Dancer Martha Graham trained her body to move in different ways and in different contexts from any before attempted, "life today is nervous, sharp, and zigzag," she said. "It often stops in midair. That is what I aim for in my dances." She insists she never started out to be a rebel. It was only that the emotions she had to express could not be projected through any of the traditional forms.

This was in 1925. All forms of art were undergoing a revolution. The theories of psychology were being used to extend the boundaries of poetry, music, and painting.

Martha Graham's debut dance concert in her new idiom occurred on April 18, 1926. Connoisseurs of dance, gathered at the Forty-eighth Street Theater in New York, witnessed Martha Graham's first foray into this new realm of dance. They saw, through such dance sequences as "Three Gobi Maidens." and "A Study in Lacquer, desires and conflicts expressed through bodily movements. These critics agreed that something entirely new. a departure from all previous forms, had been witnessed.

In the early thirties, she founded the. Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. Her classes were used as a laboratory for her stage works, and her stage works in turn were a means for attaching new pupils to her school-a sort of self-winding process, with herself as the key to the development.

Martha Graham and the school she has founded are virtually synonymous with the modern dance. She had not only produced a technique of the dance. choreographed and taught it, but her disciples have gone out to fill the modern dance world.