Martha Graham

Martha Graham built a language for modern dance out of the breath and the pelvis and used it for seventy years. She did not begin training until she was twenty-two, which was thought impossibly late, after seeing Ruth St Denis perform; she spent eight years with Denishawn and then left because she wanted to make work about something other than exoticism. The technique she developed is built on contraction and release - the torso curving sharply on the out-breath and opening on the in - and on floor work, bare feet, and weight rather than lightness, which is the opposite of everything ballet trains for. Her subjects were Greek myth seen from inside the women, American frontier religion, and interior states: Lamentation in 1930 is a seated figure in a tube of jersey pulling against the fabric, and it is about grief in a way no dance had been. Appalachian Spring in 1944, with Copland's score and Noguchi's set, won him the Pulitzer. She made a hundred and eighty-one works, danced into her seventies, stopped, drank heavily, nearly died, and came back at eighty to choreograph for another decade. Her company is the oldest dance company in America, and the technique is taught worldwide as a discipline in its own right. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976, the first dancer to receive it. Her dancers included Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Erick Hawkins, whom she married. Noguchi designed more than twenty sets for her over three decades. She said that great dancers are not great because of their technique but because of their passion.

• Lived: 1894 CE – 1991 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist