New Martha Graham bio by Deborah Jowitt

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Deborah Jowitt has just published her first book in decades - "Errand into the Maze: the Life and Works of Martha Graham."

The New York Times

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Jowitt excels at describing, minutely, the work — restoring to readers the novelty of Graham’s now-ingrained concepts; her conviction and distinct style. Of “Celebration,” a 1934 piece for 14 women, she writes: “Wearing identical dresses in deep blue and black, they jumped and jumped and jumped and jumped (a hundred times, one of them was sure), with only a brief seated section to power them up again.”

The Economist

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Less well remembered today but just as influential was Martha Graham, who pioneered modern dance. The Martha Graham Dance Company, which she founded in 1926, was the first dance troupe in America. As Deborah Jowitt, a critic and former dancer, shows in a new biography, Graham helped “dignify” dance and elevate it from entertainment to art.

The Wall Street Journal

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Ms. Jowitt was the Village Voice’s principal dance critic for more than 40 years, and she is at her best in “Errand Into the Maze” when she allows herself to veer from her timeline and comment on the meaning of Graham. In a particularly insightful passage, she writes about the artist’s desire to express “the tension between possible alternatives. Shall I go this way or that way? Thrust myself forward or shudder away? Throw myself into fury or control my emotions? One impulse yields to its opposite as, twisting and turning, she dedicates herself to ordeal.”

 

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More reviews:

Elizabeth Zimmer in The Village Voice:

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...Errand into the Maze is cultural history entwined with critical biography, accounting for New York’s social, creative, and political climate in the interwar era. Jowitt’s method includes close reading, textual analysis, all the stratagems of literary criticism of the period: translation, observation, and thick description, work for which journalistic critics rarely have space or time. She explicates music with as much clarity and confidence as she does movement. 

Carl Rollyson reviews Jowitt's book and Neil Baldwin's biography in The New York Sun.

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It is very difficult to surpass Agnes de Mille as a witness who writes so splendidly. So Neil Baldwin takes a different tack, beginning his biography with Martha Graham having an epiphany: “Bodies never lie,” she told de Mille. I immediately thought of another Graham biography, “Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life,” by the late Russell Freedman; it’s supposedly for 10- to 12-year-olds, but is really the work of a master biographer to be read by those of all ages.