Dance: Lonely Voyager

When Martha Graham took her modern dance troupe on tour in the 1930s and 1940s, her sensuous portrayals of tortured demons and demigods so outraged some audiences that one man in a Southern city took a potshot at her with a BB gun. Now, for the first time in 16 years, Martha Graham, a wispy 71, is touring the U.S. again, thanks to a $142,500 grant from the National Council on the Arts. This time she is drawing bravas instead of BBs.

Magic Phrase. In Philadelphia last week, an overflow crowd jammed Irvine Auditorium to see Graham and her company. Legend of Judith attracted the most attention because Graham herself appeared in the lead role, serving as the mystic eye of a swirling storm of dancers who flashed dreamlike through the “unknown landscape of the mind.” Though she moved with a quiet, serene grace, age seemed to have made its impression; her dancing carried more suggestion than statement. But if the body was a little unwilling, the flame of the spirit still glowed.

The tour is a celebration of Martha Graham’s 50th anniversary as a dancer, a career that is thoroughly chronicled in a new book, Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as an Artist* by Leroy Leatherman, her manager for the past 13 years. Though it tends to be overly idolatrous, the biography is an engrossing study of the woman and the creative forces that shaped her art. Beginning with the days when Graham performed tangos and apache dances in the Greenwich Village Follies, Leatherman traces her development through her early-American period (she is a descendant of Miles Standish) to her most recent The Witch of Endor, which reflects her current preoccupation with the themes of old age and death. Graham, reports Leatherman, is a voracious reader, pours through volumes of philosophy, poetry, mysticism and fairy tales, looking for a magic phrase like “cave of the heart” that will act as a catalyst for a new work.

Necessities & Joys. How she fashioned the fluidly muscular style that made her the founding mother of modern dance “is one of the mysteries,” says Leatherman, “but her approach to it is plainly visible in the technique itself. Many of its basic elements are centered in the pelvic and genital regions, and Martha’s bluntness in teaching them shocks the innocent.” She teaches her “virile gestures” at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in Manhattan, where housewives and movie stars glory in “the miracle of the foot.” “One must be ruthless to teach,” she says, and students have learned to endure her snits, her incomprehensible ways, and her lonely “voyages into herself,” when she wraps herself in a shawl and sits in the rehearsal room in a yogalike trance.

Once merely the high priestess of a cult, Graham today has gained a much broader audience as well as symbolic recognition—the $30,000 Aspen Award last year plus honorary degrees from

Mills College and from Harvard (rare for a woman) this year. Not long ago, recalling the days when, next to Eleanor Roosevelt, she was the most caricatured woman in the U.S., she mused: “Dance has finally become part of the world’s necessities as well as one of its joys.”

* Alfred A. Knopf; $12.50.