Martha Graham is arguably the most legendary figure in U.S. modern dance. During a prolific career spanning nearly seven decades, she choreographed over 180 works, and she performed into her sixties. Following her death in 1991, however, a decade-long legal battle, between designated heir Ron Protas and the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance concerning the rights to her choreography, put her legacy in jeopardy (Lee Reference Lee2004). In 2004, a Federal District Court awarded the Center the rights to stage most of Graham's dances; however the duration and vitriol of this fight had significant consequences, not least of which was that for several years, former company members were prohibited from staging or performing any of her repertory (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2010, 65). Ironically, it was Richard Move, a drag performer who began impersonating Graham in 1996, not any of her acolytes, who brought the late choreographer and her work to life during several years of stagnation.

Recent memory of Graham has been further complicated by her self-destructive and idiosyncratic behavior during the latter half of her life, when alcoholism and a “relentless self-performance of character” (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2010, 64) made her a ready target for parody. One only need look to Move's successful nearly twenty-year career impersonating the artist in his myriad “Martha@” appearances to appreciate the degree to which, on her death, Graham left a readily inhabitable “dynamic emptiness” (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2010, 66). Mediatized images of Graham that circulated in popular culture usually did not help the matter, painting an often-unattractive portrait of patrician privilege, severity, and self-importance. One could argue that, in profound ways, contemporary impressions of Graham have been so influenced by this reductive and ubiquitous iconography that we have lost a sense of who she was as an artist, and even more, as a person.

Dedicated to “rehumanizing” Graham and breathing life into her memory, Mark Franko has written Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work, a labor of admirable scholarly rigor and imagination. In the last several years, the Library of Congress has made available several robust collections of materials once belonging to Graham and her close associates, including her former husband, choreographer Erick Hawkins, composer Aaron Copland, and psychologist Frances G. Wickes. Drawing on these recently processed items, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, as well as myriad primary sources from other collections, Franko's inspired scholarship adds depth and complexity to the Graham we thought we knew. Focusing on the period between 1938 and 1953, which, he argues, was Graham's “most productive period,” Franko reveals the interrelationships and intersections between Graham's life experiences and her art making just before, during, and after World War II. His careful reading and analysis adds personal, intellectual, and psychological dimension to the artist, and reacquaints us with her seeking and sentient sides.

Graham was famous for declaring, “A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths” (quoted in Schwartz Reference Schwartz2010, 61). In Graham's lights, the first death occurs when a dancer is no longer physically capable of performing choreography she once could, and must, therefore, endure watching other, younger dancers perform her roles. Franko alludes to the physical and psychic losses Graham suffered in 1969, when she retired from the stage, and their effects on her engagement in her work as a choreographer. “[S]he had little interest in her own choreography once it was no longer vitally connected to her,” he writes, explaining, “Although Graham continued to be productive …, creating 30 new ballets at the rate of between one to three a year from 1973 through 1991, her ‘afterlife’ engendered a distorted and disjointed replay of what had already transpired in the 1940s” (4).

Focusing on Graham's most generative personal and professional years, therefore, the period in which she was most “alive,” Franko offers “a historically contextualized and biographically informed analysis” (3), the goal of which is to “situat[e] the life in the work as the life of the work” (5). Put another way, the book chronicles the genesis of Graham's perceptions of herself and her life during this period, while also addressing the roles that significant personal relationships and events played in her creative process and resulting works. At the same time, the book allows readers to envision a transitional period of U.S. history through the frame of Graham's personal, political, and artistic convictions.

Progressing chronologically, chapters associate four seminal works—American Document (1938), Appalachian Spring (1944), Night Journey (1948), and Voyage (1953)—with what Franko notes as phases in the development of Graham's approach to choreography, moving from the dramaturgical, to the mythographic, to the psychodramatic. As he argues: “My thesis is that Graham's choreography evolves across the decade from anti-Fascism—becoming veiled as patriotism during WWII—to the archetypal use of myth in the immediate postwar period (1946–48), and is then briefly but unsuccessfully exchanged for a psychodramatic approach to choreography in the early 1950s” (7). Franko's analyses along these lines are not meant solely to serve as illustrations of his methodological framework, however. As they illuminate fascinating elements of each choreographic work and its connection to Graham's life and creative process, chapters build with a larger purpose in mind, to examine “how [Graham's] myth was constructed and the effect it had on her work” (5). “Myth” is a conceptual lynchpin in the book on which Franko's argument turns.

