Martha Graham Dance Company Celebrates 100 Years of Innovation

A century ago, one woman decided to break every rule of classical ballet, and her vision became America's most enduring dance company.

The Martha Graham Dance Company celebrated its 100th anniversary this year with performances across four European cities. Founded in 1926, it remains the oldest professional dance troupe in the United States, still performing the revolutionary works that changed dance forever.

Martha Graham started dancing at 22, unusually late for a professional dancer. Born in Pittsburgh in 1894, she rejected the delicate, weightless aesthetic of classical ballet and created something entirely new: sharp angles, flexed feet, and movements that expressed raw human emotion.

Her inspiration came from an unexpected place. After seeing a bold abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky in 1922, Graham realized art didn't need to be realistic to move people. She thought to herself: "I will make a dance like that."

And she did. Graham stripped away centuries of European ballet tradition to build an American art form from scratch. While jazz legends like Duke Ellington were creating new sounds and writers like Hemingway were reinventing fiction, Graham was doing the same for dance.

Time magazine named her "Dancer of the Century" in 1998. She became the first dancer ever to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When Nazi Germany invited her to perform at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, she refused.

The Ripple Effect

Today, dancers at the company's Manhattan studio still perform classics like "Cave of the Heart," a 1946 piece about jealousy and revenge. But the troupe also commissions new works, like "We the People," created in 2024 by choreographer Jamar Roberts to depict modern protest movements.

The company is moving to a new Times Square home this year, ready for its next century. Graham's technique of using the body to express what words cannot has influenced every modern dance company that came after her.

Janet Eilber, the company's artistic director since 2005, explains Graham's lasting impact simply: "Body language transcends cultures and ages." What Graham created wasn't just steps and movements. She gave us a new way to express the full range of human experience through motion.

A century later, audiences still feel that streak of red across the canvas.