In the years that followed, Graham created more than 180 ballets and developed a unique technique of movement based upon principals of contraction and release. Early ballets by Martha Graham had names like Claire de Lune, Desir, Danse Languid, and Maid with the Flaxen Hair. Yet within a few years titles such as Revolt, Immigrant: Steerage, Strike and Poems of 1917 revealed her commitment to the contemporary world.  For example, Heretic, in 1929, staged “the essence of the eternal struggle of the individual with something new to offer, coming up against the blank wall of conservatism in any field,” a theme that was repeated often throughout her career. As an artist, and particularly as a woman artist, she was a rebel in conventional American society.

Graham made a sympathetic portrait of an American woman through Frontier (1935), a dance that must have had special resonance for Americans during the Depression and as America’s heartland (some of it settled in the 1860s) became America’s Dust Bowl. Her 1936 Steps in the Street (which was part of a larger work called Chronicle), subtitled “devastation, homelessness, exile,” might have referred to any of the tragedies of the period (among them, the Depression and the Spanish Civil War which many American artists commented upon). American Document (1938), which included structural elements from minstrel shows and words from writings such as the Declaration of Independence, a letter from Red Jacket of the Senecas, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, made reference to America’s troubled history. Graham’s own heritage, perhaps, allowed her to apply a broad lens to American history.

Learn more about Martha Graham and her work.

Martha Graham’s dance theater piece, American Document (1938), featured text written by the choreographer. It was revised by Graham in 1989 and inspired a new work of the same name created by the Martha Graham Dance Company and Ann Bogart’s SITI Company in 2010. All of these iterations sought to ask “What is an American?”

Classroom Activities

Read: Read aloud excerpts from the text accompanying Martha Graham’s 1938 dance American Document.

Discuss: Talk about what becoming “American” might mean for immigrants arriving in the United States, in the past and in the present. Ask students to comment on the different perspective of the First and Second Episodes.

Write: Free-write a response (5 minutes) to the American Document text, asking students to pay particular attention to their experiences of becoming “American.” (How) Do they identify themselves as Americans? Does the history present in American Document resonate with them?  List documents, events, attitudes, social and cultural practices such as holidays, material goods and the like that contribute to that identity. Do they know people who have come to America as immigrants?  What about their own families? Discuss their experiences.

Move:

• Break into groups of four or five and share a movement learned based upon their own cultural identity (See Jawole Willa Jo Zollar).
• Teach the movement phrases to the other members of the group and discuss how the movement phrases relate to their sense of identity.
• Share the ideas created during free-writing. Does anything in the writings suggest movements or text that might contribute to a dance about American identities?

Expand:

• Keeping in mind the lists created during free-writing and discussion during your in class work, find text that defines your “American-ness.”  This might include excerpts from documents such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, advertising slogans, poetry, or excerpts from novels and speeches.
• Read Mona in the Promised Land or another novel dealing with identity and the immigrant experience.
• Students might research and analyze any of the documents from the text of American Document. The full text of American Document is available in Needham, Maureen ed., I See America Dancing, 206 – 215.

Final Project

• In their previously established small groups, students review the movement phrases they worked on and the materials brought into class.
• After agreeing upon a theme, students collaborate to create a movement study, using compositional techniques such as call and response, theme and variation, or phrase accumulation, and integrate the music, spoken text, design, or whatever artwork inspired their theme into the choreography.
• Students present their studies to their peers.
• Through free writing, students respond to the experience of embodying their distinctive American identities.  In writing, they compare and contrast their own movement studies with themes and movements in any of the dances that they have studied: Martha Graham’s American Document, Steps in the Street or Frontier; Pearl Primus’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Strange Fruit, Hard Time Blues;  Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Walking with Pearl.
• Students share their responses in a final discussion.

Classroom Activities

Read: You might begin your study of Steps in the Street by asking students to read selected excerpts from Studs Terkel’s Down and Out in the Great Depression aloud or playing Woody Guthrie’s music for the students.

Expand: Discuss the Great Depression and the impact it had on the American people. Ask students to describe the images they researched by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange.

Watch: View Graham’s Steps in the Street and ask students to observe with the following in mind: What movement elements do you see in the dance: spatial patterns (for example, straight line, circular, rectangular, lines at right angles), body shapes, and different movement qualities, i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect? How is protest embodied in this dance? Describe the movements. How is meaning created? Shape? Pattern? Contrast? How are the individual and the group contrasted? Who does the artist identify with?

Discuss: What does it Steps in the Street tell us about 1930s America? Do you see any similarities between the images you looked at by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange?

Move: Divide the group in half and form several lines, standing shoulder to shoulder, scattered randomly throughout the space. As one student walks around the space, the students in lines should block his or her progress. Note: It is important to emphasize that students may not touch each other. Students should take turns being the “one against many.”

Reflect: Ask students to discuss their experiences as part of the group and as the individual moving into a group of people. What does it mean to be one against many?

Martha Graham’s Frontier, an early solo piece by the great choreographer, focuses on the frontier woman and the challenges of Westward Expansion. Graham’s innovative work utilized a minimalist set by Isamu Noguchi and music by Louis Horst to highlight the emotions and symbolism within the work.

Classroom Activities

Discuss: Ask the group what the term frontier means to them and ask them to create their own lists of definitions and associations for the word.

