Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern - Hardcover

Baldwin, Neil

 
9780385352321: Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385352328 ISBN 13: 9780385352321
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A major biography—the first in three decades—of one of the most important artistic forces of the twentieth century, the legendary American dancer and choreographer who upended dance, propelling the art form into the modern age, and whose profound and pioneering influence is still being felt today.

"Brings together all the elements of Graham’s colorful life...with wit, verve, critical discernment, and a powerful lyricism.”—Mary Dearborn, acclaimed author of Ernest Hemingway

Time magazine called her “the Dancer of the Century.” Her technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to the idiom of classical ballet. Her pioneering movements—powerful, dynamic, jagged, edgy, forthright—combined with her distinctive system of training, were the epitome of American modernism, performance as art. Her work continued to astonish and inspire for more than sixty years as she choreographed more than 180 works.

At the heart of Graham’s work: movement that could express inner feeling.

Neil Baldwin, author of admired biographies of Man Ray (“Truly definitive . . . absolutely fascinating” —Patricia Bosworth) and Thomas Edison (“Absorbing, gripping, a major contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a remarkable era” —Robert Caro), gives us the artist and performer, the dance monument who led a cult of dance worshippers as well as the woman herself in all of her complexity.

Here is Graham, from her nineteenth-century (born in 1894) Allegheny, Pennsylvania, childhood, to becoming the star of the Denishawn exotic ballets, and in 1926, at age thirty-two, founding her own company (now the longest-running dance company in America).  

Baldwin writes of how the company flourished during the artistic explosion of New York City’s midcentury cultural scene; of Erick Hawkins, in 1936, fresh from Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, a handsome Midwesterner fourteen years her junior, becoming Graham’s muse, lover, and eventual spouse. Graham, inspiring the next generation of dancers, choreographers, and teachers, among them: Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor.

Baldwin tells the story of this large, fiercely lived life, a life beset by conflict, competition, and loneliness—filled with fire and inspiration, drive, passion, dedication, and sacrifice in work and in dance creation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

NEIL BALDWIN is the critically acclaimed author of biographies of William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. He is emeritus professor of theatre & dance at Montclair State University. 

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1

Pittsburgh

The serried ranks of the glacier-scarred Appalachian Mountain Divide rise up, a broad, thickly wooded and granite-faced north-south fault line of ridges penetrated by the Tuscarora, Kittatinny, Blue Mountain, and Lehigh tunnels, long stretches of darkness breaking open into early-spring light diffused upon “the soft chain of hills . . . their shoulders tightly-bound into a provocative embrace” around the “vast amphitheater” of the Allegheny Plateau, the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers—Pittsburgh.

Following in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Charles Dickens, popular biographer James Parton, on assignment from The Atlantic Monthly, visited the city in 1868, by which time it was known as a place where men carried “the obligatory extra white shirt” to work so “they [could] change around noon as the city’s soot blackened their original attire.” Parton’s article concluded with a dark observation: “It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting, but if anyone would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara,” the author observed, “he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into—hell with the lid taken off.”

Local historian Charles W. Dahlinger wrote in his romantic saga, Old Allegheny, that rivalrous Pittsburgh “cast longing eyes across the river at her smaller [and prosperous] sister. Several times she stretched out her arms yearningly to take her to her bosom.” However, these advances, in the form of the Consolidation Act of 1867, were rebuffed by majority vote of the citizens of Allegheny. Three more times over the next forty years, the proud “North Siders” rejected the Iron City’s annexation resolutions, “to take [their residential suburb] in by the heels,” demonstrating the stubborn independence and fierce pride of place for which Allegheny is still known.

The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway’s sprawling, sunken depot in the northwestern Allegheny City Second Ward included a roundhouse, a constellation of repair shops, a brass foundry, and a powerhouse. The company sold the adjacent land uphill and to the east across Marquis Way and Fremont Street to business owners and real estate speculators who put up rows of homes “on tightly-adjacent plots [. . . not as attached ‘party-wall’] row houses.”

This enclave of two- and three-story, mansard-roofed long and narrow redbrick houses with modern conveniences, windows in front and back, close together with narrow alleys between them and with small patches of land as coveted yard space, sandwiched between earlier blue-collar Mexican War Streets further east (named for battles—Buena Vista and Palo Alto—and generals—Taylor, Sherman, and Jackson) and grander Victorian mansions of the Manchester region across the depot tracks to the west, evolved into a magnet for Allegheny’s professional, independent wage-earning class.

