On April 18, exactly 90 years after Martha Graham’s first performance as a choreographer, the New York Public Library’s Dance Division hosted a festive reading of her 1991 autobiography, Blood Memory.

I argue that in encountering the written autobiography we should not disavow this haunting but rather acknowledge its importance as a means of encountering that life.Graham during her first NYC concert, April 18, 1926. This impossibility is most poignant in Blood Memory as Graham struggles to represent the autobiographical significance of the embodied performance yet is haunted by the inability to fully articulate in writing its significance for her. I suggest that while the written account is an important means to chart a life, there are forms of autobiography that remain unrepresentable in the frame of writing.

Following a deconstructive perspective (Buse and Stott 1999 Derrida 1994) and taking up feminist critiques of both autobiography (Benstock 1988 Chanfrault-Duchet 2000) and the effects of embodiment (Phelan 1997 Albright 1997), I theorize autobiography as a haunting interstice between writing and the body. In this article I employ modern dance pioneer Martha Graham’s memoir Blood Memory (1991) to complicate understandings of autobiography. The author finishes by arguing that the question of Graham’s feminism is an important one because it remains unanswered. The essay then makes a close contextual reading of one of Graham’s works of the early 1930s, Primitive Mysteries (1931), to illustrate its radical conception of the female body both at the time of its premiere and over subsequent reconstructions. It then charts both the changing cultural and social beliefs of and about women in the twentieth century alongside Graham’s specific geographical, social, cultural and historical placement in that history and its possible impact on her processes of identification.

The essay first argues for the performative force of ‘doing’ a feminist identity as a foil for Graham’s public written reputation of feminism. The author suggests that this ambivalent situation allows for an ever increasing complex but fruitful discussion of Graham’s possible feminist identifications and their effects. This troubling arises from the confusion between what can be considered the predominantly feminist character of Graham’s life and work coupled with Graham’s outright rejection of a feminist consciousness. Abstract: The essay explores the mutual haunting between American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and feminism.

Blood memory by martha graham