"From 1967 through 2011, Deborah Jowitt wrote a weekly dance column for the Village Voice. Her substantial experience as a dancer, choreographer, critic, mother, teacher, and writer of a clutch of valuable books; her long marriage to a composer; and her deep familiarity with both the Southern California environment that nurtured Martha Graham and the New York City dance world in which both of them came to maturity may make her the perfect person to produce a critical biography of the woman many consider the First Lady of American modern dance: Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham. Jowitt takes all the space she needs to fully explicate an image or an idea — to interpret, theorize, and describe in great detail the universe, both on and off the stage, that surrounded Graham and all that she created. Jowitt has also taken her time: 10 years of research, on top of half a century of tracking the international modern dance scene, to produce this history of the Martha Graham Dance Company, which turns 100 in 2026 and is already celebrating. Jowitt watched dozens of films and videos, read the other books already out there about the dance diva, and interviewed many artists who participated in the creation and performance of what have become classic examples of American modernism, begging comparison to the greatest works of contemporary music and art. Errand into the Maze is cultural history entwined with critical biography, accounting for New York's social, creative, and political climate in the interwar era. Jowitt's method includes close reading, textual analysis, all the stratagems of literary criticism of the period: translation, observation, and thick description, work for which journalistic critics rarely have space or time. She explicates music with as much clarity and confidence as she does movement. Jowitt also uncovers a sensuous side of Graham, often submerged in the popular view of early modern dance as grim posturing in long underwear. Born in 1894, the eldest of three daughters of a doctor and a woman who traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower, the future choreographer grew up in a strict Presbyterian family, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. Then, when she was in her early teens, the family moved to sunny Santa Barbara, in California. "Many of the dances that later made her famous," says Jowitt, 'drew on the dualities of restraint and freedom, decorum and wildness that molded her bisected early years.' ..."
Voice
NY Times: 'If I Was Martha, What Would I Do?' For One, Stay Upright
Criterion - Martha Graham: Dance on Film
amazon: Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham
YouTube: Martha Graham on Technique, Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring Part 1/4
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