Martha Graham’s territory of innumerable dances and
a self-sufficient dance technique is a vast but closed territory, since to
create an art out of one’s experience alone is ultimately a self-limiting act.
If there had been other choreographers with Graham’s gifts and her stature, her
word might have seemed a more balanced part of the story of American dance. But
as she built her repertory, her own language seemed to shut out all other kinds.
Even when an audience thinks it discerns traces of influence from other dance
styles, the totality of Graham’s theatrical idiom, its control of costumes,
lights, and every impulse of the dance makes the reference seen a mirage. Dance
is not her main subject. It is only her servant. Graham had
achieved her autonomy by 1931. By that time, three giant figures who had
invented the new twentieth-century dance were dead: Serger Diaghilev, Anna
Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan. Their era ended with them, and their dance values
nearly disappeared. Their colleagues Michel Fokine and Ruth St. Denis lived on
in American like whales on the beach. During the twenties, Martha Graham and her
colleagues had rescued art-dance from vaudeville and movies and musical comedy
and all the resonances of the idyllic mode in the United States, but in so doing
they closed the channels through which different kinds of dance could speak to
one another and these stayed closed for half a century. Modern dance dedicated
itself to deep significance. It gave up lightness, it gave up a wealth of exotic
color, it gave up a certain kind of theatrical wit and that age-old mobile
exchange between a dancer and the dancer’s rhythmical and musical material. No
material in modern dance was bodies. Modern dance excluded its own theatrical
traditions of casual play, gratuitous liveliness, the spontaneous pretense, and
the rainbow of genres that had formed it. But all these things survived in the
public domain, where they had always lived, and they have continued to surface
in American dance, if only by accident. What is the main purpose of the passage
A. To discuss Martha Graham’s influences to modern dance.
B. To trace the origins of different dance techniques.
C. To argue the role of modern dance as an artistic form of
expression.
D. To compare several famous women choreographers of the twentieth
century.