On August 6, 1938, at the Vermont State Armory, Martha Graham and Company premiered American Document. Popularly and critically proclaimed as a pivotal dancework, it marked a creative juncture of form and content, aesthetic and political, abstract and accessible, and rendered in performance Graham’s pursuit of dancing and dancemaking that were rooted in both her own consciousness and her sense of an American identity. The work had a profound influence on her movement technique and her choreographic processes and intentions. But American Document did not spring from a vacuum; Graham was influenced by adjacent political and cultural currents as well as her own philosophies, her evolving movement research, and, as always in any human undertaking, the vagaries of life, love and, even, war. American Document was part of the Graham company’s repertory from 1938 through 1944, during which time she continued to rework the piece. Graham made the decision to re-choreograph American Document in 1989 and the work had other incarnations in 2010 and 2019.

This gives us the 1938 premier, as well as its historical antecedents and its future incarnations to consider, concomitant with all the problems that arise when trying to consider artworks that occur in and over time.¹


MY TASK  I will consider the past, present, and future of American Document, that is, works leading up to it, the work itself, and its afterlife, admitting just a few of the complexities, and interweaving, where space permits three ideas. That all dance is political, with ramifications for both the dance and the political. That it is possible for a work to hold or reflect not only multiple but also conflicting ideas or themes, embedded by the artist, intentionally or unintentionally. That in 1989 and 2010, cynicism towards a place of privilege from which Graham worked or the work’s politics and idealism may have been warranted. But subsequent analyses have provided expanded and more nuanced perspectives, and with daily threats towards the structures that comprise a democratic republic and towards people who do not meet autocratic criteria for either citizenship or personhood, perhaps it is timely to reconsider a dancework that focused on freedom, informed by a more inclusive historical accounts and without falling into pitfalls generated by nostalgia or a privileged universalism.


ART AS POLITICAL Politics and the political have been theorized on every habitable continent since at least the 8^th century BCE, spawning multiple actionable strategies and schools of thought. Both can infiltrate, constrain, or influence the cultural, social, and personal, directly or indirectly, consciously or tacitly. Dance theorists over centuries have tackled the problem of whether this can or should affect the arts and have produced many, often conflicting, responses including the possibility that all artmaking has some political dimension. Graham, herself, stated “No art can live and pass untouched through such a vital period as we are now experiencing.”² Mark Franko offers the perspective that politics may not be located “directly ‘in’ dance’ but in the way dance manages to occupy cultural space.”³ Note that a dance may occupy different cultural spaces over time. Further, dance is political “in circumstances that are conjunctural, that is, in circumstances where forms of movement and socio-political life take shape simultaneously if apparently independently.”⁴ This encounter between art and politics or the political can create something new “both artistically and politically that reveals contradictory forces and tendencies at work.”⁵ Both the development of Graham’s dance technique and some choreographic works, including American Document, are products of the conjunctural, and the art/political encounter does create something new that will, for better or worse, reveal contradictory forces.


THE PAST OF THE WORK  Graham’s early political sensibilities are evident in the development of her movement technique. “The old forms could not give voice to the more fully-awakened man.” ⁶ Her stated objective was to minimize both European and Asian movement influences and she often situated her motional impulses alongside the fervor of interwar American liberal nationalism^.7 Her 1930 essay champions the search for distinctly “American” roots—the land, exploration, the “psychic influence. . . of Indian and Negro,” but also for movement that was “divinely significant.” ⁸ Movement was the message; the felt and the thought must be “communicate[d] by means of action and perceived by action.” ⁹ At the same time, her work demanded research into the “inner landscape,” of her being. Her statements revealed contemporaneous tensions between work expressive of articulable ideas and a modernist perspective of art for art’s sake. ¹⁰ In practice, she retained from Denishawn movement11 the deep plie, use of weight, counter balance in the torso, angles and curves, rhythmic impulses, and built from these and experiments with the limits of her own physicality, what is recognizable as “Graham technique”—anchored in the use of breath in contraction and release within the body, the spiral that moves the body along vertical and horizontal axes, the off-balance that thrusts the body into space. She was percussive, angular, forceful as well as curved and sensual, often going against the grain of the beauty or exoticism that was appropriately synonymous with female. Early reviews, negative and positive, are rife with words like “awkward” or “ugly.” She “is one of the few dancers who can achieve an exquisite lyricism without danger of mere prettiness; in her newer dances she has deliberately sought out ugliness and clothed it with deep and satisfying beauty.” ¹²

Graham was also turning out work at a breakneck speed in her first two years of concerts. Although each work in her repertory was political in decisions that were a made, or made for her, regarding its making or production, only a handful were what might be designated as overtly acknowledging or suggesting the political zeitgeist of her day.

