
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 2, 1991                   TAG: 9104020321
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

DANCE INNOVATOR MARTHA GRAHAM DIES

Martha Graham, who turned the passions of the human soul into wildly original dances that made her an architect and high priestess of the modern dance movement, died Monday at home. She was 96.

She died of cardio-pulmonary arrest due to congestive heart failure, said Ross Alley, director of marketing with the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

A slim, fragile-looking woman who didn't dance until she was 21 but who performed until she was 76, Graham was viewed by many as the greatest contributor to the development in the 20th century of modern dance.

And her career embraced nearly the entire century. In October 1987, at age 93, she premiered her 177th dance - "Persephone," the story of the Greek goddess of the underworld that was choreographed to Stravinsky's "Symphony in C."

Her students and principal dancers became stars in their own right, but none surpassed Graham in the scope and intensity of her contribution to the uniquely American art form that broke away from 19th-century classicism.

"I loved Martha with all my heart for all those moments of pleasure and joy," said Mikhail Baryshnikov, who last danced in one of Graham's works in 1989. "She opened a whole new world, which will always be with me for the rest of my life."

Her early work was compared to Picasso's art and Stravinsky's music. Her later work earned her recognition as a choreographer.

The petite Graham, whose arched eyebrows, vividly painted mouth and tightly wound chignon gave her an appearance as dramatic as her stage heroines, created gripping depictions of lust, greed, jealousy, joy and love.

Sex and violence intermingled in her dances, which drew on such divergent sources as Greek mythology, the American frontier and a rebellion against her own puritanical heritage that was years ahead of the 1960s sexual revolution.

In an age dominated by science and technology, Graham's virgins, goddesses and madwomen disturbed and mesmerized audiences with raw emotion as they whirled across bare stages in bare feet to relentlessly dissonant scores.

"Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart," Graham once said. "The instrument through which the dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived . . . the human body."

by CNB