Martha Graham's territory of innumerable dances and a self-sufficient dance technique is a vast but closed territory, since to create an art out of one's experience alone ~ ultimately ~ self-limiting act. If there had been other choreographers with Graham's gifts and her stature, her work might have seemed a more balanced part of the story of American dance. but as she built her repertory, her own language seemed to shut out all other kinds. Even when an audience thinks it discerns traces of influence from other dance styles, the totality of Graham's theatrical idiom, its control of costumes. lights. and every impulse of the dance makes the reference seem a mirage. Dance is not her main subject. It is only her servant.

Graham had achieved her autonomy by 1931. By that time. three giant figures who had invented the new twentieth-century dance were dead: Sergei Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova, and Isadora Duncan. Their era ended with them, and their dance values nearly disappeared. Their colleagues Michel Fokine and Ruth St. Denis lived on in America like whales on the beach. During the twenties, Martha Graham and her colleagues had rescued art-dance from vaudeville and movies and musical comedy and all the resonances of the idyllic mode in the United States, but in so doing they closed the channels through which different kinds of dance could speak to one another-and these' stayed closed for half a century. Modem dance dedicated itself to deep significance. It gave up lightness it gave up a wealth of exotic color, it gave up a certain kind of theatrical wit and that age-old mobile exchange between a dancer and the dancer's rhythmical and musical material. No material in modem dance was neutral. The core of the art became an obsession with meaning and allegory as expressed in bodies. Modern dance excluded its own theatrical traditions of casual play, gratuitous liveliness, the spontaneous pretense, and the rainbow of genres that had formed it. But all these things survived in the public domain, where they had always lived, and they have continued to surface in American dance, if only by accident.