The years between 1926 and American Document in 1938 were marked by escalating labor tensions, exacerbated by the Great Depression, even as crises in Europe deepened and the leftist agenda expanded to include a growing resistance to fascism. However, hope was also reignited with New Deal policies that helped to regenerate a sense of faith in “American” ideals. The impending World War augmented a growing patriotism, providing a sense of unity and purpose. But rapid shifts in world politics during these two decades also generated burgeoning nationalism, inter-class tensions, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-women backlash, and racial bigotry and violence. Graham’s work shifted to reflect these historical trajectories. The dances fall loosely into two non-mutually exclusive groups: dances directly responding to the social and political crises of the times, and those that began to subsume a more overt politics into a modulated, idealistic, sense of American identity and values.¹³

The first group included works such as Revolt (1927), and Heretic (1935), portraying the violent repression of the individual, Deep Song (1937) embodying the anguish of a woman caught in the terror of the Spanish Civil War, and Chronicle (1936) presaging American Document in its sweep, structure, and response to the threat of fascism and war.¹⁴  The second group, her Americana pieces, although void of direct political messages, were, nevertheless, also constituted on a sociopolitical notion of American idealism or utopianism¹⁴ and contributed to the development of American Document with evident links between that work and both American Provincials (1935) and Frontier. Despite eschewing the description of ‘political,’ Graham also refused to perform in segregated theatres and participated in concerts aligned with left leaning organizations. She wrote about individual rights and spoke at anti-fascist events. ¹⁵ She publicly turned down the invitation by Goebbels and Laban to participate in the International Dance Festival scheduled for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Note that even as her choreographic energies were directed towards more explicit political concerns, her formal and motional explorations were shaped in tandem. Moving into new thematic territory prompted new ways of moving that conveyed ideas, or the felt component of ideas, without resorting to the literal or mimetic. She further developed dynamic group work and expanded her gestural vocabulary, particularly in her solos, that though abstracted, invited broader emotional resonance.


THE PRESENT OF THE WORK, 1938 Graham’s choreographic trajectories in these earlier works led to a confluence of the political, cultural, aesthetic, and personal. This conjoined with the parallel pressures of national and international crises to create a work that was new and utterly of its time in its complexity and complications.

The curtain opens on American Document. Surprisingly, despite the work’s emphasis on democracy and its critiques of slavery and bigotry, Graham loosely based its structure on that of a minstrel show. ¹⁶ Graham, herself, claimed a certain naivety, indicating an attraction to its form with structured musical numbers, comedy bits, dancing, and use of an interlocutor.  Others critique it as a reflection of contemporaneous racial discrimination, conscious or unconscious.. ¹⁷ Franko, while alluding to her complicated relationship to racial identities, suggests that her use of the minstrelsy structure with reference to other components of the work may have been “intentionally ironic and inherently critical of this aspect of American history.” ¹⁸ In her 1989 rebuilding of the work, that format was eliminated.

American Document was divided into an “Entrance,” four “Episodes” and a fifth “Afterpiece.” ¹⁹ Nearly every section employs a Walk Around for entries or exits or to locate the dancers on the stage. Episodes are generally introduced by text written for the piece followed by another text from an historical document. Following the “Declaration,” episodes are arranged along the chronological spine of US history. Every section has a duet, solo, or trio, framed or extended by the chorus.

Entrance introduces the Interlocutor who breaks the fourth wall by greeting the audience, locating them in that particular theatre in the United States, and emphasizing real time, ‘now—tonight.’ He introduces principals, chorus leader, and others by their actual names: Erick (Hawkins), Martha (Graham), Sophie (Maslow), and so on. It is a show within a show, utilizing a construct that conjoins the theatrical with real world urgency. Each episode thereafter is shaped by its response to the questions What is “America” or what does it mean to be “American.” The documents for the episodes—"Declaration,” “Occupation,” “Puritan,” “Emancipation,”—cite excerpts from, respectively, the “Declaration of Independence,” Seneca chief, Red Jacket’s lament for the land taken by white settlers and armies, the damning and strident text of Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, interwoven with the love poetry of the Bible’s “Song of Songs,” and Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation.” The final dance to “Democracy” is to Lincoln’s hailing of a “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people [that] shall not perish from the earth.”

The work found appreciative onlookers among all types of audiences. The growing threat of fascism had begun to unify people on all sides of the political, and aesthetic, aisles. But American Document also managed to mediate some of the squabbles ongoing between strict formalists and avid political activists. Both lauded the conjuncture of the artistic or political. ²¹ The use of familiar texts also increased the legibility of the dance. While text had been a popular device in agit-prop dances, ²⁰ Graham fully brought it into conversation with the dance, modeling a dialogue between “the people” and their documents.