Chapters 1 and 2, which treat American Document and Appalachian Spring, respectively, illustrate dimensions of Graham's dramaturgical phase. According to Franko, Graham's “dramaturgical” works were long (approximately 30 minutes), incorporated both male and female dancers who played “characters,” and employed text-based elements. Text was either delivered as oratory, provided as program notes to clue viewers into the thematic premises of a dance, or used by Graham herself and any collaborators as scenarios or libretti during the creative process (7).

In the case of American Document, a larger story revolves around the addition of Jean Erdman and Erick Hawkins to her company, and the importance of her acquaintance with Erdman's husband, the Jungian-based mythologist Joseph Campbell. While the addition of Hawkins to what had been an all-female company allowed Graham more topical and theatrical range, her conversations with Campbell about psychology and myth were integral to her developing worldview and sense of her work within it. Although I will not elaborate here, it is also worth noting that the book's serious consideration of Hawkins, not merely as Graham's dance and romantic partner, but as a consequential artist and intellectual in his own right, offers a treasure trove of material about Hawkins's contemporaneous creative work, and goes deeper into their relationship than have received sources.

For his part, Campbell introduced Graham to the literature of Greek mythology, which would become a foundation of her work beginning in the postwar years. But, perhaps even more significantly, he articulated for Graham connections between myth, creativity, the unconscious, and embodiment: “Myth comes from the realm of the Muse, the realm of inspiration, inspiration that comes from below the level of consciousness,” Campbell wrote (quoted on pp. 26–27). According to Franko, the “consequence of these ideas [for Graham] was that the dancing body was also placed below the level of consciousness” (27). In other words, dance communicated as would a palimpsest, on several levels at once, and sometimes in ways only Graham could perceive.

Campbell not only nurtured Graham's interest in mythology, as a literary basis for her artistic expression, but also helped her understand the relationship between myth and the psyche. His theories also deepened Graham's existing belief—a belief endemic to mid-century dance modernism—that movement could make manifest subliminal thoughts, feelings, and desires residing in the unconscious, thus paving the way for her development of choreographic techniques that allowed the expression of subtextual content. The notion that the physical body, its actions and sensations, could make visible the workings of the unconscious introduced the possibility in Graham's work for what Franko calls “encryption.” Over the course of the book, Franko builds on this term to shed light on the significance of elements within Graham's dances that are “sensed rather than literally seen” (7).

In the case of American Document, for example, encryption allowed Graham to present a version of national identity that indicated both the advantages and vulnerabilities of participatory democracy in the U.S. Fashioned as a pageant or minstrel show walk-around, the dance staged a series of dramatic episodes representing utopic chapters in America's social and political experiment, framed by an Interlocutor's spoken narration. In dialogue with other scholarship (Foulkes Reference Foulkes2002; Graff Reference Graff1997; Manning Reference Manning and Morris1996, Reference Manning2004), Franko investigates American Document’s relative accessibility to audiences compared to Graham's previous dances, which many had considered obscure. For instance, through its depiction of watershed moments in the nation's history via universalizing tropes, including the Puritan settlement, the naming of the country, and the emancipation of African-American slaves, the dance elided possible controversy over whether or not these were the most emblematic moments to portray. Along similar lines, Franko suggests that American Document provided points of identification that reached audiences in universal terms. Hawkins's “One Man,” for example, stood for himself but also represented the “Common Man,” or the collective whole, i.e., “Man” (35). As indicated by the Interlocutor: “This man has a power. It is himself, and you” (quoting the spoken text, 41). Franko points out that in this case, “utopian” symbolism supplanted myth in this “pro-democracy” work (174).

