Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Grahams Inspirations
Martha Graham decided after her father passed away, that she was going to pursue her dream of dancing. In the early 1900's Graham joined the Denishawn school under the instruction of Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn. This was her first bit of formal dance training and technique. Graham ended up leaving the Denishawn to dance as a soloist for two years with the Greenwich Village Follies. Around 1925 she started teaching at the Eastman Music school and theater in New York, where she started experimenting with modern dance. She was influenced by the Denishawn, Isadora Duncan, as well as Louie Horst, a former Denishawn composer. Horst was an extremely important friend and mentor through Graham's years of choreographing and dancing. He helped her explore emotion within the music and inspired her with different sound scores. With Horst she also explored angular, percussive movements, and contract/release. She taught many dancers that became well known including, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp. The Works that Graham had choreographed in her life were inspired by Greek mythology, cubism, Early America, religion, and native American culture.
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Was Martha influenced by any other prominent dancers of her own time, since Isadora was quite a bit earlier? It is interesting how close Martha and Horst were since from what I understand, he was quite hard on her and her being somewhat of a diva probably had difficulty taking the criticism. Do you know any more about their relationship?
ReplyDeleteGraham was influenced by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn at the Denishawn school. Those were her early influences as far as dancers go. otherwise her dad influenced her because he was in the medical field. Their relationship was one of inspiration, she got inspired from his compositions and music. I also heard that they had a bit of a romantic relationship.
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