About the Martha Graham Dance Company

LaRue Allen, Executive Director · Janet Eilber, Artistic Director

Founded in 1926 by dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the Martha Graham Dance Company is the oldest and most celebrated contemporary dance company in America.

Since its inception, the Martha Graham Dance Company has received international acclaim from audiences in over 50 countries throughout North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The Company has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House, Covent Garden, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as at the base of the Great Pyramids of Egypt and in the ancient Herod Atticus Theatre on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. In addition, the Company has also produced several award-winning films broadcast on PBS and around the world.

Martha Graham choreographed 181 works in her lifetime. Among these are such well known ballets as Heretic (1929), Lamentation (1930), Primitive Mysteries (1931), Frontier (1935), Deep Song (1937), El Penitente (1940), Letter to the World (1940), Deaths and Entrances (1943), Appalachian Spring (1944), Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), Night Journey (1947), Diversion of Angels (1948), Seraphic Dialogue (1955), Clytemnestra (1958), Embattled Garden (1958), Phaedra (1962), Frescoes (1978), Acts of Light (1981), The Rite of Spring (1984), Temptations of the Moon (1986), and Maple Leaf Rag (1990).

Though Martha Graham herself is the best-known alumna of her company, having danced from the Company's inception until the late 1960's, the Company has provided a training ground for some of modern dance's most illustrious performers and choreographers. Former members of the Company include Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Pearl Lang, Elisa Monte, Paul Taylor, Glen Tetley, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Donlin Foreman and Pascal Rioult. Among celebrities who have joined the Company in performance are Mikhail Baryshnikov, Claire Bloom, Margot Fonteyn, Liza Minnelli, Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, and Kathleen Turner. The Martha Graham Dance Company has commissioned works from Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, Susan Stroman, Lucinda Childs, and Maurice Béjart, which have been enthusiastically received by audiences and critics worldwide. The Martha Graham Dance Company even numbers among its alumnae one Betty Bloomer, who, after dancing with the Company in 1938, became better known as First Lady Betty Ford.

Elizabeth Auclair, Tadej Brdnik, Miki Orihara, and Christophe Jeannot in Embattled Garden; photo by Nan Melville.

"One of the great companies of the world," according to Anna Kisselgoff, former chief dance critic of The New York Times, the Martha Graham Dance Company has been lauded by critics throughout the world. Alan M. Kriegsman of the Washington Post referred to the Company as "one of the seven wonders of the artistic universe," while Los Angeles Times critic Martin Bernheimer noted, "They seem able to do anything, and to make it look easy as well as poetic." Ismene Brown of The Daily Telegraph, London, touted the Martha Graham Dance Company's performance as "Unmissable," and for Donald Richie of Japan Times these dancers were "Graham's perfect instrument."

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Copyright 2000–2006, Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. All rights reserved.

Photo Credits: Erica Dankmeyer, Kenneth Topping, and Terese Capucilli in Cave of the Heart; Fang-Yi Sheu in Errand Into the Maze; Kenneth Topping and Katherine Crockett in Circe. All photos by John Deane.