• 1 Graham’s father was a doctor (a psychiatrist), while Duncan’s family was more bohemian and arts-ori (...)
• 2 After seeing Ruth Saint Denis perform, a couple of years after her family moved to California, Grah (...)
• 3 Duncan started her dance training as a child, but she rebelled against the classical training she r (...)
• 4 Her biographer Russell Freedman explains that “Martha and her sisters were brought up strictly, wit (...)

2The Dionysian liberation of the body in dance that appears in Nietzsche’s works, his representation of dance as a “language of gestures,” and his conception of morality that does not exclude the body—as a more Cartesian current in philosophy tends to do—all spoke deeply to Graham and Duncan. Both women were born in rather educated families—albeit differently so1—and although they eschewed an academic education in favor of a dance education,2 they remained intellectually curious all their lives and were both avid readers. Their intuitive, organic approach to dance3 is mirrored in their intuitive and very personal approach to literature and philosophy, which isn’t any more academic than their dance styles are. Like her predecessor Duncan, Graham was also profoundly inspired by Nietzsche in her own revaluation—Umwertung—of American Puritanism: the dancer and choreographer, who called dancers “athletes of God,” saw dance as a way to explore and revaluate the Puritan relation to the body, and particularly to female bodies. Born in Allegheny (Pennsylvania) at the end of the 19^th century, Graham and her two sisters were raised in a largely female household composed of her mother, her maternal grandmother and her nanny—the only men being her father and a younger brother who died in infancy. Graham’s mother was a proud descendant of Mayflower pilgrims, and religion occupied a prominent place in the Graham household.4 The Puritan mindset of her mother’s ancestors was driven deep in Graham’s psyche from a very young age, and she soon rebelled against the numerous constraints this Puritan mentality imposed on women, both physically and psychologically. Throughout her career, Graham choreographed ballets that featured women torn between their desire to live and love freely and the constraints imposed by society and patriarchal conventions. A tireless pioneer, she explored movement and the American history, territory, and culture in search of the best way to express what she perceived to be the American soul in dance. This paper will explore Graham’s revaluation of American Puritan morality, and her Whitman-inspired conception of a physically embodied American democracy, as well as the way Nietzschean Umwertung is enacted in her ballet Letter to the World, which was inspired by the life and work of Emily Dickinson.

• 5 These ballets correspond to her “American” period: at the beginning of her career, Graham explored (...)
• 6 In her autobiography, Graham repeatedly professes her fascination for sexuality and her refusal to (...)
• 7 Graham choreographed a ballet based on The Scarlet Letter in 1975, a piece which centers around the (...)
• 8 The program referred to “strong, free, joyful action” (see Lamothe 2006, 8).

4Early ballets by Graham, like Heretic (1929), American Provincials (1934), El Penitente and Letter to the World (both 1940)5 enact this opposition between a frozen, life-crushing Puritan energy and an impulse towards “vigorous, free, joyful activity.” Graham grew up in a milieu that was rife with references to American Puritanism, and when she recalls the family’s move to California when she was in her teens, she opposes the Puritan East, a symbol of her past, to the freer, future-oriented West (Graham 1991 43-44). Graham’s conception of American Puritanism is a combination of her education (her knowledge of American history and of the “Founding Fathers”), the legacy of her family and upbringing (which is directly referred to in Letter to the World through the character of the Ancestress), and her own fantasies and personal struggles with what she perceives as Puritan in the American mentality (the repression of the body, feelings of shame and guilt—especially regarding sexuality6). The notion of Puritanism thus crystallizes for Graham not only the historical Puritanism she was taught about in school, combined with a web of cultural references to Early America and the Puritans that abound in the American collective imagery, but also a more diffuse sense of an intrinsic Puritan streak that she felt endured in the American mentality. Many of her ballets therefore reenact scenes of the Puritan repression of women that have become part of the collective American imaginary on Puritanism, such as the Salem witches’ trials or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s references to Puritan gloom. Danced only by women, Heretic and American Provincials oppose a soloist to a group that judges and rejects her: in these two ballets that enact a religious divergence (the soloist being the “heretic”), the opposition between a single female and a condemning mob is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and the treatment of Hester Prynne by the Puritan community.7 Throughout her career, Graham extensively explored this opposition between the two forces of Puritanism (which is always represented as deadly) and the affirmation of life and joy. The Nietzschean opposition between “vigorous, free, joyful activity” and the “impotence” of priestly values resonated so deeply with Graham that she even included a reference to this passage from The Genealogy of Morals in the program handed out during the 1929 performance of her solo Danza.8 This performance was part of a triple bill, along with Resurrection and Adolescence; the review printed in The New York Times on March 4, 1929 shows how Graham’s resistance to conventions was met with perplexity at best, or rejection, by critics. The author of the review praises Adolescence for being “the happiest use Miss Graham has made of her economy of movement, and perhaps the least inclined in the direction of ugliness,” and writes about Danza that “its interest lies in its impression of dance movement where there is actually only the barest skeleton of such movement. Of the three it is the least intriguing on first view.” Rejecting—like Duncan before her—the stifling conventions of ballet, Graham’s purpose was to explore movement to reveal the truth of the body, as “ugly” as it may seem to spectators conditioned to appreciate more classical forms of dance; to many people, she was, as she puts it herself, “a heretic.” In her autobiography, Graham recalls a conversation she had after her first solo performance in 1926 with a female spectator “dressed as a woman of the late nineteenth century” who thought her dance was “simply dreadful”:

