1Martha Graham was not a stranger to border crossing: in her autobiography, Blood Memory, she recalls the nine-day journey from Pittsburgh to Santa Barbara that took her and her family across the country when she was fourteen:

When I would stand at the end of the last car, the East was the home I was leaving, though of course now hundreds if not thousands of miles away. And when I’d run to the front car I’d watch the West unroll before me; it really was a frontier. […] The train was taking us from our past, through the vehicle of the present, to our future. Tracks in front of me, how they gleamed whether we went straight ahead or through a newly carved-out mountain. It was these tracks that hugged the land, and became a living part of my memory. Parallel lines whose meaning was inexhaustible, whose purpose was infinite. This was, for me, the beginning of my ballet Frontier. (Graham 1992, 43-44)

2This major episode of her life, the crossing of state boundaries and heading to the unknown, to the Frontier, appears as a defining moment for the future choreographer and pioneer of modern dance. It combines her engagement with American mythology (the Frontier, the opposition between the Puritan East and the “wild” West as a symbol of the future of America), her relation to the American landscape, as well as her modernist artistic quest, visible here in the correlation between human movement – fourteen-year-old Graham running back and forth in the train – and the movement and rhythm of the machine (here, the train) with the American landscape as an ever-evolving backdrop.

3Crossing boundaries – in time, space, style, genre and gender – is constitutive of Graham’s artistic project: as a dancer and a choreographer, she perpetually strove to “make it new”, to create a new, modern way of dancing, unfettered by the weight of conventions originating in Europe and resolutely attuned to the indigenous rhythm and vitality of America. As she writes in the “Affirmations” collected by Merle Armitage, “like the modern painters and architects, we have stripped our medium of decorative unessentials. Just as fancy trimmings are no longer seen on buildings, so dancing is no longer padded. It is not “pretty” but it is much more real” (Armitage, 97): true art has to spring from real life, not an imitation of it, otherwise it becomes, as she puts it “decadent” (Armitage, 99). For Graham, modern American dance is organically connected to the American territory and its indigenous physicality and rhythm:

The modern American dance is characterized, like the true dance of any period of world history, by a simplicity of idea, an economy of means, a focus directly upon movement, and behind and above and around all, an awareness, a direct relationship to the blood flow of the time and country that nourishes it. To have an American dance we must take these characteristics as a starting point, then from a cognizance of old forms we shall build a new order (Armitage, 100-101)

4This paper explores the connection between modern dance and the American landscape, and examines the correlation between Graham’s forays into the American territory and the American past, as well as her border-crossing and boundary-breaking in her pioneering choreographic work – notably through the way she associates primitivism and modernism in her early works and through her lifelong dialogue with literature. Like all the other great dance pioneers of the early 20^th century, Graham was hugely influenced by literary pioneers such as Walt Whitman, who literally became the poster-artist for all modern dance pioneers; for these pioneers, Whitman was the first “modern” American poet, and they echoed his plea for indigenous American art, his admiration for the immense vitality of America, and, in the case of Graham – as we will see – his conception of body and gender. Among the many literary influences that left a mark on Graham’s choreographic style and philosophy, Whitman occupies a special place, and therefore this paper will also highlight the Whitmanian influence on Graham’s conception of the West, her relationship to the American territory, her association of primitivism and modernity and her quest for the “truth” of the American body and its expression through true, natural movement.

1. “O you daughters of the West”: the American West, pioneering choreography and the Whitmanian relationship to the American territory

I was still a product of American Puritanism—whether due to the blood of my pioneer grandfather and grandmother, who crossed the Plains in a covered wagon in '49, cutting their road through virgin forests over the Rocky Mountains and across the burning plains, sternly keeping off or battling with the hordes of hostile Indians, or my Scottish blood on my father's side, or whatever it was—the land of America had fashioned me as it does most of its youth,—a Puritan, a mystic and a striver after the heroic expression rather than any sensual expression whatever, and I believe that most American artists are of the same mould. (Duncan, 63)

And this dancing, that has been called 'Greek.' It has sprung from America, it is the dance of the America of the future. All these movements—where have they come from? They have sprung from the great Nature of America, from the Sierra Nevada, from the Pacific Ocean, as it washes the coast of California; from the great spaces of the Rocky Mountains—from the Yosemite Valley—from the Niagara Falls. (Duncan, 223)

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers! (Whitman, 192)