Today the area is designated as the California-Kirkbride/Old Allegheny Rows Historic District. Fremont Street, renamed Brighton Place, eight lots long, runs on a gentle slope between Freedmore (formerly Fillmore/Franklin) Street to the north and Mero Way to the south. Halfway down Fremont/Brighton, a stone’s throw from where the railroad depot used to be, a faded stretch of lawn covers the gap where number 1531, the birthplace of Martha Graham, once stood.

On Saturday, June 7, 2008, at ten in the morning, at the intersection of Brighton Road and California Avenue, the Allegheny City Society, in alliance with the Heinz History Center, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and the Pennsylvania Humanities Council dedicated a “Historical Marker Honoring the Memory of Martha Graham (May 11, 1894–April 1, 1991).”

In golden letters against a blue background, the plaque reads, “Born near here, dancer, choreographer and teacher Martha Graham created a modern and unique movement style. In 1927 [sic], she founded her School of Contemporary Dance, revolutionizing the art of modern dance with innovative works such as Frontier and Appalachian Spring.”

The place-name comes from native Indian origins; according to sixteenth-century mapmakers, there once roamed an isolated, itinerant tribe called Apalatchi, meaning “the People on the Other Side,” because they hunted in the Great Path terrain along the northern banks of the thousand-mile Ohio River, “where virgin forest met the rushing waters.”

•  •  •

Named after her Irish paternal grandmother born in Newburgh, New York, Martha was the eldest of four children of George Greenfield Graham, MD, thirty-eight years old, and Jane (“Jennie”) Beers, fourteen years her husband’s junior. Jane came from the rural borough of Mars in Butler County along Breakneck Creek, north of Allegheny. She was “a compact, little wren of a woman,” the middle daughter of three: sister Annie was the older, and sister Mary (called “Auntie Re”) was the youngest.

Martha’s sister, also named Mary (nicknamed “Mimi”), was born on May 15, 1896; followed by Georgia (“Geordie”), on March 1, 1900; and on April 26, 1906, finally the precious “boy-child,” William Henry arrived.

The who’s who 1897 biography in Life Sketches of Leading Citizens of Pittsburg and the Vicinity (solemn frontispiece declaring that “biography is the home aspect of history”), claimed the “prominent and skilful physician . . . [as] a native of Allegheny,” but Dr. Graham originally hailed from Washington County, Pennsylvania, center of the notorious 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. Dr. Graham’s father, John Jr., of Pittsburgh, moved to a plantation outside Hannibal, Missouri, before the Civil War; afterward, he took the family back to Pennsylvania. Dr. Graham’s paternal grandparents—John Sr. and Elizabeth—were Scottish. John Sr., beginning “in the hat trade,” became president of the Bank of Pittsburgh and vice president of the board of Western Pennsylvania Hospital.

After attending the University of Pennsylvania, George Greenfield Graham followed family tradition and embarked upon a short-lived business career before matriculating at the Baltimore College of Physicians and Surgeons in the fall of 1880. He earned an MD in mental disorders and was hired as a resident in the department of medicine and surgery at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill district, the first chartered public Civil War veterans’ hospital in town. In the spring of 1883, he joined the staff of the Dixmont State Hospital for the Insane as assistant physician.

On a parklike hilltop overlooking the Ohio River in what is now suburban Kilbuck, eight miles northwest of Allegheny via the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago line, Dixmont Hospital opened its doors in 1862 responding to a plea from Dorothea Lynde Dix, the Maine-born nursing and lunacy reform movement pioneer: “I call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this [Pennsylvania] Commonwealth in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, lashed into obedience!” When “she closed her eyes in death—and awoke to joy forever” in the New Jersey state hospital in Morris Plains on July 19, 1887, Ms. Dix was eulogized by John Harper, president of the Dixmont Hospital Board, as having given up “the quietude of home, and . . . the fascinating pleasures of refined society . . . for the grand purpose of self-sacrifice on the altar of suffering...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385352328
ISBN 13 
9780385352321
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
576
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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Deutschland

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