fragmentary not only because of its physical impermanence but also because it is haunted by many different histories. It is burdened by the weight of numerous (and at times competing) ideological inheritances. The body is given multiple identities via the past; identities that are, amongst other things, raced, gendered, and classed. No one position or perspective can completely define the contradictory and intricate meanings circulating around Graham. Graham lived and produced work in a century that saw huge upheavals in political, social, and economic thought. Her accumulated history thus accrued many ghosts. Rather than attempt to exorcise the influences of these histories, the thinking here attempts to hold them in dynamic tension. Haunting allows recognition, no matter how precarious, of the multiple, conflicting, yet indispensable histories that lend definition to Graham’s life and art.

Moreover, if we acknowledge that understandings of the body in the present are troubled by understandings in the past, then history can no longer be thought an accounting of a dead past. Histories are alive and, although ghostly, live within us in the present. These histories live in the way that they inform the conditions that both constrain and enable the horizon of possibility in the here and now. In other words the present is a playing out of the histories of relations between bodies that shape the body’s ability to (using Graham’s words) hold in its memory all matters of life and death and love. One of the key aims of this book is to comprehend Graham’s past in order to argue for the importance and longevity of Graham’s future. Graham’s histories play a role in constraining or enabling both how we remember her and the continued engagement with the artistic material she set in motion. Understanding the past’s ghostly presence in the now allows us to deliberate and celebrate Graham’s futures.

Finally, this project emerged from a desire to celebrate Graham’s achievement as a woman but also to understand how her female identity influenced the things she did and the art she created. What did being a woman in the twentieth century mean for Graham? What did it allow her to do? Who did it allow her to be? Who did it allow her to love? And how does it still affect how we remember her today? To date there is no book-length study unpacking these questions. This book seeks to redress this omission by understanding how as a woman and artist Graham negotiated gender norms within specific yet shifting historical and social contexts. Examining these gendered forces is not straightforward. Graham was born into the last years of the nineteenth century and she lived into the last years of the twentieth. The way in which women’s identities changed over this expanse of time, as well as the different identities Graham herself inhabited during her life, make analysis particularly difficult. Haunting allows a means to interpret this influential artist’s life and work while at the same time acknowledging that no one history or identity has completely defined who she was, what she did, or the conflicting and intricate gendered meanings circling her.

Martha Graham

Graham came of age towards the end of the Victorian era and lived almost to the end of the twentieth century.¹ Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1894 into an affluent middle-class family, she was the oldest of three daughters, surviving a brother who died in infancy. Her father, George Greenfield Graham, was a medical doctor specialising in the emergent field of psychiatry. In her early teens the family moved to California where Graham was taken to see the celebrated concert dancer Ruth St. Denis. This event radically changed the course of Graham’s life. St. Denis so impressed her that Graham convinced her parents to allow her to attend the Cumnock School of Expression in Los Angeles, a junior college specialising in the performing arts.

In 1916, after graduation, Graham enrolled in Denishawn, the legendary dance school started by St. Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn, in Los Angeles a year before. Here she became both a teacher as well as a headlining dancer touring with Denishawn throughout North America and England. During this period of Graham’s life, the father whom she both rebelled against and revered passed away leaving herself, her mother, and two sisters without a significant means of living. Graham assumed a family leadership role, sustaining her mother financially until her mother remarried in 1927, and becoming the emotional centre of the family.

After breaking with Denishawn in 1926, Graham began a primarily solo career² in New York City with the help of her then lover and creative mentor Louis Horst. Her choreographic interests also expanded to include working with a devoted group of female dancers, who would themselves become visionaries in the history of modern dance.³ Graham’s breakthrough came with the apocalyptic Heretic in 1929 and coincided with the renaming of her artistic endeavours to ‘Martha Graham and Dance Group’. From this initial success Graham created seminal works such as Lamentation (1930), Primitive Mysteries (1931), Frontier (1935), Chronicle (1936), and Deep Song (1937) and would become a dominant influence in concert dance for most of the century, creating approximately 180 works⁴ over a period of six decades.

