A company and school founded in Manhattan, 1926.

The Martha Graham Dance Company began in a single room. The New York Times reported on 7 June 2023 that Martha Graham founded her dance company and school in 1926 while living and working out of a studio apartment in Midtown Manhattan. The Guardian, in a long feature by Lyndsey Winship published on 6 October 2025, placed the start a century earlier at a small studio above Carnegie Hall, and the company’s own history page describes the same beginning in a tiny Carnegie Hall studio. English Wikipedia gives the founding month as April 1926 and says Graham also taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she trained the women who formed her troupe.

Graham had come from elsewhere in dance. The Guardian says she trained with Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn and danced in their Denishawn company, then took a job with the Greenwich Village Follies revue before setting up her own school and company. The paper describes the movement she built as rooted to the earth: the spine curved and the pelvis tilted in deep contractions. The company’s history page names the principle behind it as contraction and release, and says Graham built a vocabulary from those elemental movements that would “increase the emotional activity of the dancer’s body.”

The early repertoire is still the backbone of the company’s programmes. Wikipedia lists Lamentation (1930) and Primitive Mysteries (1931) among the early works, says Frontier (1935) was the piece in which Graham began to use scenery, a fence and two ropes, with music by Louis Horst, and says the troupe was all female until men joined in 1938 and 1939. It names Erick Hawkins as Graham’s partner in American Document (1938) and in Appalachian Spring, which premiered in 1944 to music by Aaron Copland. The company says its repertoire runs to 181 works. The Guardian notes that Merce Cunningham performed with Graham’s company before setting out on his own path in modern dance.

Fabric, sculpture and costumes made as part of the dance.

Design was part of the choreography from the start, which is why the company is a useful subject for a design guide. The company’s history page says Graham conceived each new work in its entirety, dance, costumes and music together, and lists collaborators including the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the fashion designers Halston, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, and composers such as Copland, Horst and Samuel Barber. Wikipedia adds that in the early years Graham designed her own costumes and largely did without scenery.

The Guardian described how those designs work on stage. In Lamentation, it said, the dancer sits inside a stretchy tube of fabric that has to be kept taut the whole time, so that the tension becomes part of the dance. For Errand into the Maze (1947), a Minotaur-inspired piece, Noguchi made a V-shaped sculpture that the paper likened to a portal or gateway the protagonist steps through. The same article mentioned a yellow, green and black striped dress Graham designed for Satyric Festival Song (1932), and quoted Masha Maddux, who joined the company in 2007, describing the technique as restrained, deep and theatrical, “with a certain bite.”

The Noguchi partnership is treated as a theme in its own right. The New York Times reported in June 2023 that the company’s 2024–25 season, titled Dances of the Mind, would focus on Graham’s psychological works and her long artistic partnership with Noguchi, with Phaedra (1962), Errand into the Maze and Herodiade (1944) in the repertory. The Guardian reported in October 2025 that English National Ballet was performing Errand into the Maze at Sadler’s Wells in London.

Graham died in 1991, as The Guardian recorded. Wikipedia says Janet Eilber became artistic director in 2005, and that Eilber has since invited contemporary choreographers, among them Yvonne Rainer and Aszure Barton, to make short pieces inspired by Lamentation. The company says its programmes now pair Graham works with new commissions by artists responding to her legacy, alongside a second ensemble, Graham 2, and the Martha Graham School.

A centenary told in three seasons.

Many dance companies carry a person’s name, and that name does different work once the person is gone. While a founder is alive, the name on the poster promises new pieces from a particular hand; afterwards it becomes a promise about care, that the existing works will be staged, rehearsed and credited properly. Programmes start to list who taught a role and in which years, and the company’s initials turn up in dancers’ biographies like a school crest. Posters lean heavily on a single photographed body caught mid-leap or mid-fall, cropped tight and set against a plain field, with the company name small and the dates large. The image carries the energy, so the type is usually kept quiet, a sans or a restrained serif that will sit over skin, fabric or shadow without fighting it.

Circus identity travels on vehicles and canvas as much as on paper. A touring show arrives as a convoy of trucks and a tent, and the colours of that tent, seen from a road or a car park, can stand in for a logo before anyone reads a word. Season brochures pull in the other direction, gathering a year of programmes into one booklet with a shared grid, a shared palette and a calendar that has to work at a glance. Repertory companies brand the ensemble and let individual works change underneath it, while single-show producers give each production its own title, colour and typographic voice, held together only by the house name above it.

GRAHAM100, a PBS series and a studio in Times Square.

The company has framed its hundredth year as a long programme rather than a single date. The New York Times reported on 7 June 2023 that it would mark the anniversary with a three-season celebration, and quoted Janet Eilber as saying the company had been part of the American conversation for 100 years and needed at least three seasons to explore it. The paper said the 2023–24 season, American Legacies, would include Appalachian Spring, a new production of Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo with Copland’s score reorchestrated for a bluegrass ensemble by Gabe Witcher, and a new work by Jamar Roberts with a score by Rhiannon Giddens. The 2025–26 season, The Masterpieces, was built around the question “What is an American?” from Graham’s 1939 American Document. The company brands the whole cycle GRAHAM100.

Screen and print form part of the same plan. The Times listed a collaboration with Long Beach Opera, a book of photographs by NYC Dance Project, and a documentary in development with PBS. BroadwayWorld reported on 6 February 2026 that the two-part series Martha Graham Dance Company: We Are Our Time would premiere on PBS on 27 March 2026, with the second episode on 3 April. It said the production company Partisan Pictures had embedded with the company for more than three years, that Graham’s own words were voiced by Meryl Streep, and that the episodes followed the Jamar Roberts premiere and a tour through Europe and China.

The anniversary also brought a change of address. Wikipedia says the company announced in 2025 a move to the Paramount Building in Times Square, and the company now lists the Martha Graham Center on the building’s eleventh floor, describing the landmark as the 1926 headquarters of Paramount Pictures. MBB Architects, which designed the fit-out, says it set the studios beneath the building’s sawtooth skylights and took its sequence of spaces from Graham’s idea of contraction and release.

For a design guide, the Martha Graham Dance Company shows how an institution can carry a founder’s visual language — taut fabric, sculptural sets, costumes designed by the choreographer — into a centenary programme, a book and a television series without changing the name over the door. Compare Merce Cunningham Dance Company, founded by a former Graham dancer, and Sadler’s Wells, the London dance theatre where Graham’s Errand into the Maze appeared in 2025. For this guide we use crimson, bronze and stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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