EASTMAN BEGINNINGS: Graham (left, standing) and her diaphanous first dance group at the Eastman School of Music, (left to right) Evelyn Sabin, Betty Macdonald, and Thelma Biracree, 1925–1926. (Photograph: Martha Graham Collection, Box 254, Folder 30/Music Division/Library of Congress)

In the mid-1920s, after a decade as a touring dancer, Martha Graham was offered an unusual opportunity. She was invited to join a new music and theater school in Rochester, one that entrepreneurial business leader George Eastman had launched at the University as part of an innovative effort to develop a new kind of performance education.

Interested in sharing the experience of music far more broadly, Eastman had hired an equally ambitious, Stanislavsky-trained theater veteran, Rouben Mamoulian to head what was then the Eastman School of Dance and Dramatic Action. The school’amp;s newest department would be “dedicated to dance choreography embracing ‘a much wider scope than just ballet . . . [and] employ[ing] the most modern ideas,” as Neil Baldwin ’69 recounts in his acclaimed new biography of the iconic dance pioneer, Martha Graham, When Dance Became Modern: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022).

For nearly a year, Graham divided her time between Rochester and Manhattan, teaching and performing, but most importantly, honing her ideas about dance and movement while also inventing how to introduce future generations of students into what would become her signature technique.

Here are excerpts from Baldwin’s book about Graham’s time at Eastman.

The dance program at Eastman offered classes for children, senior classes, health education, and private instruction. Under Martha Graham’s supervision, “[t]he word ‘ballet’ was being dropped,” Mamoulian said, “because the new dance training will be of much broader scope, comprising all forms of the dance.” The curriculum stressed the relationship of technical training to professional preparation—through pantomime, plastic movement, makeup, stage deportment, and diction, as well as attention to dance history. Every student was given the opportunity to perform before audiences in the Eastman Theatre and Kilbourn Hall and promised the experience of being filmed in their classes, “the motion pictures [then] thrown on the screen to illustrate the effects in technic.”

(Photograph: J. Adam Fenster)

To Mr. Eastman, “acting” and “theatre” were not isolated activities. He wanted the unity of dramatic action, with emphasis upon the cause and effect of events onstage. Mamoulian came up with the wording for the announcement bulletin published for the opening of the school, “to recognize anew the close kinship of the arts of the Dance and Drama, and to develop a new form of theatrical art in which drama and dance, linked with music, will combine into an inseparable unity.” He strove to “revive the ideal of the Greeks”— choros—engendering theatre-as-dance/dance-as-theatre.

This was the milieu into which Martha Graham, at a salary of $260 per week, made a grand entrance on September 14, 1925. As she crossed the threshold of the Eastman Annex on Swan Street and mounted the stairs to Dance Studio B on the third floor, the solitary pilgrim hoped the day marked the beginning of a new adventure of seeking. Her teaching contract guaranteed that Graham would be given time in class to devise her own compositions. The Eastman School would become the setting for “that glory [she] had never touched.” Graham recalled “the first morning [she] went into class,” how she “wanted to begin, not with characters . . . but with movement—walking, running, skipping, leaping” across the room, no decorative presentation for its own sake. Through strength-building weight changes and deep stretches. Graham’s students would awaken energies within and become aware of “inner meaning . . . something to dance about!”

The crowded class included several boys, but Graham singled out the three most promising girls. Seven months later, Evelyn Sabin, Betty Macdonald, and Thelma (“Teddy”) Biracree would take the stage at the 48th Street Theatre to perform in the New York City premiere of Graham’s dance group where she shone like Venus enfolded in the angelic perfection of veiled handmaidens, “those gracious Virgins three.”

The youngest of the sister goddesses, the “exquisite” Evelyn Sabin, was destined, Graham said, to “be a dreamer all her life.” Seventeen when she came to Eastman, Sabin described the exercises instigated by Graham in a progressive sequence, “the floor work . . . walking, running, jumping, leaping . . . and the falls . . . The movement, to me, was always changing, developing and growing.”

“The first day Martha walked in the door of the dance studio,” eighteen-year-old Betty Macdonald said, she stood absolutely still, like a statue, facing the class, draped in an “East Indian sari à la Ruth St. Denis. . . . She hadn’t even moved yet [but] she illuminated the whole place with her presence. . . . [She] was finding her own way of moving the body. . . . She wanted to move the body differently,” initiating ideas in her center of gravity and carrying them over into her students. In Graham’s classes, parts of the body other than the feet would come into contact with the floor, sculptural lines supporting one’s earth-bound weight. Spiraling around the back, torso twisting, “Graham falls . . . [were] percussive, as though someone hit you. . . . When you came [back] up, you came up with your entire body naturally,” pressing down with your weight into the floor to gather energy and rise upwards again “not like a [ballet] toe-dancer who came up with prettiness and beauty.”

Thelma Biracree agreed. “We learned how to kneel. . . . The floor was a very important place for Martha.” The oldest of the Eastman muses, at twenty-one, and with a $25-per-week scholarship, Teddy became Graham’s rehearsal assistant and demonstrator. Teddy idolized her teacher, hoarding stray “threads and little ravellings” that fell to the ground from the long dress Graham wore over leotards. Graham demanded that Teddy sit cross-legged, close her eyes, and visualize the Kundalini serpent power coiling up her spine, from the sacral plexus to the many-petaled lotus crown at the top of her head, and breathe deeply. “imagin[ingl a spiral going around and around.” Graham told she girls to forget turn-outs. . . . She was an incandescent teacher,” Teddy said. “She set us on fire! . . . It was all quite revolutionary for upstate New York!”

ENCORE: Graham and her Eastman students reprised the New York City debut (top) for a late spring recital in Rochester (bottom). (Photographs: Martha Graham Collection/Music Division/Library of Congress)

Graham’s performance schedule at Eastman followed the crammed pace of vaudeville. There were three shows a day, every day except Sunday, for the six-day run of a “deluxe” program. A typical Eastman Theatre show during the fall of 1925 took place during the week of October 25. The “opener” was Wagner’s overture to Rienzi, performed by the Eastman Theatre orchestra under the baton of Guy Fraser Harrison. This was followed by a newsreel, “Eastman Theatre Current Events,” then a presentation arranged for the students by Martha Graham, a Delsartian “Pompeian Afternoon” warmly welcomed by the Democrat & Chronicle as “an indication of delightful dance divertissements, including a series of exquisite stage pictures, set against a background of four Greek columns.”

The misses Sabin, Macdonald, and Biracree were featured. After they departed into the wings, the lights came down for the feature film presentation, Little Annie Rooney, starring Mary Pickford, followed by a Mutt and Jeff comedy, Mixing in Mexico. “Now we’re set to symphonic music and presented in natural color,” the cartoon duo proclaimed. Two weeks later, November 8–14, again with three performances a day (at “3:14, 7:14, and 9:14 p.m.”), Graham arranged “A Serenade in Porcelain” that came on fifth in the lineup, preceded by an overture, the “current events,” a comedy routine, and a vocal number by a student from the Eastman opera department; and followed by a dramatic “sketch” and the featured movie.

Leading up to [the Kilbourn debut of the opera] Sister Beatrice, Martha Graham was credited as Eastman’s “sole arranger of dance routines” such as “A Cornet in Spain,” accompanied by Claude Debussy’s impressionist piece, Danse Arabesque in which Sabin, Macdonald, and Biracree “are robed in flowing white; the stage light is dimmed and given a hint of color . . . The gesture of arm and body is made to flow down the line of figures and a group pose in the stage center is taken . . . This is a music that has grace and prismatic tone color [and] rhythmic flow that travels through no set routine but moves fancy free with beauty as a goal.”

Springtime at Eastman continued with an efflorescence of dances “produced by Rouben Mamoulian and arranged by Martha Graham”—“Gavotte,” ‘‘A Corner in Spain,” “Dream in a Wax Museum” (including “Dance of the French Dolls”), and “Forest Episode.”

RAVE REVIEWS: Local reviews highlighted Graham’s three principal Eastman students: Thelma Biracree is “firmly established as one of Rochester’s gifted representatives in the dance art,” the Democrat and Chronicle wrote, while Evelyn Sabin and Betty Macdonald “have been insistently gaining notice by important appearances in recent weeks.” (Photograph: Martha Graham Collection/Music Division/Library of Congress)

Rouben Mamoulian resigned on June 24, the cusp of summer 1926. And as meteoric as its rise nine months earlier, the Eastman School of Dance and Dramatic Action plummeted. Rumors of his discontent had been circulating since winter, fueled by clandestine trips to New York and public arguments with [opera director] Vladimir Rosing. Mr. Eastman, expressing annoyance with the meager cash generated by the theatre and dance program, made it known that his pockets were not inexhaustible. Mamoulian’s transition to the venerable Theatre Guild, and the directorship of its theatre school in New York, came as no surprise to his Rochester confrere, Paul Horgan, who had felt “it was only a question of time” until his mercurial supervisor, whom he nicknamed Dr. Faustus, “took flight for broader fields. . . . We had intimately watched his work . . . we knew the penetration, the ingenuity, and the superb taste he brought to every theatrical problem.” A year later, Mamoulian would make his Broadway directorial debut at the helm of the Theatre Guild’s triumphant production of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy.

Although Martha Graham’s brief tenure at Eastman had been a noble experiment, she remained troubled and restless, On June 26, after Ave Maria, her final performance of the season, she was called to an appointment with Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School of Music, to renew her contract to teach and choreograph for a second year. Unable to bring herself to sign on the dotted line, Graham summarily “turned, walked out, packed [her] things, and returned to Manhattan.”

© 2022 by Neil Baldwin. Excerpted from Martha Graham, When Dance Became Modern: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022). Reprinted with permission.

(Photograph: Blue Moon Photography)

As a scholar and author, Neil Baldwin ’69 willingly expresses an affinity for the currents of American culture that lead to reinvention—older currents being reconfigured and recast in new ways.

If through lines can be found in his life’s work as poet, critic, and biographer, that might be one. The former founding executive director of the National Book Foundation and now a professor emeritus at Montclair State University, Baldwin has written highly regarded books about poet and physician William Carlos Williams, visual artist Man Ray, inventor Thomas Edison, and auto magnate Henry Ford, among others.

A new biography of modern American dance icon Martha Graham—the first in more than 30 years—seemed a logical addition to that pantheon.

“I felt like [Graham] had been left out of the narrative that I’ve been creating for my whole life about American art,” Baldwin says. “I thought, ‘Wait a second . . . what about dance? I did art. I did literature. I did technology.’ ”

“At a rather late point in my career, I suddenly am hit over the head with this physical nature of modernism, movement-wise, and how she used her body to create a new aesthetic,” he says. “Again, the key note is new, to make it new, as Ezra Pound says, to carve space and to create shapes with the body that no one’s ever done before—Graham was the pioneer of physicality.”

After more than a decade of research and dozens of interviews with Graham dancers—former and current—Baldwin published Martha Graham, When Dance Became Modern: A Life in 2022.

Listed in many year-end round-ups as one of the best books of the year, the biography recounts Graham’s creative life, from growing up in Pittsburgh to her status as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Among the many institutions where Graham left a lasting mark was the Eastman School of Music. From the fall of 1925 to the spring 1926, Graham participated in an innovative, but short-lived, program of “dance and dramatic action” at Eastman.

“She was hired with the express reassurance that she was going to do something different than just conventional ballet at Eastman. And she welcomed that,” Baldwin says. “In terms of the theme of the book, “When Dance Became Modern,” that’s really important because the roots of her modern mode can definitely be traced to that year.”

What brought Graham to Eastman?

At that point, she was starting to develop her own choreographic style of movement. And when she was hired by Rouben Mamoulian who was the head of a newly established school of dance and dramatic action under George Eastman, she was told that she could use the class to experiment in developing her individual technique, which is what she was really itching to do at that point.

She had paid her dues in vaudeville and as a showgirl. She had traveled back and forth across the country and performed in all these little towns from east to west and north to south with Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis and their dance company.

Did she have a plan in mind as she joined the faculty?

When she left the Greenwich Village Follies and moved beyond vaudeville, she said she wanted to create her own dances in her own body and that was crucial to the Eastman residency.

Intrinsic to the origin of modern dance, is there was no formal, preexisting repertory. There’s no, “Oh, let’s do Swan Lake.” Everybody has the pattern and the narrative and the staging of Swan Lake to follow, whereas Graham was concocting dances from simple, pedestrian movements like walking, running, skipping, and leaping and drawing upon her students’ inner energy to make new movement patterns come to life.

Is it fair to say the roots of the Martha Graham Dance Company can be traced to her time at Eastman?

Three Eastman students—Evelyn Sabin, Betty Macdonald, and Thelma Biracree—were the nucleus of what became her company. Looking back upon that nascent period, which was less than a year, she was teaching in New York City at John Murray Anderson’s school and then she would take the train up to Eastman and teach her classes and she went back and forth like that from New York to Rochester. She featured Eastman students in her New York City premiere in April 1926.

Did you work with Eastman as you were recounting Graham’s time in Rochester?

The Eastman School’s historian, Vince Lenti, and his books, for example, For the Enrichment of the Community: George Eastman and the Founding of the Eastman School of Music (Meliora Press, 2004), were very helpful. The head of special collections at the Sibley Music Library, David Peter Coppen, was also extremely helpful. Paul Horgan’s memoir of Mamoulian was a gem, as were some old Rochester Democrat and Chronicle clippings files I discovered in the Reading Room of the Library of Congress.

I would say that the story of Graham’s time at Rochester is more known among the Eastman community than the larger University community.

How do you think your time as a student at Rochester set you on your path as a writer and scholar?

It was my freshman or sophomore year, when the Outside Speakers Committee brought the charismatic cultural critic Susan Sontag to campus. I don’t think she was even 30 years old. She had just published what would become her most enduring classic, Against Interpretation.

I remember all of us students sitting on the floor in a circle around her. That was my first really vivid inspiration about how you could write about the alchemy of societal mores and art and performance and visual art. I still return to Against Interpretation every few years.

During my freshman year, I took a course called American Intellectual History with the brilliant, resonant-voiced, impassioned professor Loren Baritz in the history department. The startling keyword for me was “intellectual”—the core of his thesis in his book City on a Hill. That was a major cataclysmic epiphany for 18-year-old me.

—Scott Hauser