A Technique for Power: Reconfiguring Economies of Energy in Martha Graham's Early Work

Abstract

In the mid- to late-1920s, Martha Graham began to elaborate techniques which would have a long-term impact on the evolution of modern dance. She developed new ways of using energy in movement, which liberated her dancers (exclusively female until 1938) from the constraints on corporeal expression she associated with 'the puritanical concept of life' (Graham 1980, 46). Graham's techniques were focussed on empowerment, and can be described metaphorically in terms of 'economy', not simply because of her espousal of the typically modernist aesthetic of paring down and reducing to essentials, but also because of the importance to her technique of 'economics' in the sense of regulating the distribution, restraint and expenditure of energy in movement. As French movement researcher Hubert Godard has argued, 'dance brings into play a body-vector which does not define itself in terms of its structure, but in terms of the ways in which it organises intensity and intentionality'.' In what follows, I shall argue for the central role of economies of energy and their relevance to empowerment in Graham's early technique and training, seen in the context of American modernism and its gendering. I shall then discuss Rudolf Laban's analysis of 'effort' and later concepts of 'effort-shape', and will draw on these ideas in examining three early works (Heretic, 1929, Lamentation, 1930, and Primitive Mysteries, 1931). Finally, I shall assess the usefulness for dance analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of 'habitus' and 'field', referring here to Gay Morris's recent discussion in these pages of 'Bourdieu, the Body, and Graham's Post-War Dance' (Morris 2001), and arguing that Graham's early work transforms embodied subjectivity and establishes a corporeal 'philosophy of the dance'. Having studied at the Denishawn School for six years,2 and subsequently performed in The Greenwich Village Follies from