Martha Graham Research Paper

Dance, as an form of art and expression, can be claimed to be dated as far back as the origins of humanity. It is an innate and natural ability humans possess, and have always possessed. Throughout the long life of dance, countless individuals have contributed to its evolution, people from all over the world and thousand of different cultures. Each individual, renowned or not, who chooses to learn dance and change it to match their own artistic style and tendencies has shifted the dance world profoundly. Martha Graham did just this. As a dancer in the early years of modern, she forged a new technique to be used for decades later and allowed audiences to shift their expectations of what “true dance” is. Since childhood, it had been instilled

Dennis. Graham took the rebellion against ballet a step further by codifying and creating a new modern technique, the Graham technique, that continues to be taught to today’s dancers. According to her philosophy, movement is generated from three main places: the action of contraction and release, the pelvis, and the emotional inner self. The contraction, or strong pulling back and curving of the torso, and the release of this movement by returning to a straight torso are symbolic of the dichotomies in life. It is the contrast between desire and duty, between fear and courage, between weakness and strength. The repeated use of the contraction and release gives a rhythmic energy to the movements in this technique, and its execution is central to the seated, lying, and standing exercises of the training method. The contraction and release were both the basis for Graham's weighted and grounded style, which is in direct opposition to classical ballet techniques that typically aim to create an illusion of weightlessness. To counter the more percussive and staccato movements, Graham eventually added the spiral shape to the vocabulary of her technique to incorporate a sense of

Her goal was to give emotion and feelings back to her audiences and make them understand the movement to a deeper degree than simply action and shape. She had a genius for connecting movement with emotion. She could make visible all those feelings people have and cannot express in words or writings. One of her main goal as a choreographer was to emote an internal feeling through the movement of her body. In addition to her expressive face, she used dance to express how she felt as a woman in both small and large moments of daily life. For example, in her pieces "Deaths and Entrances," based on the work of the Bronte sisters, Graham stands tall and rigid to naturalistically portray a Victorian woman, then suddenly bends her knees and arches backward, allowing her torso to be parallel to the floor. She explained this illustrates how a woman feels when she sees an estranged lover at a party. For centuries, many women felt constricted both physically and emotionally. Graham not only moved in a way that was radical for women at the time, but did it to express her deepest