Graham, Martha
Graham's dances often draw upon historical and mythological subjects. After World War II, she created works based increasingly on Freudian and Jungian themes and centered on the female figure. Her works include Primitive Mysteries (1931), Letter to the World (1940), Deaths and Entrances (1943), Appalachian Spring (1944), Cave of the Heart (1946), Seraphic Dialogue (1955), Phaedra (1962), and Archaic Hours (1969), created the year she retired from dancing. Because so many of her students themselves became choreographers and leaders of companies, her influence on modern dance is especially widespread. Her own troupe, the oldest dance company in the United States, faced problems a decade after her death. Internecine struggles caused the closure (2000–2002) of the Martha Graham Dance Center, but a legal decision in late 2002 allowed the company to regroup, and they began to perform her dances again in early 2003.
See her Notebooks (1973) and her autobiography, Blood Memory (1991); R. Tracy, ed., Goddess: Martha Graham's Dancers Remember (1996); biographies by D. McDonagh (1973) and A. de Mille (1991); E. Stodelle, Deep Song (1984); M. Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War (2012).
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