From her debut in Trois Gnossiennes to her last dance, Maple Leaf Rag, Martha Graham's technique was present everywhere. Even though she had to stop due to health problems, her soul continued to dance. Her dance method draws inspiration not only from her frustrations to release her inner emotions, but also to create her own personality in this vast world of dance. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Martha Graham was born in 1894 in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was born to a doctor who specialized in human psychology. The town “alienist” had instilled his motto in his eldest daughter: “The movement never lies.” Even though these words seemed to pass through her, they remained engraved. When he was fourteen, his family moved to California. About three years later, she attended a dance recital given by Ruth St. Denis in Los Angeles. This presentation was the first dance she had seen. As with all great performances, she was overwhelmed by the type of dancing. She knew then that this was her future. In 1916, she enrolled at Denishawn. At twenty-two, this small, shy, but insightful and diligent young girl impressed Ted Shawn, one of the studio's executives. She was chosen to dance in his rendition of Xochilt. Then, abruptly, she left Denishawn to dance solo at the Greenwich Follies. In 1925, Graham became a dance instructor at the Eastman School of Music and Theater in Rochester, New York. “I wanted to start,” she says, “not with characters or ideas but with movement...I wanted meaningful movement. It was here that she began experimenting with modern dance forms. "I didn't want it to be pretty or flowy. I wanted it to be charged with inner meaning, excitement and momentum." She abandons the straight steps and techniques of classical ballet. Graham wanted the dancing body to be linked to natural movement and music. She began to experiment with what the body was capable of, developing “percussive movements”. In 1930, she began to recognize a new system of movement and new principles of choreography. "Based on her interpretation of Delsarte's principle of tension and relaxation, Graham identified a method of breathing and impulse control that she called "contraction and release." For her, movement began with tension d 'a muscle contracted and continued in the flow of The energy released from the body as the muscles relaxed. This method of muscular control gave Graham's dances and dancers a harsh and angular appearance, very unfamiliar to audiences of. dance accustomed to the fluid, lyrical body movements of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis As a result, in her early reviews, Graham was often accused of dancing in an "ugly" manner. "Like modern painters," she said, "we stripped our medium of superfluous decorative elements." The dances were presented on bare stages, with only costumes and lights. The dancers' faces almost reflected them because they were tight, almost rigid, and their costumes were extremely inadequate. She later completed the sets and costumes for a surreal effect. The music was contemporary and usually composed especially for dancing. Martha Graham introduced a number of other improvements to the dance. She established the use of moving sets, symbolic props such as those of Phèdre and communication through dance.