| Martha Graham is known as one of the great art masters of the 20 th century.She created more than 180 dance works.Like her contemporaries Igor Stravinsky or Pablo Picasso,Martha Graham changed people’s views of the art form that she chose.Her works have a profound influence on 20th-century culture.Martha Graham thinks: "Dance has magic because it is a performance of the state of life.The body carries love and hate,life and death.” Her dance creation follows Jung’s "national psychological precipitation" and confirms Nietzsche’s "affirmation of life".Her dance works focus on the expression of people’s inner world and emphasize the will and power of life.This proves Martha Graham’s loyalty to the artistic and ideological realm of physical fate,which has made her not only a creator of dances,but also a pioneer in practicing psychological analysis.According to Martha Graham,her father,who is a psychologist,is her first teacher,and she is deeply influenced by Jung’s "collective subconscious" theory.Her accumulated creative experience also makes her recognize the ultimate truth that "the body never lies".It can be said that Martha Graham explores the psychological space and personality archetype of human beings through the deep and mysterious ancient Greek mythology.Her works are committed to expressing the "essence,freedom and transcendence” of humans,and her dance creation philosophy directly hits the identity core of the American spirit.To this end,her style of work revolves around the logic of "physical self-discipline" to "psychological introspection",and has gone through three important periods: individual resistance to society,individual affirmation of the nation,and deep exploration of human nature.These three important periods reflect the realization of Martha Graham’s creative goals and body-centered values.At the same time,Martha Graham constructed dance techniques from movements and developed her dance vocabulary by consciously "recognizing the self" and "deconstructing the body".On this basis,Martha Graham stressed that the so-called "body self-discipline" meant the body’s "real freedom",which she believed is the premise that her dance creation ideas can be presented on the stage.It requires dancers to go through a certain period of training to achieve.With the United States intervening in World War II and the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union,Martha Graham increasingly felt that she should take"psychological introspection",which was developed from "physical self-discipline",as another theme of her artistic creation.This time she was inspired by Indian dance,which helped her bring dance back to a more primitive world,like Nietzsche’s "spiritual three changes" to express the most authentic human feelings.To sum up,starting from the era and personal background of Martha Graham,this paper discusses the theories that Graham absorbed in the development process of her dance works,summarizes the essence of her three periods of dance creation,and sums up her representative works from the feature of "body self-discipline" to "psychological introspection". |
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