Sacred Woman, Sacred Dance: Awakening Spirituality Through Movement and Ritual by Iris J. Stewart

Author:Iris J. Stewart [Stewart, Iris J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2000-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Martha Graham

The political became the personal in the work of Martha Graham (1894–1991). An emancipator in her own way, Graham, too, kept women at the center of the stage in the dances of her early and middle period, often using themes and characters from ancient mythology as the vehicles for showing women in a new and powerful way and using the body to communicate states of the mind and emotions. Her belief that inner emotion can be revealed through movement was the basis of her dance creations.

Graham believed that a woman’s body in movement is capable of extending the spirituality of nature and connecting it with the fundamental experience of being human. In her Notebooks of Martha Graham, she wrote: “Thus the woman is the original seeress, the lady of the wisdombringing waters of the depths, of the murmuring springs and fountains, for the ‘original utterance of seerdom in the language of water.’ But the woman also understands the rustling of the trees and all the signs of nature, with whose life she is so closely bound up.”5 She taught that the language of dance is based on the body’s exaggerated, abstract gestures. In dance, a stride across the stage becomes a metaphor, she said.

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