Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy

Martha Graham's Cold War is the first book to frame the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-Western Cold War propaganda used by the United States government to promote American democracy. Why did the State Department choose Martha Graham? As with other artforms such as jazz or avant-garde paintings, modern dance was seen to demonstrate American values of individualism and freedom; the choreographer used the freed body to make a new dance technique that could reshape narratives. But Graham took the pro-American argument one step further than herartistic compatriots. She targeted elites and used modern dance to propound the "universalism" of human rights that could, she believed, only be achieved through democracy. In her choreography, argues author Victoria Phillips, Graham recast the stories of the Western canon through femaleprotagonists whom she captured as timeless, seemingly beyond current politics, and in so doing implied superior political and cultural values of the Free World. Centering on powerful yet not demonstrably American female characters, the stories Graham danced seduced and captured the imaginations ofelite audiences without seeming to force a determinedly American agenda. When her characters grew mythic on stage, they became the stories of all mankind, as Graham termed it. "My dances are ages old in meaning," she declared.In the Cold War, Graham's particular modernism and the woman herself ossified, as did political aims of a cultural diplomacy based on an appeal to foreign elites. Phillips lays bare the side-by-side trajectories between the aging of Graham's choreography, her work as an ambassador, and the politicaldominance of the United States as a global power. Representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, Graham performed politics in the field for over thirty years. With her tours and Cold War modernism, she demonstrated the power of the individual, immigrants,republicanism, and freedom from walls and metaphorical fences through cultural diplomacy with the unfettered language of movement and dance.