• 10 Duncan proclaimed in her autobiography that “the supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I hav (...)
• 11 In his manifesto The American Ballet, Ted Shawn mentions Walt Whitman in the prologue and places th (...)

5Graham made extensive use of “heretic” technique, with flexed feet, hunched torsos, off-center tilts, along with a refusal to portray the female body as a light and ethereal being floating on stage (as it usually appears in the ballet tradition), but on the contrary a desire to work with body weight, gravity, and using the floor. Like many other dance pioneers (Ted Shawn or Isadora Duncan, for example), she was inspired by Walt Whitman’s vision of America and his conception of physicality in her own search for the truth of the body. Whitman was a “spiritual father”10 to many of the pioneers of American dance, who all adopted an idealized, romanticized vision of the American poet as the great formal innovator and liberator of the American body—a template for revolutionary art that does away with obsolete conventions and wants to create a new and free American self; many of these pioneers of what could be called the American Renaissance in dance, no doubt inspired by Whitman’s sweeping enumerations and strong lyric energy, had a very grandiose vision of the poet’s art and of what innovative American art should be.11 In Leaves of Grass, Whitman celebrates the body’s unaffected beauty, its vitality and strength; he sings the sacredness of the body, as in this famous passage from section 6 of “I Sing the Body Electric”: “The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred; / No matter who it is, it is sacred” (84). Critic Jimmie Killingsworth writes that

• 12 Whitman also wrote a series of articles entitled “Manly Health and Training,” published in The New (...)
• 13 Also reiterated in her autobiography: “Movement never lies” (Graham, 1991 122).
• 14 Like Whitman and Duncan before her, Graham was exposed to American Delsartism, which was extremely (...)

6Like Whitman, Graham strove to redefine physical beauty: in classical ballet technique, pointe shoes are used to create the illusion of lightness and ethereality, as if the female dancer was floating effortlessly on stage, but Graham wanted to show the truth of the body in motion—as she says herself, she “showed effort,” showed tension, broke classical lines to create new ones in an endeavor to present organic and true movement. In this sense, her quest is much akin to Whitman’s as depicted above by Killingsworth: she wanted her audience to rethink what “ugly” and “beautiful” movement was, and to find the sacred beauty of the body in all movement, and in the physicality, the muscular strength of the human body. Everywhere in Leaves of Grass Whitman praises the strength of physically active bodies.12 Graham’s “physical morality,” like Whitman’s, rejects the social oppression of the body and of human sexuality, the fakeness of conventions, and looks for the purest expression of human movement. As she often famously said, “Movement is the one speech which cannot lie” (Armitage 99)13—a statement that was inspired by what she calls her “first dance lesson” taught by her alienist father, who told her that she must always “look for the truth” (Graham, 1991 19-21). The body is the ultimate locus of truth, since, according to the principles of Delsarte that inspired her,14 the body doesn’t lie; a person can lie in various ways, through speech, costume, actions, but the body will always reveal the truth. This conception of the body, inherited from her father and the influence of Delsartism, has shaped Graham’s conception of dance throughout her entire career, which she describes as “a gesture toward the truth” (Graham, 1991 20). Graham’s “physical morality” relies on discipline and mindful practice: as she explains in her “Primer for Action” destined to dancers, “freedom may only be achieved through discipline […]. Your years of training and discipline in your craft and in the cultivation of yourself as a human being have made it possible for you to be free” (Graham, 1941 178-87). Influenced by Zen Buddhism and Jungian psychoanalysis, Graham built a technique that advocated a strong mind-body connection, in accordance with these principles. As Mark Wheeler explains in his article on “The Orient in America: Fertile Soil for Martha Graham,” “by mentioning ‘spontaneity,’ ‘freedom’ and ‘simplicity’ as desired qualities of the dancer and in identifying discipline as the only way to achieve them [she] echoes Suzuki in the following instance addressing the 1957 Conference of Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis in Cuernavaca, Mexico” (Helpern 49).

