Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance

Dancing with Graham, 1929–1931

Dancing with Graham, 1929–1931 Along with Mary Jo and Bessie, savings in hand, Martha did finally venture back to Manhattan the next summer, at the beginning of the major economic depression of 1929. Yet Martha was joyful: “These were exciting times. We were avid to learn anything in any art. We went to concerts and galleries. We taught, talked, and lived dance.” Martha’s range of cultural interests had grown considerably since her last stay two years earlier. This time, with Mary Jo, she thrived in Manhattan’s cosmopolitan world and its arts and ideas, admiring Edward Steichen’s photographs, reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and André Malraux, intrigued by Marlene Dietrich’s films, absorbing New York’s panoply of choices—hearing jazz in Harlem one night and attending Yiddish theater in lower Manhattan the next. As Prohibition was not repealed until 1933, Martha’s social life in college circles consisted of “dry” soirees and innocent evenings with friends who, like her, had developed a taste for tobacco. Nonetheless, gin or hard cider would often appear, courtesy of a local bootlegger, and somebody always seemed to know of a parlor down a back alley where hard liquor was available. Despite soapbox preachers’ warnings, the 1920s brought a fun-loving easiness to the social scene, with dance marathons, Charleston competitions, and escapes to boisterous roadside inns in Ford Model As complete with rumble seats. But the mood of the country was increasingly bleak, with thousands of jobs disappearing every day. With political corruption and organized crime critically undermining police departments, illicit drinking establishments proliferated , and legally proscribed sex between men was virtually ignored. If Martha was a prime example of President Hoover’s cry for self-reliance and individual initiative—the very ethos of white, Protestant culture—she was one of the fortunate ones, and she knew it. When the apple-shippers’ association came up with the scheme to sell apples to the unemployed on credit at $1.75 a crate, six thousand peddlers appeared on the street corners of New York City, hawking apples at a nickel apiece. Into the early 1930s, with hunger strikes, lynchings, and mob violence making headlines, the situation became dire. Still, the Depression was not so great a hardship for artists, according to Louis Horst, because they lived on practically nothing anyway. In that summer of 1929, soon after the trio arrived in New York City, Graham invited Martha Hill into her company of women. There she reveled in the exhilaration of rigorous rehearsals where Graham and her group explored new movement ideas. Her work as a dancer with Graham would become the most significant influence in her life: “It was cultish in a way, I suppose, a kind of hero worship, but not holding her aloof. I could have gone to Doris, I could have stayed with ballet, I could have done other things, but the minute I went to Martha [Graham] I just said, ‘Here I am. I believe in you.’ This was what I’d been looking for—the look, the aesthetic, the belief behind the look. We never questioned Martha [Graham] about her approach to her art. We were much more imbued with a higher spirit. I ate and slept dance. It was a passion.” Martha’s first year as a dancer working on the concert scene was very productive . “We had input in what Martha [Graham] was doing. She let us improvise . . . . It was such fun. We would take an idea, Martha would do something and we’d do something. [Graham’s] early movement seemed right artistically . . . what she was saying and the way she was saying it.” Graham had earlier created political statements in her solos Revolt (1927) and Immigrant: Steerage: Strike (1928). When Martha Hill joined the group, she learned Heretic and Vision of the Apocalypse, dances that had premiered at the Booth Theatre on 14 April 1929. She understood Horst’s influence on Graham, and credited his fascination for the German artists Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz for the “violent things [Graham] was doing.” The first thing Martha learned in the studio was Prelude to a Dance to a Honegger score. It was not unusual for Graham to experiment and set materials on her group before distilling the final product into a solo for herself. This work led to her 1929 solo, Dance, a “clarion call of her new thinking,” according to Bessie Schönberg, who described it as “credo” made up of action only between...