About violent movement
From the book “They Changed the World. 200 Icons who have made a difference.” By Barbara Cady
FOR MARTHA GRAHAM (1894 – 1991), THE intense theatrical doyenne of modern dance, movement – not beauty – was the embodiment of truth. Movement could never lie, her doting father had told her when she was a child growing up in Allgheny, Pennsylvania, and through some sixty years of influential performance she focused all her energy and talent in giving expression to this simple dictum. What bloomed – or rather exploded – from her creative stance was a revolutionary approach to dance that rejected the codified forms of classical ballet for an earthier, more emotionally charged choreography.
[…] As an explorer of the psyche, she created a starkly new kinetic language to express the secrets and yearnings of the human soul, using movement not for its own sake, but to illustrate psychological states. Graham taught her students how to contract the solar plexus so that releasing it would send them spiraling into the air, how to use tautly controlled gestures to express primal feelings. She also introduced starkly sexual movements into dance and claimed that her bold, theatrical approach – spectacular backfalls, pendulum-like leg swings, great upward thrusts of the torso – flowed through her from the past, expressing timeless, universal truths. Critics often scoffed at her stylistic audacity and her decidedly abstract approach, but contemporary audiences all over the world were awestruck. Their seduction was complete after witnessing such compelling solo works as Lamentations, in which Graham, imprisoned in a huge wrapping of fabric, portrayed the anguished search for release from a self-inflicted inner torment through violent movement.
So, is that the way? Out of my misery? Through violent movement?
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Posted on August 26th, 2009 under English • Tags: creativity, dance, energy, imprisonment, lies, Martha Graham, movement, psyche, release, talent, torment, truth. •
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