Errand Into the Maze by Deborah Jowitt
Martha Graham was pivotal to the development of modern dance, choreographing some 200 dances and dancing in most of them. Her last piece, probably unfinished, premiered six months after her death in 1991. She almost reached 97.
Her long and eventful life is chronicled with elegant precision in Errand into the Maze. As dance critic for the Village Voice, Jowitt’’s career overlapped with her subject, albeit most of Errand concerns Graham’s life prior 1980—during the years when the dancer made her greatest strides. Jowitt’s biography is concerned with formative influences, showing that Graham was born with a sensibility for the stage. Although the child of a Protestant family, she enjoyed slipping away to Roman Catholic mass for its theatricality. Arriving in New York in the 1920s, she danced to the music of Debussy and Borodin, read philosophy and quoted Nietzsche in an early program note, a line that encapsulates much of her aesthetic: “strong, free, joyous, action.”
Jowitt identifies the “dualities of restraint and freedom, decorum and wildness” as inherent to Graham as she choreographed her life and her performances.
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