Watch Martha Graham perform 'Heretic'

Martha Graham's revolutionary approach to choreography

The dancer and choreographer created a uniquely American form of ballet that brought together stories from the country's history, abstract expressionism, modern psychological ideas, and collaborations with other major artists.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

Listen to an interview with Martha Graham from 1974

This interview, from the "Bernard Gabriel Views the Music Scene" program, features a candid conversation in which Graham discusses how her career did not take off until her 30s and how she learned to ignore criticism.

A step-by-step guide to the Martha Graham Technique

This BBC explainer walks you through Martha Graham's famous approach to dance, offering you six moves you can work into your exercise regiment—or Graham-inspired routine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Marina Abramović subjected herself to pain and humiliation in her ‘Rhythm’ series

The five performances, which included an invitation for the audience to use 72 objects as they pleased, helped put her on the map as a fearless artist, but they also caused her physical harm.

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.

Dada artists satirized the horrors of World War I

The movement’s early performances were absurd cabarets featuring experimental poetry, avant-garde music, and maskwork. Much of it was reckoning with the growing deathcounts of World War I, with work that often lampooned Western imperialism and supposed rationality.

The 1974 anarchist protest in Denmark that later inspired SantaCon

An interview with one of the participants explains what the performance art group that planned the event was hoping to achieve. Hordes of Santas walking down the street with a giant goose, attacking buildings with backhoes and pickaxes, handing out “presents” stolen from department stores, and eventually being arrested.

Dolly Parton danced with disco in the late 1970s

As disco grew more popular, more artists experimented with the genre, including through remixes. One of them was Dolly Parton, who released the “Dance With Dolly” EP in 1978, which remixed two tracks from her “Heartbreaker” album to make them more explicitly aimed at the dancefloor.

'SNL' parodied Liza Minnelli's showbiz persona

Kristen Wiig plays Minnelli in the skit, poking fun at the Broadway star's extravagance and onstage presence. Minnelli is unable to perform regular tasks without whipping out Fosse's dance moves.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

After her fellow cult members tried to kill her with an LSD-infused hamburger, one member of the Manson Family, the murderous cult led by Charles Manson, decided to testify against the group's leader.

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.'

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

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.

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

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

Explore chaos in this simulation of two double pendulums, where small differences in the release angles produce wildly different outcomes.

See photos of Meteora, a mountainous site in central Greece, home to 14th-century monasteries perched atop soaring outcroppings.

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

Watch contemporary footage covering the US-backed Shah of Iran fleeing the country in the face of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by more than 1.5 million Muslims each year.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

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

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

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 what it's like inside a patient isolation unit, used in situations such as treating a patient or suspected patient with Ebola.

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.