She inspired her dancers with poetic visions of porous sculptures and growing vines. Then I write down, I copy out of any books that simulate me at the time many quotations…” Intermediately, before she ever reached the dance floor, Graham expressed herself in words.Įven when she advanced to the stage of studio composition, Graham continued to think things through with verbally rendered images, emotions and movements. She describes the early stages of her creative process thus: “I would put a typewriter on a little table on my bed, bolster myself with pillows, and write all night…I get the ideas going. Her published notebooks reveal a rich mix of personal musings, poems (visual images rendered verbally!) and dance plots. Graham’s inventive process began well before bodily composition on the dance floor. I will make a dance like that…And I did.” In Graham’s Diversion of Angels, “a woman in red…flashes across the stage as erotic love…and the girl in red is the Kandinsky flame.” In her memoir, Blood Memory, she writes of visiting an art show featuring the work of Wassily Kandinsky: “I saw across the room a beautiful painting… had a streak of red going from one end to the other. One of the greatest dancer-choreographers of the 20th century, Graham was in fact a highly visual and verbal thinker.

Any kind of sensation, feeling, emotion, or image can be transformed into movement.* But to equate the way a dancer expresses herself with the way in which she generates her ideas is wrong-headed. This is certainly the case for psychologist Howard Gardner, who claims that Graham was primarily a “bodily-kinesthetic thinker” in his book Creating Minds (1993). And what we find can give us a clue to what’s going on in our own heads.īecause a dancer “speaks” with movements of the body, many people assume that she thinks primarily or only in body images. Using the dancer-choreographer Martha Graham as an example, we can take a peek into human cognition. Surprisingly, she may not initially imagine it as bodily movement. Before the dancer creates her first step, she imagines it in her mind. Before the language of expression, comes the inspiration of first thoughts.

Blood Memory by Martha Graham