Analyze: Using the Movement Analysis Worksheet, have students identify spatial patterns (i.e. circular, rectangular, lines at right angles) within Graham’s Frontier. Once students can confidently identify these patterns in space, ask them to identify body shapes and different movement qualities (i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect).

(For more information about Movement Analysis, student should read: Words for Movement, Movement Observation Guidelines, and Rethinking Movement Analysis.)

Discuss

• What are the movement themes (repeated gestures, locomotor movements) in Frontier?
• What are the repeated spatial patterns and movement qualities (i.e. strong movement, light movement) in Frontier?
• What traits does the woman in Frontier seem to have?
• How does the dance relate to America’s Westward Expansion?
• Why might these ideas about being American have resonated within the cultural agendas that defined 1930s America?
• How might the dance have resonated with those concerned about American economic and agricultural issues?
• How does the Frontier woman resonate with our ideas about American women in the 1930s?  With contemporary ideas about women?
• Ask students to compare the definitions and associations list they created at the beginning of the class, based on their interpretation of the concept of the frontier, to their present understanding.
• Can you think of other ways that dance and movement might create a distinctive national or ethnic identity?

Who is an American? This question has been redefined throughout United States history. In the 16th century, an American was someone we would now call Native American. In the 17th century, Americans came to be people of European birth or ancestry living in the New World, especially people whose roots were in the British Isles. This idea persisted during the American Civil War (1861-1865), even as Americans split into Union and Confederacy over slavery, states rights, and economic disparity, and into the twentieth century. In his essay, “Who is an American? The Imagined Community in American History,” historian Eric Foner describes how America took on a more pluralistic definition in the 1930s and 40s:

Despite broad acceptance among intellectuals, the celebration of diversity remained a minority point of view until World War II, when it suddenly emerged as the official definition of American nationhood. The way, to be sure, had already been paved during the New Deal by the resurgent union movement and the broad left-wing culture of the Popular Front era. The Congress of Industrial Organizations mobilized ethnically divided industrial workers into a self-conscious class with a broad social definition of citizenship and an emphasis on pluralism and inclusiveness as the American way. Meanwhile, left-wing artists and intellectuals advanced a new conception of America as a multi-ethnic, pluralist nation that included blacks. (91)

As Foner discusses, Americans began to expand their ideas about American identity in the 1940s during World War II. Confronted with Nazi Aryanism, Americans could no longer keep up their own race-based definitions of national identity. New immigrants from southern and eastern Europe became Italian Americans or Polish Americans and were considered part of white America. The status of African Americans reemerged, for the first time since Reconstruction, as a subject of national debate. Quotas for Asian immigrants were readjusted, although minimally. Foner states, “As the ethnic understanding of Americanism was discredited, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt explicitly committed the nation to the civil definition. To be an American, he insisted, had always been a ‘matter of mind and heart’ and ‘never was a matter of race or ancestry’” (91).

Contemporary Viewpoints

In the 21st century, we may again reconsider American identity, especially in response to changing structures of international trade, growing economies in South America, and increasing numbers of United States citizens with roots in Latin America. We may learn to see ourselves as North Americans, to identify ourselves geographically in relationship to people living in Central and South America, or come to see Americans as people living across the Americas.

Today, we see American identities as questions of birth, choice, and conscience. United States citizens are people born of citizens, whether in the U.S. or abroad, or who seek the process of naturalization, but many more people live within the borders of the United States. This makes for a broad range of people, with varying ties to America, who contribute to our economy, to our shared values and considerations about education and public life, and (as anyone who attends a community arts festival or surveys a range of cable television channels can tell you), to our expressive culture. That does not mean we all feel equally American. We all entertain questions of conscience: Do I embrace the current choices of the government? Do I aspire to the American dream? Do I feel part of or do others identify me with marginalized or empowered social, economic, ethnic, political, or religious groups? Do I feel free to redefine myself?

National and international events might shake Americans into defending or redefining ideas about who Americans are and what Americans stand for. The closing of American textile and auto plants as jobs are moved overseas, the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and military involvements in the Middle East, for example, have inspired patriotism in some and jingoism in others. Taking on an American identity implies self definition, but also a willingness to define others, to determine who is in and out of the “we” circle. Everyday performances—wearing or displaying the American flag, wearing or taking off an Islamic headscarf, contradancing or Sufi dancing—are important means of affirming old and learning new American identities.

Artistic expression is a vital part of public discourse about American identities. Modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham approached works like Frontier, which explores the feelings of pride and trepidation that were part of westward expansion, from the vantage point of an American who could trace her family back to Miles Standish. Pearl Primus, who came to the United States from Trinidad at age two and who came to identify as African American, made works like The Negro Speaks of Rivers from her understanding of the African diaspora. In the works we explore in this unit, we glimpse the poverty and dislocation that characterized the Depression, the Dustbowl, and the post-Civil War American South and revisit debates over slavery and racism that spanned nineteenth and twentieth-century America. We read and hear the works of poets and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Waring Cuney. We realize the changing status of women as public figures in American life. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, with her works Walking with Pearl … Africa Diaries and Walking with Pearl … Southern Diaries, brings the arts as public discourse about identity into the present and again affirms the importance of history to how we think about ourselves.

Foner, Eric. 1998. “Who Is an American.” In Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study. Edited by Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Next Section: The Search for Identity Through Movement: Martha Graham’s Frontier