Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work by Mark Franko (review)

Martha Graham is arguably the most legendary figure in U.S. modern dance. During a prolific career spanning nearly seven decades, she choreographed over 180 works, and she performed into her sixties. Following her death in 1991, however, a decade-long legal battle, between designated heir Ron Protas and the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance concerning the rights to her choreography, put her legacy in jeopardy (Lee 2004). In 2004, a Federal District Court awarded the Center the rights to stage most of Graham’s dances; however the duration and vitriol of this fight had significant consequences, not least of which was that for several years, former company members were prohibited from staging or performing any of her repertory (Schwartz 2010, 65). Ironically, it was Richard Move, a drag performer who began impersonating Graham in 1996, not any of her acolytes, who brought the late choreographer and her work to life during several years of stagnation.

Recent memory of Graham has been further complicated by her self-destructive and idiosyncratic behavior during the latter half of her life, when alcoholism and a “relentless self-performance of character” (Schwartz 2010, 64) made her a ready target for parody. One only need look to Move’s successful nearly twenty-year career impersonating the artist in his myriad “Martha@” appearances to appreciate the degree to which, on her death, Graham left a readily inhabitable “dynamic emptiness” (Schwartz 2010, 66). Mediatized images of Graham that circulated in popular culture usually did not help the matter, painting an often-unattractive portrait of patrician privilege, severity, and self-importance. One could argue that, in profound ways, contemporary impressions of Graham have been so influenced by this reductive and ubiquitous iconography that we have lost a sense of who she was as an artist, and even more, as a person.

Dedicated to “rehumanizing” Graham and breathing life into her memory, Mark Franko has written Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work, a labor of admirable scholarly rigor and imagination. In the last several years, the Library of Congress has made available several robust collections of materials once belonging to Graham and her close associates, including her former husband, choreographer Erick Hawkins, composer Aaron Copland, and psychologist Frances G. Wickes. Drawing on these recently processed items, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, as well as myriad primary sources from other collections, Franko’s inspired scholarship adds depth and complexity to the Graham we thought we knew. Focusing on the period between 1938 and 1953, which, he argues, was Graham’s “most productive period,” Franko reveals the interrelationships and intersections between Graham’s life experiences and her art making just before, during, and after World War II. His careful reading and analysis adds personal, intellectual, and psychological dimension to the artist, and reacquaints us with her seeking and sentient sides.

Graham was famous for declaring, “A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths” (quoted in Schwartz 2010, 61). In Graham’s lights, the first death occurs when a dancer is no longer physically capable of performing choreography she once could, and must, therefore, endure watching other, younger dancers perform her roles. Franko alludes to the physical and psychic losses Graham suffered in 1969, when she retired from the stage, and their effects on her engagement in her work as a choreographer. “[S]he had little interest in her own choreography once it was no longer vitally connected to her,” he writes, explaining, “Although Graham continued to be productive …, creating 30 new ballets at the rate of between one to three a year from 1973 through 1991, her ‘afterlife’ engendered a distorted and disjointed replay of what had already transpired in the 1940s” (4).

Focusing on Graham’s most generative personal and professional years, therefore, the period in...