"Martha Graham"

Martha Graham, a name widely known among fellow dance connoisseurs, has been compared to some of the most talented artists of the past due to her significant contributions to what is today called "contemporary" dance. It is believed that her impact on modern dance is equivalent to that of Frank Lloyd Wright's on architecture, Stravinsky's on music, and Picasso's on painting. Her contrasting ideas of dances being composed of harsh, angular floor movement transformed the …

…the first modern dance choreographer to regularly employ both Asian and African-American dancers and fully use collaborations with other modern artists to create her dance theatre masterpieces. Her collaboration with Isamu Noguchi and Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring, for example, remains as one of the dancer's great masterpieces. Martha Graham's continued experimentation and her constant attention to the human emotion, frailty, and perseverance, is one of the greatest individual achievements in the American cultural history.