Feminist Discourse and American Identity in Modern Dance: Martha Graham and the Social Significance of the Female Dancing Body

Resumen

This article reflects on the concepts of feminist discourse and American identity in the context of the social significance of the dancing body as portrayed in choreographies by the American dancer Martha Graham. Here, we approach the impact of the revolutionary works of Heretic (1929) Lamentation (1930), Primitive Mysteries (1931), Frontier (1935), Letter to the World (1940) and Appalachian Spring (1944), exploring the social significance attached to the demarcation of masculinity and femininity in Graham’s vision of dance. The visual iconography, extraordinary music scores and sensory atmosphere created for and by these seminal choreographies are unique experiences of a specific dance art that constructs feminist discourse. Martha Graham’s contribution to the shaping of modern dance and her signature of contract and release movements at the core of the Graham Technique, in which energy is at the centre of the body, is saturated with human emotion. The feminist discourse embedded in these choreographies speak of love and death, of oppression and freedom, of the limitations of genre and the struggle for identity. Her illuminating contribution to contemporary dance rested on her mesmeric movement sentences and her uncompromised questioning of socially constructed bodies. Martha Graham created a new movement vocabulary that revolutionized dance and was shaped by ‘cultural embodiment, cultural communication and the whole shift in the Western lifeworld at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Keywords. Martha Graham, Graham Technique, modern dance, social significance, feminist discourse, female body, social groups, American identity, musical landscape, female dancing body.