• 15 Increase Mather refers to the “disorderliness of dancers” in his “Arrow Against Profane and Promisc (...)
• 16 Another passage of “the Fourth Remove” also refers to their dance in that way: “they had sung and d (...)
• 17 “On the shoulders of a comely youth uprose the head and branching antlers of a stag; a second, huma (...)
• 18 As Jacqueline Shea Murphy delineates in her chapter on Graham and Indians, Graham integrated Native (...)
• 19 In her “Affirmations,” she writes that “the Indian dance […] is for awareness of life, complete rel (...)
• 20 “Martha Graham offers a revival,” The New York Times, May 12, 1944.
• 21 For further discussion of the poem, see my article “Dance in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” 26-27

7The body and the mind are perfectly indissociable for Graham. In her notes for her ballet Death and Entrances, Graham reflects on the physicality of the struggle between light and darkness, between the “real being of good, of creative energy” and the “powers of darkness” which she presents in Puritan terms as a “witches’ Sabbath.” This struggle, represented through dance in her ballet, is a physical one: “Strength comes from a use of the muscles—the athletes of God wrestled and grew strong. They chose, & they acted. What I do must be done in full sunlight of awareness—I must learn a means of changing the mood—the state of consciousness—without double-mindedness or tho’t of gain” (Graham, 1973 87). Virtue and strength therefore lay with the body, not the mind alone, in a very Nietzschean revaluation of the place of the body. For Graham, the morality—truth and virtue—of the American body also meant exposing the truth of its origins, and acknowledging its Native roots. While Puritan anti-dance writings presented dance as disorderly, and equated it to savageness and the devil,15 Graham rejects this “priestly mode of valuation” and its mortification of the flesh in favor of a celebration of moral physicality that embraces the “savage” and the “primitive” in her quest for the true roots of American spirituality. In her captivity narrative, Mary Rowlandson represents the ritual dances of the Indians as a hellish vision: “This was the dolefulest night that ever my eyes saw. Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell”16 (“First Remove,” Rowlandson 8). Similarly, in Hawthorne’s short story “The Maypole of Merrymount,” the dancers (who will eventually be reprimanded by the Puritans and forced to conform to their values) wear clothes and adopt attitudes and movements that make them look like beasts or savages.17 In her quest to find true indigenous American movement, Graham explored Native American movement in depth; though in her own admission she “never [did] an Indian dance” (Graham, 1991 176), having always refused to create imitative art, Native American movement was profoundly inspirational to her technique,18 and she retained the energy and spirit of Native American dances (“I’ve received an excitement and a blessing and a wonderment from the Indians,” Graham, 1991 176), which she identifies as a celebration of life.19 Ballets like Primitive Mysteries (1931) or El Penitente (1940) draw from Native American ritual dances as well as from medieval mysteries to depict the mystical union with the divine. Both ballets are quite minimalistic in form, replicating the starkness of what could be construed as Puritan aesthetics, but this simplicity is profoundly infused with vitality and joy—notably in the group dances that take on a festive air. Set in the Native rituals of the American Southwest, El Penitente was built like a Medieval mystery play, and retains some of its austerity in the simplicity of the choreography, along with moments of joy and humor: scenes of penance and flagellation are followed by a joyful group dance, and, as Jack Anderson notes in his October 10, 1989 review of the piece for The New York Times, the ballet features “sly touches of theological humor, as when the wiggly Mary Magdalen tempts the Penitent with a piece of fruit, thereby recalling Eve’s temptation of Adam.” In his review of Primitive Mysteries, dance critic John Martin20 writes that the ballet “communicates with complete persuasiveness the ritual integrity of a religious people who have welcomed the young gods of the white man into the company of their own ageless Indian deities of earth and sky.” Graham’s combination of Native and Christian references, of primitiveness, of Eastern and Western cultures, recalls the cosmopolitan whirl of dances depicted in the fourth section of Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Storm” (342-43): like Whitman, who presents all types of dances—Eastern and Western, “barbaric” and “civilized”—with no cultural nor aesthetic hierarchy whatsoever in this section of the poem, Graham seeks to celebrate the universality of physical expression, the sacredness of every human body which offers itself in worship through dance.21