These are primitive sources which, though they may be basically foreign to us, are, nevertheless, akin to the forces which are at work in our life. For we, as a nation, are primitive also – primitive in the sense that we are forming a new culture. We are weaving a new fabric, and while it is true that we are weaving it from the threads of many old cultures, the whole cloth will be entirely indigenous. […] Their [the dancers of America] dancing will contain a heritage from all other nations, but it will be transfigured by the rhythm, and dominated by the psyche of this new land. Instead of one school of technique ever becoming known as the American dance, a certain quality of movement will come to be recognized as American. (Armitage, 100)

9The sartorial metaphor Graham uses (“We are weaving a new fabric, and while it is true that we are weaving it from the threads of many old cultures, the whole cloth will be entirely indigenous”) explicitly combines the old and the new, the primitive and the modern, in her artistic project. The transnational dimension (“a heritage from all other nations”) is also important, since building the future of American dance requires the crossing of temporal boundaries, but also of geographical boundaries. This combination of primitive and modern, as well as the transnational dimension, are first apparent in the role that Native American culture takes in her choreographic research; in her own admission, Graham was always fascinated with Native American culture:

The American Indian dances remained with me always, just like those haunting moments before sunrise in the pueblos, or my first view of the Hopi women in their squash blossom hair arrangements that I was to use in Appalachian Spring. […] Although I have been greatly exposed to the Native American tribes, I have never done an Indian dance. I’ve never done an ethnic dance. I’ve received an excitement and a blessing and a wonderment from the Indians. (Graham 1992, 176)

10Even if she “never (did) an Indian dance”, Graham integrated indigenous movement and references to Native Americans in her ballets – like Appalachian Spring, mentioned above, Primitive Mysteries, American Document (which features an entire sequence on the Native American heritage and a group dance, “Lament to the Land”, interspersed with fragments extracted from a letter by Red Jacket) or El Penitente, which is inspired by the rituals of the Native Americans of the American southwest as well as by medieval mysteries – in another transnational primitivist conflation, searching for the roots of American spirituality. As Franko notes, Graham’s transnationalism in her quest for American primitivism is limited to the American continent and isn’t transatlantic – as it was for European modernists:

In her search for the primitive, Graham traveled closer to home than her European counterparts. She looked instead to the Indian culture of the American southwest and Mexico. The primitive other that contained secrets masked by western civilization was to be discovered in non-European cultures. Graham sought primitiveness within the geographical boundaries of the American continent, and even within America itself. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she attempted to identify her otherness as American rather than her otherness from the American. […] The “other” primitive space was an esoteric or uncanny space structuring a physical environment called “America” that awaited theatrical discovery. (Franko 1995, 52)

11Martha Graham didn’t actually need to look elsewhere for primitivism, since, as she explains in the affirmation quoted above, “we, as a nation, are primitive also” (Armitage, 100). Whenever Graham mentions the European tradition of dance, she represents it as a stifling model, limiting indigenous American creativity. In fact, one could argue that her plea for the advent of an indigenous American dance much resembles the quest of the authors of the American Renaissance, as expressed in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” for example. As she explains:

Interest from America in the dance as an art is new – even to dancers themselves, fettered as they have been to things European. […] Granted that rhythm be the sum total of one’s experience, then the dance form of America will necessarily differ greatly from that of any other country. So far the dance derived or transplanted has retarded our creative growth, in spite of the fact that there are thousands of ardent dance pupils in this country. It is not to establish something American that we are striving, but to create a form and expression that will have for us integrity and creative force. (Armitage, 97-98)

2. Native American dance and the search for the truth of the American body

14The liberation and free expression of emotions through the body is at the core of the Graham technique: as Mark Franko explains, “rather than imposing emotional typologies on the body, Graham saw the dancer as the producer of autonomous action that is open, in equal yet separate measure, to technical refinement and emotional inflection” (Franko 1995, 62). Graham rejects imitative dance and pantomime (one of the pillars of the European ballet tradition) in favor of the search for true movement, that doesn’t imitate but actualizes emotion in the here and now of the performance. Her famous contraction and release technique, which provokes a hunching of the torso and a thrusting forward of the pelvis, forces dancers to experience emotion through the body, not in stylized gestures. Dance critic Edwin Denby thus contrasted ballet’s obsession with lightness and elevation to the Graham technique:

Miss Graham, beginning with modernism, made of heaviness and oddity a complete system of her own. Brilliancy in heaviness and oddity became her expressive idiom. This is one way of explaining why much of her style looks like ballet intentionally done against the grain, or why she has used lightness and ease not as fundamental elements but for their value as contrast. (Denby, 127-128)

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot. (Whitman, 206)

One key to understanding Whitman's complicated presentation of “individuality versus democracy” lies in his depiction and positioning of body in “Song of Myself”. Particularly important is his alignment of the human body along horizontal and vertical axes. Whitman portrays the head and the feet as the body's extreme connection points. (Hagood, 25)

