Graham left the Denishawn establishment in 1923 in order to become a featured dancer in the
Greenwich Village Follies revue for two years. In 1925, Graham was employed at the
Eastman School of Music where
Rouben Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama. Among other performances, together Mamoulian and Graham produced a short
two-color film called
The Flute of Krishna, featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly thereafter and Graham chose to leave also, even though she was asked to stay on. In 1926, the
Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance was established, in a small studio on the
Upper East Side of New York City. On April 18 of the same year Graham debuted her first independent concert, consisting of 18 short solos and trios that she had choreographed. This performance took place at the
48th Street Theatre in
Manhattan. She would later say of the concert: "Everything I did was influenced by
Denishawn." On November 28, 1926, Graham and others in her company gave a dance recital at the
Klaw Theatre in New York City. Around the same time she entered an extended collaboration with Japanese-American
pictorialist photographer
Soichi Sunami. Graham was on the faculty of
Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre when it opened in 1928. One of Graham's students was heiress
Bethsabée de Rothschild with whom she became close friends. When Rothschild moved to Israel and established the
Batsheva Dance Company in 1965, Graham became the company's first director.
Graham's technique pioneered a principle known as "contraction and release" in modern dance, which was derived from a stylized conception of breathing. In conjunction with the
1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the German government wanted to include dance in the Art Competitions that took place during the Olympics, an event that previously included architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature. Although
Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, was not appreciative of the modern dance art form and changed Germany's dance from more avant-garde to traditional, he and
Adolf Hitler still agreed to invite Graham to represent the United States. However, the United States was not represented in the Art Competitions as Graham refused the invitation by stating: I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible. In addition, some of my concert group would not be welcomed in Germany. Goebbels himself wrote her a letter assuring her that her Jewish dancers would "receive complete immunity". Graham nevertheless rejected the invitation. Stimulated by the occurrences of the 1936 Olympic Games, and the propaganda that she heard through the radio from the
Axis powers, Graham created
American Document in 1938. The dance expressed American ideals and democracy as Graham realized that it could empower men and inspire them to fight fascist and Nazi ideologies. American Document ended up as a patriotic statement focusing on rights and injustices of the time, representing the American people including its Native-American heritage and slavery. During the performance, excerpts from the
U.S. Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, and the
Emancipation Proclamation were read. These were passages that highlighted the American ideals and represented what made the American people American. For Graham, a dance needed to "reveal certain national characteristics because without these characteristics the dance would have no validity, no roots, no direct relation to life". In 1938, the
Roosevelt family invited Graham to dance at the
White House, making her the first dancer to perform there. In the same year,
Erick Hawkins became the first man to dance with her company. He officially joined her troupe the following year, dancing male lead in a number of Graham's works. They were married in July 1948 after the New York premiere of
Night Journey. He left her troupe in 1951 and they divorced in 1954. On April 1, 1958, the
Martha Graham Dance Company premiered the ballet
Clytemnestra, which would become a success. With a score by Egyptian-born composer
Halim El-Dabh, this ballet was a large scale work and the only full-length work in Graham's career. Graham choreographed and danced the title role, spending almost the entire duration of the performance on the stage. The ballet tells the story of Queen
Clytemnestra, who is married to King
Agamemnon. Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter
Iphigenia on a pyre, as an offering to the gods to assure fair winds to Troy, where the
Trojan War rages. Upon Agamemnon's return after 10 years, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon to avenge the murder of Iphigenia. Clytemnestra is then murdered by her son,
Orestes, and the audience experiences Clytemnestra in the afterworld. The ballet had a limited engagement showing at the
54th Street Theatre on
Broadway, conducted by
Robert Irving, voice parts sung by Rosalia Maresca and
Ronald Holgate. Graham collaborated with many composers including
Aaron Copland on
Appalachian Spring,
Louis Horst,
Samuel Barber,
William Schuman,
Carlos Surinach,
Norman Dello Joio, and
Gian Carlo Menotti. Graham's mother died in Santa Barbara in 1958. Her oldest friend and musical collaborator Louis Horst died in 1964. She said of Horst: "His sympathy and understanding, but primarily his faith, gave me a landscape to move in. Without it, I should certainly have been lost." Graham resisted requests for her dances to be recorded because she believed that stage performances should only be experienced live. There were a few notable exceptions. For example, in addition to her collaboration with
Sunami in the 1920s, she also worked on a limited basis with still photographers
Imogen Cunningham in the 1930s, and
Barbara Morgan in the 1940s. Graham considered
Philippe Halsman's photographs of
Dark Meadow the most complete photographic record of any of her dances. Halsman also photographed in the 1940s
Letter to the World,
Cave of the Heart,
Night Journey and
Every Soul is a Circus. In later years her opinion changed. In 1952 Graham allowed taping of her meeting and cultural exchange with famed deaf-blind author, activist and lecturer
Helen Keller, who, after a visit to one of Graham's company rehearsals became a close friend and supporter. Graham was inspired by Keller's joy from and interpretation of dance, utilizing her body to feel the vibration of drums and of feet and movement moving the air around her. (1961) In her biography
Martha,
Agnes de Mille cites Graham's last performance as having occurred on the evening of May 25, 1968, in
Time of Snow. But in ''A Dancer's Life'', biographer
Russell Freedman lists the year of Graham's final performance as 1969. In her 1991 autobiography,
Blood Memory, Graham herself lists her final performance as her 1970 appearance in
Cortege of Eagles when she was 76 years old. Graham's choreographies span 181 compositions. ==Retirement and later years==