• 22 In this endeavor, Graham echoes Emerson’s plea for self-reliance, and argues for an indigenously Am (...)

8By combining Native American and Christian rituals, Graham explores the roots of American spirituality, between the Puritan impulse towards rigidity and the Native urge towards physicality and joyful energy. Taking the raw, wild, and unrestrained energy of Native American dance and integrating it as the “primitive source” (Armitage, 100) of American dance (along with African-American dances), Graham unearths the origins of American movement, thus rejecting its affiliation with the European tradition22. As Mark Franko explains in his article “Emotivist Movement and Histories of Modernism: The Case of Martha Graham,” Graham thus rejected imitative dance, which she associated with the European ballet tradition: “Graham’s writing during this period also embroils imitation (to be avoided) and unique presence (to be fostered) in a convoluted symbolism of male and female roles. Seeking the indigenously American, Graham was led to eschew imitative dance which she linked to European ballet and its reputation for effeminacy” (Franko, 1991 117).

• 23 Graham was well-versed in Oriental philosophy, Buddhism and yoga, which she mentions several times (...)

9If dance is “the affirmation of life through movement” (Armitage, 103), then it is not imitative, but life itself; for Franko, “the intention of this work is to remain at the origin of presence, not at the origin of meaning” (Franko, 1991 118). This definition of Graham’s intention recalls Archibald McLeish’s contention that “A poem should not mean / But be” in the final lines of his Ars Poetica: Graham’s ars choreographica is a celebration of life, of its vitality and constant renewal. In her rejection of imitation, Graham also rejects the artificially feminine, and the association of femininity with imitation instead of original creativity. For Graham, “virile gestures are evocative of the only true beauty. Ugliness may be actually beautiful if it cries out with the voice of power” (Armitage 97). 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 passage showcases Graham’s complex conception of the virile feminine: 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. Graham pioneered a particular brand of maieutics in her technique: for her, the truth of female movement originates in the pelvis. In her trademark contraction and release technique, the contraction comes from the pelvis, which becomes for her the locus of truth and of emotions in the body23. In her autobiography, she explains that this aspect of her teaching was so groundbreaking that her students had nicknamed her school the “house of the pelvic truth”:

• 24 “The action is built on the legend rather than on the facts of her life, and the scene is laid in t (...)