If Graham’s creative life was lengthy and prolific, it was also tumultuous, often resulting in her working to the point of mental collapse. Graham’s personal life was equally turbulent and whether this fuelled her creativity or caused the tumult is often a source of debate.⁵ In 1938, in the middle of her long-standing affair with Horst, Graham fell deeply in love with the ballet dancer Erick Hawkins. Within the year, Hawkins joined her company as its first male dancer and his romantic and creative relationship with Graham stimulated one of her most productive and successful periods as a choreographer and a performer. During this time she created master works of Americana such as American Document (1938), Letter to the World (1940), and Appalachian Spring (1944), as well as perfecting her reinterpretation of classical mythology with Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), and Night Journey (1947).⁶ Graham and Hawkins married in 1948 but the marriage collapsed with great bitterness in 1950 during the company’s first European tour. Graham never seemed to fully recover emotionally from this estrangement.⁷

Graham’s work in the 1950s and 1960s reached its zenith of influence with several lengthy and hugely successful international tours. Graham also created what is considered her magnum opus, Clytemnestra (1958), the only evening-length work in her oeuvre, where at the age of 64 she portrayed the queen of Troy. Despite success, her progressive physical decline damaged her self-identification as a dancer, leading to alcoholism and depression. Increasing pressure to retire from the stage also precipitated her anxiety. Contractual agreements finally forced her to retire as a dancer in 1970. This led to a mental and physical collapse that Graham was not expected to survive.

Graham did recover and moved to the role of choreographer for her existing dance company, enabling it once again to flourish. Yet this period was not without continued personal and artistic controversy. During her convalescence Graham developed a deep friendship with Ron Protas, a former law student turned freelance photographer. She began to promote Protas as an artistic advisor above people who had been working with her for more than two decades. In addition to this he subsequently served for almost 20 years as Graham’s live-in personal assistant and official representative in all company and school business. Consequently, at her death in 1991, Protas was named her sole heir.

Ten years later, Protas brought a number of lawsuits forward against the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, for trademark and copyright infringement respectively. These court battles ruled against Protas and re-established the Center’s entitlement to Graham’s dance legacy.⁸ However, a consequence of this confusion, which included the disbanding of the Graham Company in 2002, is that things have been difficult for the Graham organisation. It continues to rebuild with former Graham principal dancer Janet Eilber at the helm as its artistic director.

In summary, Graham lived a long, significant, and turbulent life. Her lifespan allowed her to experience momentous events that altered America and the world. Born into the Progressive Era, with its increasing industrialisation and mass immigration, she lived through World War I, the 19th Amendment extending suffrage to women, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War McCarthy witch-hunts, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Vietnam War. Graham died two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time her influence on the founding of modern dance as an important and worthy form of art was immeasurable. Graham not only developed her own distinctive artistic signature but also stimulated the work of other significant choreographers and performers. This list could well be endless but might include Alvin Ailey, John Butler, Robert Cohan, Merce Cunningham, Mark Dendy, Jane Dudley, Jean Erdman, Erick Hawkins, Pearl Lang, Sophie Maslow, Donald McKayle, Richard Move, May O’Donnell, Anna Sokolow, Glen Tetley, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Taylor, and Yuriko. Additionally, through her influence with dance educators such as Martha Hill, Bonnie Bird, Gertrude Lippincott, Bessie Schönberg, and Gertrude Shurr, dance has become an integral part of various national curricula as well as a legitimate university discipline in its own right. Throughout her life, Graham also received a number of significant awards, including the Dance Magazine Award and the Capezio Dance Award. Yet it was receiving tributes like the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kennedy Center Honours, the Aspen Award in the Humanities, the Medal of Freedom, and the Legion of Honour that indicate her widespread renown and the importance of her achievements in the twentieth century.

Previous research reflecting on Graham’s life and achievements has focused on either detailing her life in biography form or in reminiscences of former Graham dancers (see Bell-Kanner 1998, Freedman 1998, Bird and Greenburg 1997, Tracy 1997, de Mille 1991, Stodelle 1984, Terry 1975, and McDonagh 1973). These works are invaluable for their documentation of Graham but remain firmly in the genre of biography. There have also been investigations into the development of her dance training technique (see Bannerman 1999, Helpern 1999, 1994, Horosko 1991). This work is also crucial but, like the biographies, remains primarily documentative.

