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Invincible Martha
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19535 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
4,260 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
BLOOD MEMORY
Martha Graham
Doubleday, New York, 1991
280 pp., $25
MARTHA
The Life and Work of Martha Graham
Agnes de Mille
Random House, New York, 1991
510 pp., $30
When asked in the 1970s if she wanted her works to live on into the next century, Martha Graham was adamant that they should die with her. What, then, did she want to survive with respect to her career? "The legend," she replied.
And so be it. Graham, who saw herself as a goddess and who behaved like one, died this past April at the age of ninety-six, the reigning deity of modern dance. While it cannot be said that she single-handedly invented modern dance--Ruth St. Denis, with whom Graham studied, had made orientally-inspired free-form creations, and Isadora Duncan had danced barefoot in classical tunics--Graham gave it a vocabulary, a language written on and derived from her own body, codified, molded, and propagated by her clear discipline and aesthetic.
Using the floor, the pull of gravity, and the pulsation of breath itself, she made dances that would change the shape of all dance to come. Laura Shapiro wrote in Newsweek, "Her astonishing vocabulary seared the landscape of dance like a branding iron." All who dance today are in her debt, from the choreographers, like Merce Cunningham, who rebelled against her, to the funk-pop performers on MTV who gyrate from the torso that Graham declared the source of all expression.
Both Blood Memory, Martha Graham's autobiography, and Martha, Agnes de Mille's biography of Graham, are long-awaited books. Not wishing to damage her friendship with Graham, Agnes de Mille withheld the publication of her twenty-five-year effort until after Graham's death. And Graham herself avoided the press for a lifetime. She was quoted in her New York Times obituary notice as having said, "I have always fought against any dramatization of my peculiarities or my personality." She finally agreed "not to record but to reveal my life" when in 1986 Doubleday senior editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis offered to work with her. The book evolved from conversations between the two women, preserving on the page the elliptical,
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