11Danced for the first time in the Bennington College Theatre in August 1940, and performed for the first time in its definitive version in New York City in January 1941, Letter to the World is part of the group of pieces known as Graham’s “American” ballets, like American Document, Frontier or Appalachian Spring. The ballet is divided into five acts, and alternates scenes exploring the interior life of Dickinson and others representing her public persona—all in non-chronological order, to evoke an oneiric temporality, and also possibly the universality of the struggle against the Puritan repression featured in the ballet. In the program, Graham states that the piece is based on the “legend” of Emily Dickinson, not on the facts24: this is doubly true since the only edition of Dickinson’s poems that was available when Graham choreographed the ballet was the Higginson and Todd edition—a highly controversial one that had given titles to Dickinson’s poems and erased all her poetic “quirks” as to grammar, spelling or punctuation. This edition and the representation her first editors gave of the poetess is largely responsible for the enduring “legend” of Emily Dickinson as a recluse and weird poetess who withdrew from the world because of a broken heart. Critic Edwin Denby refers to this legend in his review of the ballet: “There is a legend that Emily Dickinson fell in love with a married minister, whom she saw once or twice and might have run away with” (Denby 54). This legend is what underscores Graham’s ballet as well, as visible in the program: “the loss of her lover forces her to face her destiny as a poet with the realization that her happiness must be found in the intensity of her work. That out of the tragedy of loss will be born the poet, is her ‘Letter to the World’” (program for Letter to the World, 1941). Beyond the cliché of the lovesick spinster, Graham took this limiting legend and turned it into a portrayal of the female artist’s fight for freedom: her fight against Puritan values in her experience of love and desire, and her fight to find her voice as an artist in a stifling environment.

• 25 Emily Dickinson, letter to Th. W. Higginson, L261, April 25, 1862: “Thank you for the surgery—it wa (...)
• 26 Dickinson’s third letter to Higginson, written on June 7, 1862, lets us understand that Higginson w (...)

13We can see here another example of Graham’s “feminine masculinity,” since—if each character is a facet of Dickinson’s personality—the male figures are facets of her character, the virile, masculine driving force that Graham identifies as the creative urge within the female creator. The ballet unfolds to a score by Hunter Johnson, and to the rhythm of the 36 poems recited by “The One who Speaks.” The first act, “Because I see New Englandly,” presents the two Emilys in Amherst: it opens on a tableau in which “The One who Dances” is sitting on a bench while “The One who Speaks” comes on stage reciting “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” This poem has often been read as the “proof” that Dickinson voluntarily shrank from publication in a Victorian display of modesty, refusing to expose herself publicly “like a Frog.” It attests to the ambiguity of Dickinson’s relationship to publication, and to the extent to which Puritan conventions had been internalized by the poetess; although she wrote to Higginson presumably to seek advice in the perspective of publication, she also repeatedly proclaimed that this was not her intention. The “refusal” to publish expressed in “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” testifies to the unshakable and overwhelming weight of Puritanism and Victorian conventions which urged women not to expose themselves in the public sphere, instilled in them a disgust in seeing their works passed on from one editor to the next and from one reader to the next—where the public handling of the textual body echoes an inappropriate handling of the physical body. Another form of repression of the woman writer was that enforced by the patriarchal literary canon, incarnated in Dickinson’s life by her father and by her “mentor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom she had written in 1862 asking for advice on her poems, and who performed, as she put it, “surgery” on her texts.25 He thus quickly made her understand that publication was not an option.26 Emily Dickinson was ambivalent as to publication, at once attached to her native region and her home and eager to exist outside the domestic sphere in her New England environment, and Graham seems to have perceived this ambiguity in the poetess in a particularly acute manner. She also projected her own struggles with a patriarchal and deeply religious environment on to her depiction of the poet’s desire to break free: the piece is built around a system of oppositions, a pattern of obstacles (both interior and exterior) to the artist’s “free, joyful expression,” and the act of overcoming these obstacles. Here again, Graham echoes Zarathustra when he concludes the second section of “Old and New Tablets” with the following words: “For must there not exist that over which one dances and dances away? Must there not exist, for the sake of the light and the lightest, moles and heavy dwarves?” (Nietzsche, 2005 171) The presence of what Nietzsche calls “the Spirit of Heaviness” (Nietzsche 2005, 171) is necessary to goad the dancer on so she can overcome her limiting circumstances and her personal limitations—the Puritan and patriarchal oppression that has been integrated and endures within her.

• 27 See Rosella Simonari’s article on “The Ancestress Figure” in Appalachian Spring and Letter to the W (...)

15Martha Graham experienced a similar struggle, which she represented in Letter to the World through the figure of the Ancestress,27 which was inspired by her great-grandmother:

• 28 “and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid.”( L261, April 25, 1862). (...)

