Courage, Imagination Are Graham’s Legacy

“Martha taught me to live with courage,” Erick Hawkins said about Martha Graham shortly after she died on April 1. “She had a vision and she went after it with imagination and with courage,” he said of the modern-dance giant.

Hawkins, 82, now marking his own pioneering troupe’s 40th anniversary, was Graham’s first male dancer and remained with her company for 12 years, nearly two as her husband.

Along with Doris Humphrey and Isadora Duncan, she “opened up the range of possibilities so that there was not just not one way of moving,” Hawkins said. “I’ve always been grateful to her because she unleashed the imagination so that in inventing movement, I was reckless in trying to find new ideas.”

Indeed, Hawkins forged a dance aesthetic that veered radically from Graham’s, one that shunned extreme tension and forced movement.

“One of the areas where I disagreed with Martha, is that Martha believed in strain,” he said during a phone interview from his Manhattan home. “I find that the most beautiful movement is without strain. It’s as though it obeys the principal that if you obey nature, nature will obey you and you don’t have to willfully make the movement happen. You just let it happen.”

Graham, who was 96 when she died, choreographed some of her greatest roles for Hawkins. He was her partner in “American Document,” the Husbandman in “Appalachian Spring,” the Ringmaster in “Every Soul is a Circus” and He Who Beckons in “Dark Meadow.”

To her, he was the physical ideal of masculinity and he became the model of virility for her later male dancers. While Hawkins gratefully acknowledges her influence, he unabashedly asserts that he had an impact on her as well.

“There’s no question about it. By being the first man to work with Martha, I let her be a woman. I upheld the male principal, and she didn’t have to; she could be a woman.”

He stopped well short of saying he had anything to do with the technique she evolved, however.

“Part of her virtue was that she had a strong will and a strong image (of what she wanted). That’s why she lived so long.”