Martha Graham's revolutionary approach to choreography

How Martha Graham challenged ballet's rigidity

Ballet prized lightness, but Graham's choreography emphasized weight. This essay explores how her work broke from European influences to embrace American idioms, much as her American contemporaries in jazz and literature did.

A visual biography of Martha Graham

This history of the modern dancer's life uses archival photos and videos to illustrate how Graham's childhood, especially her upbringing by a psychiatrist and her early dance performance, set the stage for her career.

Watch Martha Graham perform 'Heretic'

The 1929 piece features Graham in white, expressively dancing on her own, flanked by 12 dancers in black who follow a more rigid choreography. Some critics have argued the piece was an allegory for Graham's rebellion against ballet's strict traditions.

The Martha Graham Technique, explained

It's considered the first codified modern dance technique and a foundational pillar of American dance. In this 1975 instructional film, its namesake explains how the Graham Technique works. "As you can see," she notes, "the body is capable of almost endless variations and combinations once it is trained."

View a gallery of vintage photos of Martha Graham's performances

Graham's choreography was as visual as it was physical, complemented by the modernist set design of Isamu Noguchi. That's on display in this collection of artful photos from classic productions of shows like "Night Journey" and "Appalachian Spring."

Exploring Martha Graham's 'love of the body'

The innovative choreographer encouraged her dancers to tune into their bodies' natural movements. According to Dr. Kimerer L. LaMothe, author of "What the Body Knows," that kind of mindfulness made them better able to communicate a piece's symbolic meaning.

Martha Graham on preparation and discipline

This clip from the 1957 documentary "A Dancer's World" features the dancer explaining why she's committed all of her energy to her art. "Spontaneity … is something arrived at over years and years of training," she says, "it is not a mere chance."

How the Martha Graham Company experiments with technology

The dance company was the first major group to livestream rehearsals and has collaborated with Google on a version of Graham's "Lamentation" that superimposes past performances on the present-day dancer.

Martha Graham's philosophy of creativity

The influential choreographer and dancer once said that creative people will never be satisfied with their work. Instead, "There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

Listen to the last-known interview with Martha Graham

Reporter Michael Small interviewed the influential choreographer and dancer in 1989 for People magazine, two years before she died, and features the 95-year-old looking back on her life and career. If you want to skip ahead to the raw audio, jump to 26:40.

The Martha Graham Dance Company was the first integrated Broadway dance company

In 1951, Graham hired Mary Hinkson and Mattie Tierney, two Black dancers who started in the company's dance corps and eventually took on lead roles in productions. The move broke color barriers that were the norm for the time.

How Martha Graham's 'Rite of Spring' imposed order on chaos

Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is famously chaotic, making it an odd choice for Graham's highly precise style. Her 1984 choreography for it, however, redefined how people saw the ballet's score. Graham's version is still performed today; below is an excerpt from a 2018 performance by the Paris Opera.

Why the US State Department sponsored Martha Graham Dance Company tours

The Graham company toured the globe several times on cultural exchange campaigns throughout the 1950s. Some believe that the Graham Company, in particular, was chosen because it was the first integrated dance company in the US, thereby countering international perceptions of American segregation and racism.

Watch Martha Graham perform 'Lamentation,' an influential piece on grief

Graham choreographed and performed the piece about grief, which premiered in 1930. The dance is performed while seated, with Graham's character attempting to free herself from an all-encompassing purple jersey.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Unpacking 'Night Journey,' Martha Graham's take on a Greek myth

The dance piece was inspired by the story of Oedipus, as well as by more contemporary psychoanalytic theories from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. This JSTOR article explores how Graham's show merged those texts with her singular approach to movement to explore gender and identity.

Watch a performance of the influential ballet 'Appalachian Spring'

This performance of the American ballet—choreographed by Martha Graham, with music composed by Aaron Copland—about a small community in 19th-century Pennsylvania, aired in 1959 on Pittsburgh's WQED.

Watch Helen Keller visit Martha Graham's studio

The two women were friends, and Keller eventually visited Graham's studio while her company was rehearsing. In this footage of that encounter, Graham shows Keller the shape of her choreography.

Martha Graham refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics

Graham turned down an invitation to perform at that year's Summer Games in Berlin, citing the Nazi regime's persecution of artists and implying that Jewish members of her company would not be welcome. "Chronicle," a work about the rise of fascism, debuted in New York the following December.

Exploring Oskar Schlemmer's 'Triadic Ballet,' a Bauhaus-inspired performance piece

The "symphonic dance of threeness" brought together Bauhaus' varied artistic interests and offered a fable in which collectivism wins. This history and timeline of the work details its origins as well as its near-destruction at the hands of the Nazis, who considered it profane.

Marina Abramović helped popularize performance art

Working across continents for over five decades has made Abramović one of the most recognizable and prolific performance artists in history. Her shocking oeuvre has involved self-harm, public nudity, exotic animals, and fire.

American modernism highlighted a rapidly changing America

Featuring work from 1915 to 1950, the movement illustrates the country's evolution between World War I and World War II. Artists captured the loss and uncertainty of a post-war, industrialized world.

Guerilla warfare was a significant part of the success of the Americans

Francis Marion, also known as the Swamp Fox, was a Patriot general who used guerrilla warfare tactics in the Carolinas during the Revolutionary War’s southern campaigns. Also called “maneuver warfare,” the approach focuses on disorienting the enemy and exploiting their weaknesses while avoiding their strengths.

Bossa nova had its own dance, though it was short-lived

American record executives hoped to create a social dance for the song, believing it would lead to more record sales, as had been the case with Chubby Checker's "The Twist." That led several well-regarded dance studios to attempt to create a dance, though none caught on like "The Twist" had.

Senda Berenson Abbott revolutionized women's basketball

In the late 1800s, college physical education programs were used to prepare post-Victorian Era women for the workforce. In 1890, Smith College built one of the country's largest and most well-equipped gyms and hired Senda Berenson to run its activities, which she did by revising basketball's rules so women could play while still meeting societal expectations.

Basquiat helped move graffiti from the streets to the galleries

He took graffiti's aesthetics—cryptic slogans, bold colors, and repurposed iconography—and placed them on his canvases, helping to create what some called "post graffiti." These short documentaries, produced in 1982 and 1983, capture the nascent movement as it emerged in the mainstream art world.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Explore an interactive map of battles from the American Revolution, along with detailed summaries of each engagement

In recent years a child anxiety expert has created and tested a novel phobia and anxiety treatment approach for children, focused on changing how parents respond to the fears.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Venture capital is a form of funding provided to early-stage companies with high growth potential, typically in exchange for an equity (or ownership) stake

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.