Revealing aspects of encryption, Franko digs even deeper into the meanings of the dance. For instance, he points out that the pieced-together narrative of events delivered by the Interlocutor assembles a collection of viewpoints on selected national milestones rather than a singular, definitive account. Franko believes it is likely that some viewers would have read into this artistic choice Graham's valuation of pluralism, and a veiled comparison to Fascism's monolithic dictation of truth. Further, because selected events are embodied as dance, Graham's version of events illuminates the element of their process. They are ongoing, therefore, not fixed, and in this aspect they are flexible yet potentially unstable. Thus, while celebrating democracy, American Document nevertheless “figured” (32) it as “something that needs to be sought for, something that is not yet thoroughly established” (42), a system of government that was, in fact, “precarious” (43). In these ways, we come to learn that through American Document, Graham expressed her fears about the fragility of democracy, while, at the same time using the work as a foil for her anti-Fascist views.

Like American Document, Appalachian Spring “insinuate[ed] … absent characters and actions beneath or within what [was] visible” (7). Set to Aaron Copland's score, the dance revolved around the wedding of a Bride and Husbandman, and involved other members of their frontier community. Franko examines how the work enacted a marriage ritual that had private significance for Graham, while, at the same time, resonating with the nation's celebratory but apprehensive mood nearing the end of World War II.

One of Franko's important contributions to scholarly understanding of Appalachian Spring comes in his close reading of two scenarios Graham wrote during the preparation of the musical score in 1943, which she shared with Copland through written correspondence, she in New York City and he in Hollywood (48). First to examine these scenarios, Jacqueline Shea-Murphy revealed the presence of an Indian Girl character in an early conception of the work, a character never actually portrayed in its final version, but who asserts a palpable presence even in her absence (Reference Shea-Murphy2007). Along these lines, Franko notes other personae Graham initially imagined in the work but that she ultimately omitted, most importantly the Escaped Slave and the Abolitionist (50).

In fascinating ways, Franko's analysis alternates between Copland's score, created based on Graham's second scenario in which these characters were present, and the staged version of the dance, in which they are absent. In this movement back and forth, he uncovers relationships among those characters who finally made it to the stage, and their antecedents, showing that each “can be turned back upon their origins.” According to Franko: “[O]ne could … sense a certain dislocation between the narrative implied by the score and the narrative implied by the choreography. The dislocation set the stage for the emergence of the erased characters at a fairly subliminal level” (55).

Explaining that the country's patriotic mood circa 1944 likely had an impact on Graham's decision to forsake these characters, he makes manifest how they “haunt” the dance nonetheless (57). Further, he argues convincingly that the “dislocation” between the musical and choreographic scores related anti-conventional and anti-Fascist sentiments in what appeared to be a straightforward dance about a wedding (62). Building on this contention, Franko reveals other dimensions of Appalachian Spring’s subliminal political “edge,” communicated through its veiled critique of the institution of marriage (drawing on Kowal Reference Kowal2010), evident especially in the Bride's second solo entitled “Moment of Crisis” (63), and through its muted opposition to wartime nationalism, expressed through Graham's “impatience with narrative” (64).

Increasingly, according to Franko, Graham used myth to submerge “hidden messages of a political and personal nature” (7–8) in her work, blurring boundaries between her life and her art. Her deployment of encryption in her dramaturgical works are inklings of this, especially in Appalachian Spring, in which the dance revolves around a wedding between the Bride and the Husbandman, played by herself and her eventual husband, Hawkins. Here the dancers embody archetypes within a “national mythology” (79) whose actions possess meaning within the narrative and symbolic frameworks of the dance, and also for the very dancers performing these actions.

In “mythographic” works, such as Errand into the Maze, Cave of the Heart, and Night Journey, Graham turned again to myth as a means of living in and through her choreography in the course of her turbulent relationship with Hawkins. In his words: “The intricate workings of myth she arrived at were determined by the need to both publicly perform and conceal from public awareness personal rituals concerning their relationship” (9). During the mid- to late-1940s, Graham looked most often to the literature of Greek mythology, for its ability to fuse archetypal, ritual, psychological, and sociological elements within a unified story line. Using herself as a dramatic center of gravity, Graham interpreted these narratives from a distinctly feminine, and personal, point of view.

