Martha Graham

I went on to read Armitage's compilation of the first contemporary reviews of Martha Graham's dancing, from the 1920s and the 1930s. Curiously enough, I could have asked the same question about filming her, the earliest record is from the forties. She wouldn't be filmed until the fifties and the sixties and by then she was, well, much older so what you see is more like a reminder of what the first audiences saw, than the thing itself. But this is not the best way of looking at something as alive and transitory as dance--every dance is dance, whether performed by a twenty year old or an octogenarian.

At the same time, just as I would have wanted to see one of those famous "suspended" jetées of Nijinsky, I'd want the Martha Graham of show more boneless youth. show less