3. A universal modern American body?

18As Mark Niemeyer writes in his article on the representation of Native Americans in Leaves of Grass, “the […] surprisingly frequent appearance of Indians can be seen, in fact, as a natural part of Whitman’s nationalistic project to make his work distinctively American” (Derail & Roudeau, 70). Yet, Niemeyer continues, “in Leaves of Grass the presence of Indians is ghostly; they are seemingly there and not there at the same time” (Derail & Roudeau, 70). Similarly, Indians are everywhere and nowhere at the same time in Graham’s work; a good example of the use of the “vanishing Indian” trope in Graham’s work is the disappearance of the character of the “Indian Girl” in Appalachian Spring. In the script for the ballet, Graham writes:

But America is forever peopled with certain characters who walk with many of us at certain times in a very real way. […] This is why I have introduced the Indian Girl. There is no reason in one sense for her to be there and yet she is always there… in the names of our cities, states, rivers, and in the play of all of us as children. We can never escape the sense of her having been here and of her continued existence as a supreme spectator to all of our happenings. She is the symbolic figure of the land, the Eve of this Genesis. (Graham 1943, 2)

19Like Whitman before her, Graham adopts an ambiguous posture here, between the classic white American acknowledgement that Native Americans have indeed disappeared and are now relegated to a ghostly presence, and a desire to integrate Native Americans in a “great American epic”, as “pieces of a unified, national whole” (Derail & Roudeau, 81). As Jacqueline Shea Murphy delineates in her chapter on Graham and Indians, Graham also integrated Native American movement in her technique:

Dancers from the early 1930s note the influence this exposure to Southwest American Indian land and culture had on Graham’s class work and choreography. Dancer Marie Marchowsky writes of “the contraction and release principle,” described as the “fundamental source” of Graham’s early course work: “The exercises were primitive: legs and feet parallel, hands cupped, feet flexed as if rooted into the earth. The movement was influenced by American Indian dances—a source of inspiration to Martha.” (Murphy, 151)

20Sally Banes and Brenda Dixon Gottschild identify that type of movement – “frequent pelvic thrusts, crouches, bent legs, flexed ankles, and flat feet” – as “African-Americanisms” (Banes, 63); if we think of the example of American Document, Native American and African-American inspirations are indeed conflated in this piece. The structure of the ballet is modeled on minstrel shows, and the movement is clearly inspired from both African-American and Native-American traditions, which, combined with references to American history and many signifiers of Americanness, aim at creating what Clare Croft calls “a universal American subject”:

In American Document, one white female body, or a group of white female bodies, signified American identity as a composite of all racial, ethnic, and gender identities. An abstract mise en scène offered little suggestion of a specific location or time, a choreographic dislocation that made the work’s textual references to specific events in American history mere frames. (Croft, 111)

21In Graham’s ballets, the white female body appears as the universal American body, capable of fluid racial and gender identification. In the context of the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, Graham took a stance against Nazism and Fascism by celebrating democratic, pluri-ethnic America; her representation of Americanness is therefore far from a folkloric depiction of America as exotic and “other” compared to Europe. On the contrary, Graham opposed American primitivism to the European troubled political context to celebrate a universality of human experience, in which the pioneer, courageous American woman – always the lead role in her ballets – appears as the embodiment of the future. The crossing of temporal and geographical boundaries in Graham’s quest for the universal American body also entails a crossing of the boundaries of gender. In her 1930 essay “Seeking an American Art of Dance”, Graham identified the American creative urge as masculine: “Although she may not yet know it, America is cradling an art that is destined to be a ruler, in that its urge is masculine and creative rather than imitative” (Graham 1930, 249). The complex Grahamian gendering process is already visible in this passage, in which America is seen as female (through the use of the pronoun “she” and the representation of motherhood, America “cradling” the art of dance) but engendering a strong masculine force. This representation is echoed in the conception of her female roles, strong women who do not “act feminine”, whose power and strength is their main feature, and who are driven by a “masculine” force and willpower. For Mark Franko, Graham’s feminist quest to choreograph dance for the modern woman led to the creation of her particular brand of “feminine masculinity”:

Graham’s revolt against the classical tradition seemed to be a revolt against an artificial “feminine” in the name of an essential “masculine”. Yet her rhetoric allows a third term to show through in which the feminine is recuperated: an imaginary feminine masculinity; there is this a double consciousness through which Graham articulates her own experience in male terms, but also reintroduces the feminine. (Franko 1995, 56)

One’s self I sing—a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.

Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;
Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for
the muse—I say the Form complete is worthier far;
The Female equally with the male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful—for freest action form'd, under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing. (Whitman, 3)