A number of scholars have undertaken important critical re-evaluations of Graham. These include Geduld (2008), Bannerman (2006), LaMothe (2006), Manning (2004), Reynolds (2002), Morris (2001), Banes (1998), Burt (1998a, 1998b), Graff (1999), Power (1999), Franko (1995), Thomas (1995), Corey (1990), and Siegel (2001; 1985), who have all taken up the topic of Graham from intertextual critical perspectives. This recent research though has not focused solely on Graham, taking place rather in journal articles or chapters in monographs or edited collections that concentrate on a broader discussion of the political dimensions of concert dance. Importantly, of the above engagements, Banes, Burt, Corey, Franko, Power, and Siegel make a gendered analysis or draw on feminist theory in critically assessing the dimensions of Graham’s life and work. Although this is a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist scholarship, this book-length project,⁹ devoted to a feminist discussion of Graham, draws attention to the significant influence that her identity as ‘woman’ had for her conditions of possibility.

In using the concept of haunting to examine the changing values and privileges attached to Graham’s identity as woman and art producer, this project appreciates recent research in dance studies that has sought to rediscover and re-evaluate the histories of American modern dance (Chatterjea 2004, Manning 2004, Jackson 2000, Graff 1999, and Tomko 1999). In her review of the spate of publications following Graham’s death, Lynn Garafola calls for a different way of exploring the dancer. She writes,

first the decks must be cleared. Even more than new research, what is needed is fresh thinking. The old assumptions no longer serve, nor the old hagiographies that once passed muster as history. A new history must be written, a history as brave, bold and daring as the dances of her prime.

(1993: 172)

Taking Garafola’s injunction seriously, this book immerses Graham in the politics of gender, using the concept of haunting to examine the changing and ongoing values attached to her identity as woman and art producer.

Searching for Graham: Finding Ghosts

I met Graham briefly in her dressing-room, but awe confined me to monosyllables. I had read too many daunting things about her: that in more than one way she resembles Nefertiti (de Mille), that her beauty was of a formidable sort, enigmatic, ambiguous and her face an unnaturally motionless mask (Bentley). My own first impression was of a woman who looked forty and might be four hundred, and combined the salient physical qualities of Helene Weigel as Mother Courage and Beatrice Lillie as Kabuki Lil.

Kenneth Tynan (1989: 175)

As the English writer and critic Kenneth Tynan indicates above, defining Martha Graham is a particularly daunting prospect. Indeed, trying to understand Graham summons many ghosts. The circumstances and length of Graham ’ s life and the character of her work itself have undeniably produced an immense and confusing mixture of myth and fact. This mess obscures our attempts to understand her, producing instead half-formed shadows. Furthermore, the fragmented character produced by such a long life and artistic oeuvre is further tangled by the consequences of how her life and work have been represented and archived—ghosts who in their only partial being further confuse our understandings of her.

In her book on the celebrated American dance-educator Martha Hill, Janet Mansfield Soares (2009) begins by saying that when Hill finally entertained the idea of an autobiography her much practised stories had taken on a kind of inflexible veneer. In this context Soares perceptively writes, [i]t has been said that women are impossible biographical subjects because their lives are full of secrets (2009: xii). Graham, a colleague and contemporary of Hill, was no less practised in hiding secrets through gloss and artifice.¹⁰ Indeed, Graham was notoriously cagey and controlling. Her friendships with the dance critic Walter Terry and the choreographer, writer, and performer Agnes de Mille cooled substantially when Graham found out they were doing biographies of her. Graham’s treatment of the dance journalist Don McDonagh was even more severe. According to McDonagh (2008), when she found out he was writing a book about her, Graham threatened to ostracise anyone that talked to him about her. When asked in an interview why he thought she did this, McDonagh replied in a resigned manner, She wanted control of the product (McDonagh 2008). Graham’s fanaticism around the circumstances of her private life is furthered in a claim made by de Mille that Graham went to Horst’s apartment immediately after his death, and retrieved and destroyed the letters she had written to him.¹¹ Similarly in 1966 LeRoy Leatherman wrote that [t]here is good reason to believe no definitive biography ever will be written. An invaluable cache of source materials, every letter she had ever written to her mother, and she had written at least once a week from the time she first left home, Martha burned (1966: 33).

