Martha Graham Google Doodle: Modern Dance Pioneer

Celebrating Martha Graham, Seminal Modern Dance Choreographer

The new Google Doodle is in honor of Martha Graham, who would have turned 117 on May 11, 2011. Martha Graham, born in 1894, pioneered a whole new vocabulary for movement. The Martha Graham Dance Company, the oldest in America, still performs.

• Time Top 100 People of the 20th Century: Martha Graham
• Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance
  

Martha Graham danced well into her 70s, and believed that dance was immediate and ephemeral; she was against having her work filmed or recorded for most of her career. She died on April 1, 1991 at age 91, leaving behind an unfinished work called "Eyes of the Goddess".

The Google Doodle chronicles that idea of transformation and power with a simple series of steps, as the dancing figure changes as she moves, ending with a Tadashi Suzuki-style stomp--boom!-- that subtly shakes the image. Nice.

(Thanks, by the way, to all my Twitter folks who alert me to these... I almost never use Google's homepage, so who knows how many I miss?)

Photos

Martha Graham: Modern Dance Pioneer

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uploaded by Jordan Yerman