A century ago, the dancer Martha Graham began teaching at a small studio above Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. It was the start of a dance revolution. Graham wasn’t the first dancer to cast off ballet’s shackles and look for new ways of moving as the world shifted in the early 20th century: free-spirited Isadora Duncan had wafted her way through European salons; Loie Fuller experimented with costume and light effects; Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, with whom Graham trained, explored dance aping the styles of India, Egypt and Japan. But it’s Graham who became the true godmother of modern dance, developing a technique that would become the foundation of many dancers’ training around the world, and starkly modernist choreography that would point dance in a new direction.
Where ballet leapt to the sky, Graham was rooted to the earth. Where classical backs stood straight, Graham curved the spine and tilted the pelvis in deep contractions, connecting to some primal place of power. In the most famous images of Graham dancing, she wears a full skirt kicked into a semicircle while she reaches high or far into space, but also into the psyche. You can sense her gravity by just looking at the photo. Masha Maddux, who joined the Graham company in 2007 (Graham herself died in 1991 aged 96) describes the technique: “It’s restrained. It’s very deep, very visceral, theatricalised and with a certain bite.” And what does it feel like to dance it? “Liberating!”
Starting a trend … Edd Mitton and Abigail Attard-Montalto in Errand Into the Maze by Yorke Dance Project at Linbury theatre, London, in 2024. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Yet as Graham’s company prepares to celebrate its centenary in 2026, what’s strange about such a legendary performer, so fundamental to dance’s history, is that her work is rarely seen in the UK. “I do not understand why,” says Yolande Yorke-Edgell, whose London-based company Yorke Dance Project has presented a number of short Graham works. Aaron S Watkin, artistic director of English National Ballet (ENB), felt the same when he moved to London after working in Europe. “I was thinking, she’s the mother of modern dance, she’s so iconic and famous, but hardly anyone is doing it.”
Yorke-Edgell, however, may have started a trend. Last year, her company performed Graham’s 1947 piece Errand Into the Maze, a Minotaur-inspired heroine’s journey (with demons real and metaphorical); it was then picked up by ballerina Natalia Osipova for her solo project. And now ENB is performing the same piece. “It’s like a 15-minute introduction to Martha Graham, everything that you’d want,” says Watkin. For an autumn tour, Yorke Dance Project is mounting another Graham piece, Deep Song, an angry, despairing solo made in response to the Spanish civil war. So, finally, there’s more Martha Graham on the menu.
Born in 1894 in Pennsylvania, Graham later moved to California with her family. Her father, a doctor and psychiatrist, gave her what she called her first lesson in dance. “Movement never lies,” he told her. After dancing with St Denis and Shawn’s Denishawn company, Graham took a job with the Greenwich Village Follies musical revue, but was certain that her art form could be more than what Maddux says she called “inconsequential entertainment”. Graham soon established her school and company, creating weighty work inspired by Greek mythology, history, the American west and our rich interior worlds (as in 1930’s Lamentation, a study of grief), with strong female characters at the fore.
So many important artists passed through her studio, from other dance pioneers such as Merce Cunningham, who performed with Graham’s company before setting out his own trailblazing path in modern dance, to Madonna, who took classes when she first arrived in New York. It was Graham who gave the rebellious student the moniker Madame X, a name Madonna used for an album title decades later. Graham was a force, no doubt, in person and on stage. In her photographs, dark hair swept back into a chignon, she emanates seriousness, and she was passionate too. Or as Maddux puts it: “Not the kind of person who would civilise herself. So if emotion was raw she didn’t hold back.” Yorke-Edgell, who encountered Graham at an audition, describes her having the kind of energy that vibrates. “She just had this presence; a total commitment to her art form,” she says, remembering what the former Graham dancer and teacher Robert Cohan would say: “When she left the stage, she took the stage with her.”
Rooted to the earth … Martha Graham performing in Salem Shore. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images
Back in the present day, in ENB’s east London studio, Maddux is coaching dancers Minju Kang and Rentaro Nakaaki in Errand Into the Maze, trying to pass on some of that Graham energy. Nakaaki is the Minotaur character, with a horned headpiece attached to a bit he holds in his teeth. (Which can be painful, apparently. Yorke-Edgell tells of a performer in New York who dislocated his jaw from biting too hard during a performance. The physical challenge, she says, “does create more of a monster”). Between Nakaaki and Kang it is a battle of wills rather than blows. The shapes they make are like a woodcut, every movement so defined, solid, economical; there’s no visual noise. When Kang throws her leg straight up to the ceiling, turning her whole body into an arrow, it’s so decisive. But then the famous Graham contractions tug at the torso like inner turmoil. Some of the geometry is like jazz dance, but the context and the energy is so different it feels completely other.
At the side of the studio, dancer Emily Suzuki is practising a step, her face intensely focused. She’s simply turning from facing the front to the side, but the resistance in the body has to be exactly right for it to work. “It’s like being pulled in both directions,” Maddux tells her. “Maybe her mind or her heart wants to resolve something, but physically she says no. It’s a very emotional internal dialogue.” It is not just a step to the side. These ideas are clear to see when you watch. The dancers’ faces don’t betray too much emotion, the point is that the dance does it for you. “We try to cultivate a physical voice that travels and projects far,” says Maddux. “To use the movement to crank up the volume on your entire body.”
There is nevertheless a lot going on psychologically for the dancers at the same time. “They have to do some really deep emotional digging,” says Maddux. But for Graham, the movement itself could give you the emotion you need to portray. “Something here so deep produces that frightened state that the audience responds to,” says Maddux. You’re not “acting” emotions, she says: “You really have to internalise it and then let it bubble up. I call it the can of soda, you know, you shake it until …”
Having recently seen three different dancers in the lead role in Errand, what’s interesting is that while Graham’s choreography is so recognisable and specific, each interpretation is still very different. “It’s such a fabulous role for the lead woman,” says Watkin. “It’s such a character, it’s like doing a full-length Onegin or Manon.”
The sense of high drama, Watkin admits, could feel somewhat dated. But, at the same time, the distinctive choreography cuts through. The designs are striking too, and integral to the dance. A V-shaped sculpture by Isamu Noguchi for Errand Into the Maze is like a portal or gateway the protagonist steps through. In the iconic Lamentation, which Yorke Dance Company has performed, the dancer sits inside a stretchy tube of fabric. “You have to keep it completely taut the whole time,” says Yorke-Edgell, so that tension becomes an innate part of the dance. Graham designed her own costumes, such as the amazing yellow, green and black striped dress recently worn by singer (and classically trained dancer) FKA twigs to perform Graham’s 1932 piece Satyric Festival Song.
FKA twigs said the opportunity to perform Graham’s work was “like winning a Grammy”, such is the stellar power of her legacy. Why should we still be watching Graham’s dance – and maybe even watching more of it – a century on? “I think because there’s a purity to her technique,” says Yorke-Edgell. “It all comes back to the humanity of her work,” suggests Maddux. Graham wrote in her memoir Blood Memory that the essence of dance is the landscape of the soul. “I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be,” she said. But I like another quote of hers that points to the transcendent power of her art: “Dancers are the messengers of the gods.”
English National Ballet is performing Errand Into the Maze as part of R:Evolution at Sadler’s Wells theatre, London, until 11 October. Yorke Dance Project is performing Deep Song on tour as part of Modern Milestones until 22 January
