Martha Graham: Born in Pittsburgh, Changed How Bodies Move

Martha Graham was born near this spot in Pittsburgh in eighteen ninety-four, though she spent most of her adult life in New York. She would become the most influential figure in the history of American modern dance, credited with creating an entirely new movement vocabulary rooted in contraction and release rather than the flowing lines of classical ballet.

In nineteen twenty-six she founded her dance company. Her landmark works include Frontier, which treated the American stage as open space, and Appalachian Spring, composed by Aaron Copland, which premiered in nineteen forty-four to immediate acclaim. She performed into her seventies and continued choreographing into her nineties. When she died in nineteen ninety-one at age ninety-six, she had trained or shaped a great many of the major American modern dancers of the twentieth century. It started here, in Pittsburgh.