Martha Graham in love and war The life in the work

Mark Franko

Book - 2014

"Often called the Picasso, Stravinsky, or Frank Lloyd Wright of the dance world, Martha Graham revolutionized ballet stages across the globe. Using newly discovered archival sources, award-winning choreographer and dance historian Mark Franko reframes Graham's most famous creations, those from the World War II era, by restoring their rich historical and personal context. Graham matured as an artist during the global crisis of fascism, the conflict of World War II, and the post-war period that ushered in the Cold War. Franko focuses on four of her most powerful works, American Document (1938), Appalachian Spring (1944), Night Journey (1948), and Voyage (1953), tracing their connections to Graham's intense feelings of anti-fasc...ism and her fascination with psychoanalysis. Moreover, Franko explores Graham's intense personal and professional bond with dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins. The author traces the impact of their constantly changing feelings about each other and about their work, and how Graham wove together strands of love, passion, politics, and myth to create a unique and iconically American school of choreography and dance"--Publisher's website.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Oxford University Press 2014.
Language
English
Main Author
Mark Franko (author)
Physical Description
231 p. : ill. ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780199367856
  • Myth, nationalism and embodiment in American document
  • Politics under erasure : regionalism as cryptology
  • The invention of Martha Graham : emergence and the strictures
  • Jocasta at Colonus : post-Freudian landscapes
  • "A possible somewhere (an impossible scene setting)."
Review by Library Journal Review

Martha Graham looms large in the annals of modern dance, and she has been the subject of a number of biographies. This is not one of them. Instead, Franko (dance, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz; The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s) offers "a historically contextualized and biographically informed analysis of her work between 1938 and 1953, arguably her most productive period." Delving deep into four of Graham's works from this period-American Document, Appalachian Spring, Night Journey, and Voyage-he unearths a range of political, personal, artistic, literary, and other influences that informed her choreography. Franko explores these influences as well as Graham's personal and professional relationship with fellow dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins to, as he puts it, "situate the life in the work as the life of the work." VERDICT Dance scholars will appreciate the meticulous research and careful analysis in this study of an iconic dancer.-Carolyn M. Mulac, Chicago P.L. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.