16The Ancestress appears in the second act, “The Postponeless Creature,” the embodiment of rigidity and death which stifles all the joyful life bursting in the first act; the dancers of the group dance return to the stage in mourning clothes, and the Ancestress chases “The One who Dances” until she finally catches her. The lover is powerless to drive this creature away, and “The One who Speaks” is finally the one who manages to do so by reciting one of Dickinson’s most blasphemous poems, “The Bible is an Antique volume / Written by faded Men” (F1577). Recalling her role as the Ancestress in Letter to the World, Jane Dudley remembers that “Martha really felt that Puritanism was the death element in life, and sexuality was the life element in life” (Helpern 17). In Letter to the World, the “life element,” the life-affirming “free, joyful action” that feeds creativity and allows free expression is associated to childhood in Acts One and Three. Act Three, “The Little Tippler,” presents a playful Dickinson: Graham’s choice of costume echoes the frequent gender shifts in Dickinson’s poems about childhood. As Denby notes, “The heroine herself appears at one point in a funny dress with trousers under it, and plays games with herself like a schoolgirl, even upsetting the bench and doing happy stunts on it” (Denby 54). The trousers can be a reference both to the type of undergarments worn in the nineteenth century as well as to a form of cross-dressing which is frequently encountered in Dickinson’s poems: in poem F1096 “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” the speaker changes gender when reminiscing about the days of childhood (“when a Boy and Barefoot,” line 10) just as Dickinson compares herself to a boy “singing” “by the Burying Ground” in one of the letters to Higginson, which makes it most clear that her “scared-little-girl” persona is nothing but a pose.28 In the poem “I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that” (F225), the power associated to the newly granted title of “wife” is also expressed in masculine terms through the insertion of the figure of the “Czar” in the third line (“I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that— / That other state— / I’m Czar, I’m ‘Woman’ now— ”). We can easily see therefore how Graham would have been inspired by this kind of “gender trouble” in her own conception of masculine femininity. Act Three is also the one in which sexual desire is expressed in the most playful manner: in the scene entitled “Dear March, come in,” a duet with Merce Cunningham, the sexual innuendo contained in the invitation to March (portrayed as a man who has been travelling for a long time in the poem) to “come upstairs” with the speaker (“Oh March, Come right upstairs with me”), who has “so much to tell,” is mirrored in the choreography when “The One who Dances,” leaning back on the bench (which symbolizes transgression—the place where the naughty child gets sent to when (s)he is punished)—does a series of contractions and a wide straddle split, while “March” demonstrates his virile strength through a series of “March jumps.” For Graham and for Dickinson, childhood is represented as the time when all sorts of metamorphoses are allowed in the form of cross-dressing, playful make-believe, disguise—a time when free expression is possible, and when creativity expresses itself unfettered by the obligations that weigh on the adult. As in the end of Act Two, the child appears as the figure most able to counter the mortiferous influence of Puritanism. The poem used to drive the Ancestress away in Act Two is part of the series of poems in which the speaker adopts the playful mask of the child to get away with blasphemy—such as F1752: “God is indeed a jealous God,” for example, where God is vexed because the children would rather play with each other than with Him.

• 29 Barbara Morgan’s photograph from the final solo capturing the kick is a particularly good illustrat (...)

19According to Lamothe, “what Graham found in Nietzsche was inspiration for dancing religion—that is, for presenting dance, in her dances, as capable of revaluing the hostility toward bodies, female bodies in particular, that she believed Americans had inherited from Christian belief and practice” (Lamothe 8). Graham was profoundly inspired by Nietzsche’s revaluation process, Umwertung, in choreographing Letter to the World, which explores and revalues the weight of Puritanism on female identity through the figure of Emily Dickinson; but the ballet is also a form of self-exploration, where Graham examines her own struggle with the Puritan tradition. The final solo, “Letter to the World,” showcases the female artist’s struggle to impose her own voice and establish her artistic legacy in a Puritan patriarchal world. The solo exemplifies Graham’s use of Nietzschean Umwertung in the sense that it is also a choreographic experiment, where Graham deploys her trademark style: the dramatic use of fabric and costumes to express tension or elation,29 in a sartorial reenactment of the dichotomy between constraint and release, as well as Graham’s signature technique (using the floor, flexed feet, contraction and release), revalue what is considered beautiful movement, and beautiful dancing by a woman.