Graham’s autobiography Blood Memory (1991)—the assumed definitive telling of her life—is in some ways more incomplete than her many biographies.¹² In her review of the work in 1993, Lynn Garafola suggests that the autobiography might not have been written entirely by Graham.¹³ When reading Blood Memory one gets a sense that Graham’s words were actually spoken and transcribed later. The spoken feel of this work could be attributed to a precedent established in the late 1960s by Graham’s literary agent at the time, Lucy Kroll. According to Kroll, the well-known New York literary and talent agent, Graham began taping her autobiography interview-fashion with Kroll as interlocutor as early as 1968. This suggests that Graham acquired the habit of ‘speaking’ her life but also that she could have ‘begun’ her autobiography much earlier—at a point in her life where she may have seen things quite differently.¹⁴ These early tapes were surrendered to Ron Protas after the threat of legal action in 1975.¹⁵ Additionally much of the beginning of Blood Memory is pieced together from prior sources like published interviews and articles written by Graham.¹⁶ Blood Memory certainly confounds any straightforward designation of the authenticity, time, and/or place of ‘authorship’.¹⁷

Furthermore as a number of critical thinkers¹⁸ have indicated, autobiography, assumed to be the definitive and final telling of a life, engages in active forgetting and dynamic self-creation. Autobiography is therefore partial in both meanings of the word, equally biased and incomplete. For dance autobiography, attempting to articulate the creative force of bodily self-knowledge further exacerbates this sense of incompleteness: a knowing whose communication varies considerably in kind to that of the written and spoken word. As I have argued elsewhere (Thoms 2008), Blood Memory is not only haunted by the possibility of an unstable authorship, but also by the ‘autobiography’ created by Graham through her dancing, a bodily form of self-production and self-creation that cannot entirely be recorded in words.¹⁹

The difficulty of grasping the dancing past is further illustrated in the representational form that dancing takes. Dance representations (performances, lecture-demonstrations, class workshops) are intermittent and not made to be easily seen again; witnessing the representation is dependent on being in a performance venue at a prescribed date and time, with a limited run of performances. Additionally they are singular and idiosyncratic in character. Each performance is potentially quite different (different casts, different audiences, different performance dynamics), even though the same choreography is performed. This leads to a phenomenon where, even if the performance event were to be easily viewed, the composition of the performance, while nevertheless a repeat, might be substantially different.

With the development of recording systems such as Labanotation and Benesh Notation, as well as the increased ease of video and photographic documentation in the latter half of the twentieth century, the recording of concert dance in notated and visually reproducible forms has become far more robust. Yet this kind of documentation of history also proves elusive. In the case of filmed or photographed dance, there are usually only a few, select, recorded instances of specific works. This runs the risk of interpreting the recorded copy as the definitive representation of a piece of work, which can erase whole histories of a work and the people who contributed to its performance. Revealingly, early Graham-dancer Bonnie Bird (Bell-Kanner 1998) notes that one of the things she most regretted was not participating in the series of photographs Barbara Morgan made shortly after her departure from Graham’s group in 1937. Bird’s regrets notwithstanding, her example tellingly demonstrates the way that photographic and filmic dance documentation can obscure the influences of a work that might have been performed extensively over several years, through different periods in history, by different raced and gendered casts and in different geographical locations.

Graham on film is particularly obscure. She very rarely appeared on camera dancing in her prime. While there are a few instances of Graham performing on film in the 1930s and 1940s,²⁰ a sustained and well-filmed example of her performance quality and interpretative approach can only be witnessed²¹ from work that was mostly filmed in about a ten-year period between 1958 and 1969 when Graham was in her 60s and 70s (explored further in Chapter 4).²² A number of filmed documents exist of the Graham Company dancing the repertory and, after Graham’s retirement, increasingly featured interpretations of her role by other women in the company. While these alternative performances allow us to witness interpretations of Graham’s roles by dancers in their prime, they also remove us further from an understanding of Graham in performance.

