There are some people who take the world that they live in and turn it on its ear. They do not settle for has always been, but seek out ways to change the world that they live in. These are the people that blaze a trail for those who will come behind them.



When we think about the artists who have created a new way of looking at art, we probably think about Picasso and Pollock. These two artists created an art that had never been seen and forced the people of their generation to see things in a different way. Martha Graham is an artist who has changed the way that people see and experience dance.

When Martha Graham looked at the stage productions that were being shown on Broadway and found them to be an escape from the social situation for just a precious few elite members of society. For her, it was more important to show the pain and suffering of the people that lived around her in the streets of New York. She started to dance with the pain that she witnessed every day.

The theater on Broadway provided a means of escape, but only for those who had the money to indulge. Graham saw the stage as an escape from the real world that surrounded it. Her vision was to bring the reality of life to the stage and give movement and motion to the turmoil of the real New York City.

The stage is a black box with the twelve women dancing a dance that can only be described as agony set to motion. The undulations of the women as they move across the stage are a depiction of the collective downward spiral of so many that was living in society during that time. It was a dance that very few people could classify or even understand.

There were of course critics of Grahams work mostly because it was so misunderstood. Because her dance was so different than anything else that existed it took many years before it could be appreciated. Today, almost twenty years after Martha Graham died, we see dance as an art form that can be an expression that uses the body to communicate.

There were critics of Graham's work, however. It was difficult for them to understand what she was trying to accomplish with her work and what standpoint she was working from. It took many years for people to begin to understand that the dance that was created by Martha Graham was self expression in its agonizing glory.

Martha Graham was a woman who was unafraid to perform her art the way that she felt it should be performed and not what was expected from the audience. She was a pioneer who never cared what the critics thought of her work, but performed it because she was passionate about her art. This is the true meaning of artistic integrity.

There are very few people who are brave enough to push an entire art form into the future. She taught the world that the medium that is used to make a statement does not matter. Artists are those who push fearlessly into the future and bring their art with them for those in future generations to enjoy.