American Dance Pioneer Martha Graham and the Ghosts of Feminism

Abstract

Abstract: The essay explores the mutual haunting between American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and feminism. This troubling arises from the confusion between what can be considered the predominantly feminist character of Graham's life and work coupled with Graham's outright rejection of a feminist consciousness. The author suggests that this ambivalent situation allows for an ever increasing complex but fruitful discussion of Graham's possible feminist identifications and their effects. The essay first argues for the performanative force of ‘doing’ a feminist identity as a foil for Graham's public written reputation of feminism. It then charts both the changing cultural and social beliefs of and about women in the twentieth century alongside Graham's specific geographical, social, cultural and historical placement in that history and its possible impact on her processes of identification. The essay then makes a close contextual reading of one of Graham's works of the early 1930s, Primitive Mysteries (1931), to illustrate its radical conception of the female body both at the time of its premiere and over subsequent reconstructions. The author finishes by arguing that the question of Graham's feminism is an important one because it remains unanswered.

Keywords:

• Martha Graham
• modern dance
• feminism
• identification
• performativity
• twentieth-century feminist culture and history in the United States

Notes

¹ Blood Memory was published by the international publishing house Doubleday and was edited by Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy. Dance Magazine is an internationally recognized trade publication in dance.

²For what I find is one of the most effective explanations of the revolutionary character of Butler's theory of gender performativity, see Loizidou (2007).

³For critiques of the white middle class character of second wave feminism see bell hooks (1989), Gayatri Spivak (1988), and Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981), Judith Butler's Gender Trouble was published in 1990.

⁴Prior to the National Women's Party's turn to militant action on a national scale, women's lobbying at state level attained full women's suffrage in only 10 of 36 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, New Jersey, New York State, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming.

⁵For a discussion of the Lewisohn sisters, see Blood (2007), Daniels (1989) and Tomko (1999). See Johnson's obituary in the New York Times (Cook 1990). For a feminist response to Luhan, see Rudnick (1992).

⁶My analysis has been facilitated by access to studio rehearsals and performances of a reconstruction of Primitive Mysteries at Laban in London in February 2009. The reconstruction was presented as part of the ‘Historical Project Mixed Bill’ on 5 and 6 February 2009 by arrangement with Martha Graham Resources, a division of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance.

⁷From conversations in London in January 2009.