In Chapter 3, Franko lays a foundation for his ideas about Graham's use of myth for the purposes of subliminal encryption through interpretations of proto-mythographic dances such as Dark Meadow (1946) and Errand into the Maze (1947). Referring to the former, he contends that “encryption allowed Graham to display, but also to bury in plain sight, a personal discourse on love, desire, and isolation” (79). Heavily laden in Jungian symbolism, Dark Meadow was impenetrable to audiences and critics alike (79). The more accessible Errand into the Maze (1947) went deeper into this psycho-personal vein, enacting a conflict between a female Theseus, played by Graham, and a Minotaur, who embodied “a monstrosity of the heroine's own making” (87).

In his reading of Errand, Franko braids together a compelling story about Graham's anguish following a separation from Hawkins that was complicated by her therapeutic, and possible romantic, relationship with Erich Fromm, with whom she was in psychotherapy at the time. Advancing his thesis about the differentiating role of encryption in Graham's work, he asserts: “What started in 1944 as a choreographic technique for encoding concealed meaning became a way to invite the spectator to an active investigation of this concealment” (88). In other words, on the level of personal awareness, Graham intended her dances to serve audiences in similar ways as they served her: as a means through which to work through the “maze” of the psyche. Adding another contextual layer to this picture, Franko introduces the possibility of a political reading of the work, this time envisioning the conflict between Theseus and her foe as “battle with fear in the immediate postwar years [when] Fascism still hung in the air as a compelling point of reference for irrational violence” (90).

Night Journey, a work that culminated Graham's mythographic phase, also presaged the end of her relationship with Hawkins. Exploring themes of incestuous desire, the “actual and the dream” (107), and personal ruin in its adaptation of Sophocles's Oedipus the King, Graham cast herself in the role of Jocasta and Hawkins as her son/husband, Oedipus. In Chapter 4 a paradox unfolds, disclosing how, on the one hand, the dance represented a crowning achievement in Graham's career, for its deployment of myth as a multivalent expressive vehicle, and, on the other hand, it played out the most pressing issues standing between Graham and Hawkins, including their fifteen-year age difference, Graham's jealousy of Hawkins's youth and her “insecurities about aging” (131), and Hawkins's struggle for autonomy and recognition in her shadow (140–1).

In compelling ways Night Journey itself offers a richly textured analytic tapestry allowing Franko, alongside Graham, to weave together deftly the thematic strands of encryption and myth. Graham built interpretive dimension into the work on the levels of character and symbolic action, and their interplay with William Schuman's score, designating the artist as psychoanalyst, and inviting the audience to assume the role of the analysand. In Franko's words: “It was … a culturally coded invitation to the audience to desublimate—to get beyond its disgust and accept what it beholds as an engagement with the unconscious” (130). In his role as scholar, Franko methodically uncovers layers of personal, psychological, and symbolic meanings in the dance. At the same time, his historiographic contextualization of the work moves in a graceful choreography among his many sources, which include but are not limited to interviews with dancers Hawkins and Bertram Ross (who played the role of Oedipus after Hawkins's departure), excerpts of written correspondence (especially between Graham and Schuman, and Graham and Hawkins), reviews of the work, passages of relevant modernist literature (Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats), psychoanalytic writings by Fromm and Otto Rank, and noteworthy precedent scholarship (Burt Reference Burt1998; Morris Reference Morris2001, Reference Morris2006). Over the course of the chapter, we come to see how, by the late 1940s, Graham's life and art had, in essence, fused. Franko demonstrates poignantly how, “Through Jocasta, Graham could experience the self-accusation she would later express to Hawkins, and assume guilt for the relationship's failure” (131). In turn, with the help of Franko's analysis, readers comprehend the magnitude of “Graham's realization of the loss of her relationship to Hawkins” (131), as well as the ways she ritualized this realization through the dance.

