Martha Graham’s House of the Pelvic Truth: The Figuration of Sexual Identities and Female Empowerment

Martha Graham writes in her autobiography Blood Memory that she was bewildered, or, as she puts it “bemused,” when she heard how dancers referred to her school as “the house of the pelvic truth” (Graham 1991, 211). We might perhaps agree with Graham that this is not the best description for a highly respected center of modern dance training; neither does it match Graham’s image as an awe-inspiring and exacting teacher, nor does it suit the seriousness with which her tough technique is regarded. But the house of the pelvic truth does chime with stories about Graham’s often frank method of addressing her students. She is reputed to have told one young woman not to come back to the studio until she had found herself a man. At other times she would tell her female students, “you are simply not moving your vagina” (211). Add to this other stories about the men in the company suffering from “vagina envy” (211), and it can be readily understood that the goings-on in the Graham studio gave rise to its nickname, “house of the pelvic truth.”

In British dance circles of the 1960s, it was not rumors of the erotic that attracted most of us to Graham’s work or persuaded us to travel to New York in search of the Graham technique. There was little in the way of contemporary dance training in Britain at this time, and we had been mesmerized by the beautiful and rather chaste film A Dancer’s World (1957), in which Graham pronounces:

a dancer is not a phenomenon . . . not a phenomenal creature. . . . I think he is a divine normal. He does what the human body is capable of doing. Now this takes time . . . it takes about ten years of study. This does not mean he won’t be dancing before that time, but it does take the pressure of time, so that the house of the body can hold its divine tenant, the spirit.

(1962, 24)

These words represented the loftier ideals to which, as a young and aspiring dance student, I responded on my first contact with Graham’s style. However, when I eventually saw the Martha Graham Company perform live at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963, I was bewildered, and indeed bemused, by what was happening on stage. So immersed was I in attempting to sort out the complications and complexities of dance dramas such as Clytemnestra (1958), that the poetic and inspiring words of A Dancer’s World paled into insignificance. Neither did I notice whether or not the women were moving from their vaginas. Nevertheless, in the few Graham classes that were available in London in the early 1960s, I was introduced to the mystery of the contraction and discovered that as well as the floor exercises, many of the traveling movements were propelled from the pelvic region. I understood that the pubic bone is “the seed of the body” (G. Jackson 1982, 53), and that for Graham’s female dancers the pelvic area of the body, vital for procreation and giving birth, houses the core of her movement.

According to Anna Kisselgoff, it was Graham herself who coined the phrase “house of the pelvic truth” since she used the metonym to describe the area deep in the pelvis from which the contraction “always originates” (qtd. in de Mille 1991, 98). This powerful movement has the capacity to generate energy along the spinal column and outward through the limbs to the extremities of hands, feet, neck, and head. Kisselgoff eloquently summarizes the visual effect of Graham’s pelvic-centered movement when she explains that, “[w]hile [the contraction] often gives Graham’s choreography an explicit sexual tension, the movement itself has broader metaphorical implications” (98). I shall return to these wider implications and to the signifying capacity of the contraction later in this article.

The principle of contraction and release was established during the earliest stages of Graham’s career (Horosko 2002, 21–22). These were the years of the legendary all-female group, when the...