She was born in
Allegheny, Pennsylvania, a small town that is now part of
Pittsburgh. Her father George Graham was what in the
Victorian era was known as an "alienist" or a doctor of nervous disorders, which was an early form of
psychiatry. The Grahams were strict
Presbyterians. Martha's father was a third generation
American of Irish descent and her mother a tenth generation descendant of
Myles Standish. As a doctor's family the Graham's had a very high standard of living. Dr. Graham often brought his wife strawberries in the winter at a time when they were very hard to come by. The Graham children were looked after by a live-in Irish maid. They were a proper family at the upper echelon of Pittsburgh society. While the social status in which she was raised contributed to her level or education and her exposure to art, her family's status largely worked against her as the eldest daughter of a prominent Presbyterian doctor would be strongly discouraged from considering any career in the performing arts.
Though her father was a man of science, he was also
theatrical, often playing music and singing for his children. Martha was the eldest daughter in the family and a willful child. When she got in trouble once with her father he asked about what she had done and Martha lied to him. But he read her body language and knew she was lying to him. He told her, perhaps apocryphally, "Movement never lies." It would be a catechism she would repeat throughout her life.
When Martha was fourteen years old, her family left the often cold and sooty
Western Pennsylvania and moved to
Santa Barbara, California on account of Martha's sister Mary's respiratory condition. The Graham family traveled cross-country by train. The seemingly infinite expanses of the Midwest made an impression on young Martha and would later inform such works as "Frontier". Santa Barbara was a wonderland of sunshine, oak trees and flowers, a significant contrast from where they had come, which provided a strong stimulus to the Graham children.
When Martha was sixteen years old, she saw a poster for a dance performance by
Ruth St. Denis in
Los Angeles, and she begged her father to take her. He complied. In her
autobiography, Blood Memory, Graham recalled that her father bought her a bouquet of violets from a
Japanese flower vendor outside of the theater. The performance was a revelation to her, and she decided on the spot that she would devote her life to dance. This did not go over well with her parents. The world of dance was not a proper pursuit for the daughter of an upstanding
physician, let alone a Presbyterian. But something she saw on that stage in Los Angeles struck a chord within her. Graham was undaunted.
The prevailing style of dance in the early
20th century United States was an odd mixture of fledgling influences. Ballet had been well-established for centuries in Europe and translated fairly well for American audiences. But American dance also drew on a range of other styles and less formal influences including tribal dance, folk dances, burlesque, vaudeville, fantasy, acrobatics, and others. In contrast to high-brow European ballet, American dance was seen as more exotic, popular entertainment and not a form of high art.
But Martha was in the right place at the right time. It was Californian
Isadora Duncan who began to redefine the concept of American dance and developed a platform upon which the art form could step beyond itself to something richer and more complex. Many of her dances had a naturalistic style, reminiscent of plants and flowers, with women dressed in gauzy, flowing dresses who pranced about the stage
in bare feet. Duncan drew upon Greek Mythology for her influences. Simultaneously in California, another dance pioneer, Ruth St. Denis, worked along parallel lines, though she drew upon Asian, Egyptian, Mexican, and Native American influences. Both Duncan and St. Denis took the first steps in building the foundation of what Graham would do later. However vital their influences were to Graham's development, their progress in the field was incremental whereas Graham's would be revolutionary.
As soon as Martha had completed high school she was enrolled at the Cumnock School, a junior college where she could study liberal arts as well as the arts. In 1916, at the age of twenty, Martha enrolled with the Denishawn Dance School, studying under Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. She was told that she was too old to begin to dance and that her body did not have the correct build for it. But she persevered. Martha proved to be a quick study with an impressive attention to detail and she worked incredibly hard to train her body to great precision.
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1920s===
She toured with their company for years before she moved to
New York City in 1923 . She lived in
Greenwich Village and had some success as she danced on
Broadway with the Greenwich Village Follies. She was able to make an impressive sum of money but she was dissatisfied. At the age of thirty she accepted a teaching position at the Eastman School of Music in
Rochester, New York, where she directed a newly formed dance department. She enjoyed having her own students to teach but she chafed against the limits and the bureaucracy of the school. She returned to New York City and began to teach dance out of a classroom in the back of
Carnegie Hall. During this time she began to choreograph some of her earliest dances. On
April 18, 1926, she gave the first performance of her very own dance company. This was an important milestone for the young dancer but even she recognized her early performances as derivative of her work with Denishawn. As she continued to choreograph her dances increasingly became her own, each one pushing herself and the art form further. With early dances such as "Revolt" (1927) and "Fragments" (1928) Graham found her voice. But her breakthrough was in 1929 with "Heretic", in which Graham appeared as a sole dancer dressed in white facing a wall of opposing dancers dressed in black with a simple, stark Breton song pounded out on the piano by Louis Horst, who would go on to become a life-long collaborator. 1930's "Lamentation" saw Graham as a solo dancer on a bare stage encased in a tube of stretch jersey fabric, rocking with pain and anguish.
Graham's early dances were not generally well-received by audiences who were not sure of what they were seeing. The works were spare, powerful and modern, devoid of the dreaminess and glamour of the works of the previous decades. But the works, many based on strong, precise movement and pelvic contractions, were charged with beauty and emotion. It was a stirring period of revolution for Graham in which she would begin to establish a new language of dance which was different from everything that preceded it and which would leave everything that came after it indelibly changed.
In the
1930s, Graham taught at
Bennington College and
New York University where
Martha Hill directed the dance departments. In 1951, Graham was a founding member of the dance division of the
Juilliard School, also directed by Martha Hill.
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