Moreover these later filmed records are themselves less than clear or complete. Several recorded for television Dance in America programmes filmed in the 1970s and 1980s²³ do provide useful recordings of Graham’s works. Also in the 1970s, the Jerome Robbins Film Archive made several important filmed documentations of Graham’s works, performed in rehearsal and mainly in rehearsal clothing.²⁴ Yet much of the footage collected as part of a documentation project that the Graham Company undertook, funded by a special National Endowment for the Arts grant running from 1984 to 1987, was filmed solely by placing a stationary camera at the back of thousand-plus-seat theatres where the dancing on stage was greatly obscured.²⁵ Additionally, much of this work is only held in specialist libraries and archives. In what seems a detailed and exhaustive report on the Graham film archive and its availability, Virginia Brooks writing in Dance Magazine in 1991, ends saying that [t]here is no doubt that the importance and impact of Graham’s technique and choreography will survive in moving images and thrive in the living world (1991: 63). Writing just after Graham’s death, Brooks is both nostalgic and commemorative. Yet what her comment belies in its optimism is the confused and inaccessible state of the Graham’s film archive. The disordered, partial, even haunted state of the collection is demonstrated in Brook’s carefully worded, elaborate, and even obsessive detailing.²⁶

Notation systems, while providing a useful means of recording and preserving dance works, also have representational limitations. From as early as the Renaissance there have been systems for notating dance. However Labanotation and Benesh Notation systems emerged in the twentieth century with the intention to generate a more accessible, exact, and distributable record of the dance event. Labanotation, for instance, sprang from a form of scoring dance that was conceived by Rudolf Laban in the 1920s and expanded both in post-WW II Germany²⁷ and in the 1940s at the Dance Notation Bureau in New York City.²⁸ Unlike film as a form of documentation, a Labanotation score includes a number of different components that contribute to its preservative and documentative effect. It incorporates not only a notated score of the work that, similar to musical notation, features a staff-like grid that uses symbols to indicate things such as specific bodily movement as well as force and direction, but also a written historical and contextual explanation and, when possible, a filmed example of the work.

Moreover as Ann Hutchinson Guest (1984) points out, what the notated score also achieves is a representation of the work itself: it is as the choreographer wanted it performed and not a performance interpreted through the personal style of the dancers and translation of an artistic director. Nevertheless, the ability of the notation score to fully represent the entirety of the dance work begins to unravel in a number of ways. The very proliferation of different types of representations that accompany a notation score indicate that there is no one definitive means of representing it. While these adjuncts to the notated score are intended to help achieve a greater clarity and exactness, their very presence in the reconstruction process indicates that no one form of accessing the work can represent that work fully. While Hutchinson Guest (1984) is quick to argue that notation allows for a much more nuanced record of movement than does film, she also is clear that the score can never completely capture the essence of the original work. The score is intended as a record that is available for interpreters to reinterpret. In this case there is no recording system that can fully represent the ‘original’ version.

Graham’s original intentions captured in a Labanotation score are also particularly illusive. First, of her massive choreographic legacy, the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) presently only holds 11 (some only partially notated) Graham dances. Of these, only six works were notated or partially notated prior to her death. None of the works notated during Graham’s lifetime were created during their initial conception but notated during various reconstructions by the company. The other scores were undertaken after her death.²⁹ Indeed the quest for original intentions is most elusive in the scores created after Graham’s death in 1991. For instance, the DNB’s notating of Primitive Mysteries in 2007 during a reconstruction headed by Yuriko Kikuchi at Southern Methodist University, while extremely important as a recorded version, cannot be considered to be the ‘original’. As explained in Chapter 2, Kikuchi’s supervision of this reconstruction lends it an impressive pedigree. However Kikuchi was not a member of the initial 1930s group that originated Primitive Mysteries, but rather learned her role in the chorus for a 1944 retrospective performance of the work. Furthermore, even if the work is notated at the time it is originally conceived, one must also take into consideration the fact that notators will interpret the intention of the choreographer in a