Voyage, the subject of Chapter 5, offers a denouement of sorts in Graham's life and work. Created in 1951 after she and Hawkins had separated, and she had entered into psychoanalysis with Wickes, it marked Graham's departure from the mythic, as a basis for choreographic creation, and turn toward the psychoanalytic, or, in the terms of the book, the “psychodramatic.” At the outset, Franko underlines the dance historic import of this work, despite its panning by critics and neglect by scholars. In his words, “Voyage is unique in the annals of twentieth-century choreography because it was conceived in analysis, and developed in correspondence (and probably also in conversation) with the choreographer's analyst” (144). More importantly, however, in the scope of the book, Franko's examination of Voyage brings to light aspects of Graham's interior and creative life that have received little, if no, scholarly attention.

Voyage had a limited shelf life in Graham's repertory, with its last performance in 1955, and there was never a film made of the work. For these reasons, Franko's account is based largely on the recollections of dancers Bertram Ross, Robert Cohan, and Stuart Hodes, with whom Graham worked during the creative process and with whom she performed, as well as on Graham's writing about the dance, especially in letters to Wickes and in her Choreographic Notebooks. According to a program note: “This dance … is a theatre for four characters voyaging on the strange seas of intimacy, caught in the ebb and flow, the tragic and the comic cross-currents of relationships.” What is most important in the dance, Franko suggests, however, is not what actually happened. Rather, the significance rests in how and why it happened, as “Voyage is about the effort to shed delusions” (146). Through his thoughtful reading, Franko makes apparent that Graham produced the work as an “analytic activity” (144)—an artistic means of penetrating her own psychic projections and defenses.

The dance, in fact, inverted or subverted many of the structural formulae on which Graham had built her choreographic legacy thus far. It took place in the here and now, explored tensions between illusion and reality (154), and, perhaps most importantly, featured Graham playing “an idea of herself,” wearing an elegant cocktail dress (Helen McGehee quoted on p. 155). Eschewing techniques of encryption, Graham instead sought to lay bare her anxieties. In Franko's words: “Voyage offered the superimposition of dichotomies without encryption—ambiguities, that is, which lay open to inspection at the surface, and divisions, which constitute psychic uncertainty represented in visual terms” (155). If the mythic had proved the undoing of Graham's relationship to Hawkins, in positioning her as an immortal literary heroine around which the world revolved, Voyage would be its choreographic antithesis, thus presenting Graham as a mortal woman. In the end, Franko implies, Graham could not escape the magnitude of her own image, nor could she evade the mythology about her of her own making. “The tyranny of myth was at once Graham's greatest choreographic invention and her most tragic personal ordeal” (175), he concludes.

Given Voyage’s critical failure and disappearance in the Graham repertoire, it would be easy, as many have, to write off this dance. Yet Franko's determined excavation of a dance that may otherwise have been lost in the archives prompts interesting questions and opens new avenues of scholarly investigation, not only with respect to Graham and her legacy, but also considering the roles that archival research can play in contemporary scholarly and creative arenas. In “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” André Lepecki refers to these possibilities: “In-re-enacting we turn back, and in this return we find in past dances a will to keep inventing” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2010, 46). Lepecki's ideas stem from an article that Franko wrote in Reference Franko1989, in which he theorized that the reconstruction of historical dances was not, as is commonly thought, an act of reproducing an extant work. Instead, as Franko asserts, it involves “reinventing” the original for contemporary purposes, thus engaging in embodied “cultural critique” and “foster[ing] new creativity” (Reference Franko1989, 73).

In many ways, Martha Graham in Love and War carries out these ideas about reinvention as they apply to scholarly research. In “writing as if [Graham's] dances had disappeared and must be rediscovered” (5), Franko engages readers’ imaginations, evoking, through layered analysis and contextualization, thoughts, feelings, and realizations they might have had sitting in the audience watching the original performance. Having accomplished the task of infusing Graham's afterlife with substance and wisdom, at its best the book evokes the “quickened experience”Footnote ¹ one has when watching a good dance, provoking the reader to probe deeper, search further—to make something new.