Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 2, 1991 TAG: 9104020611
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/6 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Graham, who died at home Monday of congestive heart failure, first danced at age 21 and performed until she was 76. She continued to choreograph ballets long after that in a career that embraced much of the 20th century.
Her works included "Lamentation" in 1930; "Primitive Mysteries" in 1931; "Letter to the World" in 1940, in which dancers enacted the life of Emily Dickinson; and "Appalachian Spring" in 1944, with music by Aaron Copland.
The most recent of the 180 works she choreographed was "Maple Leaf Rag," which had its debut Oct. 2 in New York.
Her early work was compared to Picasso's paintings and Stravinsky's music in its revolutionary impact.
Graham's technique was "on a par with ballet dancing, which took 400 years to develop," said ballet choreographer Agnes de Mille. "You have to go back to people like Michelangelo to get this kind of achievement."
Her students and dancers became stars, among them Pearl Lang, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor. But none surpassed Graham in the extent of her contribution to the uniquely American art form that broke from 19th-century classicism.
Graham, a thin, fragile-looking woman 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 '60s sexual revolution.
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."
Graham was born in Pittsburgh, a direct descendant on her mother's side of Miles Standish. Her father, a doctor, moved the family to Santa Barbara, Calif.
As a child, she saw Ruth St. Denis dance and was enraptured. But her father, a staunch Presbyterian, was said to disapprove of her desire to become a dancer. It was not until he died in 1916 that she entered the Denishawn School in Los Angeles.
There she studied with St. Denis and Ted Shawn, whose pioneering school offered instruction in Oriental and primitive techniques as well as ballet.
The tight corsets, straight-leg kicks and pointe work that were the rigid hallmarks of classical ballet were not for the theatrical Graham.
She preferred the uncharted terrain of human passions as translated in angular movements, flexed - not pointed - feet, controlled falling and jumping, and rhythmic "contraction and release" breathing.
Graham joined the Greenwich Village Follies in New York in 1923. In 1926, she made her debut as an independent artist with her own company, creating dances she said freed the body to "make visible the interior landscape."
Much of her early work was done in collaboration with her lover and longtime musical director, Louis Horst. "He liked anything that was physical, that had to do with the vivacity of the moment," she once explained.
Horst, who never divorced his wife, died in 1964.
"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."
Graham's close friend Liza Minnelli called her life a "celebration" of change. "For those of us who were lucky enough to call her a friend, she was an inspiration," Minnelli said.
Gian Carlo Menotti, who composed the music for her ballet "Errand Into the Maze," said Graham worked right up until the end, sending a telegram several weeks ago asking him to work on a new ballet.
In 1948 Graham married Erick Hawkins, a dancer in her troupe. The couple separated in the early 1950s and later divorced.
She leaves no immediate survivors.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
by CNB