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Blood Memory. By Martha Graham. (New York: Doubleday, 1991. viii + 279 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-385-26503-4.)
Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. By Agnes de Mille. (New York: Random House, 1991. xviii + 509 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-394-55643-7.)
Dance history is a young discipline. Until too recently, it read more like public relations than scholarship, emphasizing anecdote and personal devotion over research and critical perspective. But all that has changed in the last decade, as a spate of books on topics ranging from the Ballets Russes to contact improvisation have offered powerful arguments for the aesthetic, economic, and political significance of dance as a cultural practice. The best of the new dance history displays scrupulous research, a broadening reach in methodology, a longer perspective on the place of dance in culture, and a fresh set of questions.
Twentieth-century American dance, in particular, is a mother lode for historians. George Balanchine, although born a Russian, created a distinctly American form of classical ballet--fast, sleek, and large-scaled. Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis transformed nineteenth-century skirt-dancing and Delsartism into a completely new genre of dance. (Distinct from her peers, Duncan led a racy personal life that gained her entry into the pantheon of American popular mythology.) Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham, leaders of the next generation of modern dance, pumped into their work all the aesthetic modernism and social utopianism of their era. The reputation of Graham, with her emphasis on gesture and theatricality, has outpaced that of Humphrey, whose dances depended on the more subtle and abstract manipulations of line and structure. Humphrey never manufactured a school and an empire, as did Graham, who has become almost as large a cultural icon as Duncan.
Clearly, Graham (1894-1991) is a huge historical subject. Her life spanned nearly a century and her art reached around the globe. She choreographed more than her share...