The introduction of Erick Hawkins, with whom Graham fell utterly in love, changed everything. He was an imperious intruder in a company that, until then, had been all women. Several dancers, already choreographing on their own, left with his arrival. Her long-standing relationship with Louis Horst, her mentor, aesthetic adviser, musical director, composer, and lover diminished.²² However, Hawkins’ arrival also affected her movement vocabulary. Graham continued to choreograph powerful movement for her herself and her female dancers, but much of the exuberant, airborne movement that her women had danced--flying leaps, cartwheels, diving through space—were now assigned to men. On the other hand, this conjuncture of the personal with broader sociocultural norms of that period contributed to a change of direction in her choreography. In addition to its length and theatricality, there was gender. Her “Puritan” woman, in a duet sensuous enough to make some audience members squirm, was delicate and yielding relative to Hawkins’ stronger and more vertical movement. While pushing the boundaries of propriety on stage, she was also, motionally, yielding to socially acceptable performances of heterosexual sex.²³ This marks the beginning of her deeper psychological explorations of these relationships in terms of both power dynamics and sexuality. While revolutionary in furthering the power of the female protagonist in her next choreographic era, these works were rarely totally revisionary in terms of gender—the woman almost always dies.

Finally, this piece brings together two important thematic strains, overt political ideologies and a more tacit utopian Americanism. Graff locates the shift to Americana within the context of ‘30s and ‘40s socio-political moves in the US ²⁴ that led citizens and artists alike to affirm the freedom and the land that marked their identity. That this “American” identity might be multiple, even fractured, was not the concern at hand.

Critics on both the left and in the center, espoused this uncritical notion of American Identity. Though confronted in the work with Puritanical repression, the persecution of indigenous peoples and slavery, both sides still found the metaphor of the vast, open land and its “people” resonant. The New York Daily Worker critic argues that Graham’s “flesh and blood are identified with the sweeping picture of the American landscape and its people.” ²⁵ And Dance Observer, generally at odds with Popular Front opinions, rhapsodizes over its “Joyceian manifestation of this land, this people whose history began, one stormy day, with Plymouth Rock.” ²⁶ The obvious question here is who is missing in this picture.

The Frontier had been a potent image for Graham and, while aware of its negative connotations of oppression and genocide, she framed it as “a symbol of the journey into the unknown. . .a frontier of exploration. . .of discovery”²⁷ If urban political radicals were less aware of the horrific treatment of indigenous peoples, still, this existed in their knowledge banks along with a their recognition of the bigotry confronting people of color and immigrants who worked the land or its factories. But the hold of the metaphor of this cleansed “Frontier” was very strong. Perhaps, though cognizant of its untruths, it represented a longed-for future America that would live up to its full promise of an inclusive democracy. Conjuncture of art and politics can reveal contradictions, including those impossible to resolve.


THE FUTURE OF THE WORK  In 1989, Graham , for various reasons, decided to revive the work, describing it first as a premier and later as “neither a revision nor a revival of the 1938 ballet.''  There were dancers alive who had performed in the original, poor quality film, and Barbara Morgan’s exquisite images, but Graham did not utilize the archive directly, stating that she would be largely remaking the work. A musical collaboration with Leonard Bernstein did not work out ²⁸ but she succeeded in bringing in Barishnykov to dance Hawkin’s original role for an opening night benefit. Of the dance, reviews offer descriptions that indicate some similarities in the basic structure, but multiple differences in movement and tone. In 2010, in an even further remove from the work, director Anne Bogart, playwright Charles L. Mee, and movement advisor, Oliver Tobin, reconceived the work, making no attempt at an actual reconstruction. Performances in 2019 indicated a return to a fully danced work under the direction of Tobin that included a text by Graham, herself.

What then constitutes American Document? As bodied art occurring in physically instantiated time and space, no dance can exactly repeat itself, every repetition is, in a way, an original. It is possible to retrieve and re-perform a dance, perhaps nearly exactly in the next night’s performance, but less so if time has erased its memory or new cultural spaces and bodiedness have intervened. Theorists have offered various ways to think about this. Mark Franko, positing that a dance’s identity exceeds its original steps, considers the work’s cultural and historical moments and its motional and structural impulses as guidelines for re-enactments that may be true to their source but different in physicalized performances. Andre Lepecki argues that every work holds infinite possibilities of meaning, only some of which are released in its original performance. All the potential meanings of the work are always in that work, stored away, waiting to be activated in newly conceived re-enactments.


CONCLUSION? American Document was an artistic success; it enriched the world of dance, expanding the parameters of gesture, movement, choreography, and theatrical performance, but it is a work rife with contradictions. It was meant to represent the range of American peoples, yet efforts towards inclusion were nearly eclipsed by an underlying narrative that erased some of whom it purported to include. However, while invisibilizing the failed universalism of an American identity, it also embodied instances of these failures for all to see and confront. It stirred the emotions and made room for hope, while reminding us that democracy was not a given but an uncertain and yet-to-be-fulfilled promise.
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What potential new meanings stored away for nearly ninety years in American Document might another re-imagining or re-thinking activate? What might it retrieve for its own purposes—a title, an idea, a structure, a movement, a counter-movement. What could it be, what might it mean to a weary world in 2026?