Graham embraced her role as a pioneer of American culture. In a 1930 essay titled “Seeking an American Art of the Dance,” she declared that American dance must have a style made “in this country and of this country.” To do so, she suggested, dancemakers must look back at American history, rather than imitating the traditions of Europe and Asia as her forebears and even her own teachers had done. Graham felt herself equipped for this task, as she saw touchstones of American history in her own lived experience: She could trace her genealogy to the Mayflower; she had her own formative westward journey as a child, traversing the Appalachians as her family moved from Pennsylvania to California. She also made her career in the “new New York City,” the capital of American cultural production, and had absorbed the city’s angularity, bustling pace, and diversity in her movement lexicon and collaborative work with the likes of Copland, Noguchi, and others. Just like her characters in Appalachian Spring, she resolved, herself, to venture into the unknown in her quest to make modern dance American.
Neil Baldwin’s biography, Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern, is an attempt to tell the story of how the choreographer made modern dance a distinctly American art form. His previous subjects have included Man Ray, Thomas Edison, and William Carlos Williams, but Graham’s life and work might have presented him with a particularly formidable biographical task. She actively resisted the archiving of her career, believing that her work should speak for itself. She burned her personal correspondence and discarded many of her choreographic notes, an obstacle to insight that has vexed her previous biographers. As Baldwin describes, “It was one thing for Martha Graham to be seen, another to be seen into.” Where primary sources lack, Baldwin draws from the recollections of Graham’s collaborators to reconstruct the development of her artistic philosophy.
Baldwin focuses on Graham’s career in the first half of the 20th century, through her first international tour in 1950. His Martha Graham is steeped in Americana. She uses the history, geography, and popular culture of the United States to craft her technique, transcending the strictures of European ballet. With this framing, Baldwin’s book is in contrast to most recent scholarship on Martha Graham, which uses a transnational lens to examine her later career and cultural diplomacy tours with the US State Department. Baldwin recognizes Graham’s global resonance, but his concern in this biography is more foundational: How did Graham’s work come to encapsulate an American identity in the first place? He examines how Martha Graham channeled her ambition and intellect into movement technique—especially that involving movements of contraction and release, her principal method. In so doing, he returns us to the origins of Graham’s specific form of American modernism, even as the biography’s scope forgoes a deeper, more complicated exploration of her patriotism and practice through the end of the Cold War.