How Did Martha Contribute To Dance

Martha was inspired by St. Denis performance at the Mason Opera House and enrolled in an arts oriented junior college and later at the Denishawn School, which was founded by Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn to teach techniques world dance. She worked a period of time with Ted Shawn and Martha improved her dancing skills. She is recognized for her first role of an attacked Aztec maiden, “Xochital” and a dance made for her by Shawn. By 1923, eight years after entering Denishawn, she found herself dancing in the vaudeville revue Greenwich Village Follies. It is where she was able to design her own dances. She wanted to expand her style of dance where she went to Eastman School of Music, where she was able to constraints of public performances. There she was able to take control of her classes and dance programs. She was given the opportunity to expand her experimental dance and she began to create her own style. …show more content…
Martha believed ballet was mostly consisted of flow and grace, she wanted to change and improved the left violent traditions passions, by expressing emotional and spiritual themes that other dances ignored. She was able to achieve this through the repetition of sexual and violent movements. With her Eastman students, she formed her and now famous Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in New York. One of her works was “Frontier” in 1935, a solo performance about a pioneer woman. With Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese –American sculptor helped Martha create this piece by creating a sparse and designs that replaced flat backdrops with three dimensional objects. Both where were able to revolutionized set design through this type if