"When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before"
About this Quote
A good critic is really a witness, and Leslie Fiedler stages himself that way here: not as the man with the verdict, but as the kid caught mid-conversion. The opening detail, "When I was 12", isn’t cute memoir; it’s a credibility hack with teeth. He’s telling you this response predates taste, training, and the social pressures of knowing what you’re supposed to admire. In other words: the shock was pure.
The line about "serious dancing" is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s a child confessing his narrow definition of art. Underneath, it’s a diagnosis of American cultural hierarchies in the mid-century: ballet as the official language of prestige, modern dance as suspicious, bodily, maybe even too emotionally legible to count as "high". Martha Graham arrives as the refutation, not by argument but by physics. "Moving through space" is criticism stripped to essentials: form felt as force. He can’t yet name technique or vocabulary, so he reaches for the one thing a spectator can’t fake: the sensation that the room’s rules have changed.
Fiedler’s intent is to capture how modernism actually wins converts - not through manifestos, but through encounters that make your old categories look small. The subtext is generous and slightly combative: if you need art to resemble what you already recognize as "serious", you’re missing the point. Graham isn’t just different; she’s unprecedented, and that “no one ever did before” is the critic’s highest praise: history being rewritten in real time, from a seat in the dark.
The line about "serious dancing" is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s a child confessing his narrow definition of art. Underneath, it’s a diagnosis of American cultural hierarchies in the mid-century: ballet as the official language of prestige, modern dance as suspicious, bodily, maybe even too emotionally legible to count as "high". Martha Graham arrives as the refutation, not by argument but by physics. "Moving through space" is criticism stripped to essentials: form felt as force. He can’t yet name technique or vocabulary, so he reaches for the one thing a spectator can’t fake: the sensation that the room’s rules have changed.
Fiedler’s intent is to capture how modernism actually wins converts - not through manifestos, but through encounters that make your old categories look small. The subtext is generous and slightly combative: if you need art to resemble what you already recognize as "serious", you’re missing the point. Graham isn’t just different; she’s unprecedented, and that “no one ever did before” is the critic’s highest praise: history being rewritten in real time, from a seat in the dark.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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