“It takes me ten years to make a dancer,” Martha Graham declared, and by 1961, at age sixty-seven, she had created a generation of stars. Her technically powerful company trained with the matriarch of modern dance, its “Picasso,” as they readied to tour for a new, young president, John F. Kennedy, and his sophisticated wife, Jackie. He needed to show sophistication and gravitas; in 1962, Graham and her twenty glowing dancers toured Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, Sweden, West Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway, traversing a complex geographic puzzle of territories contested between East and West, engaging with “containment,” the “Iron Curtain,” old-fashioned wartime European neutrality, and Bandung’s issues of nonalignment, all refashioned by the changing Cold War. Yet the tour would start in Israel, again courtesy of private funding. Greece and Turkey had been named by Truman in his “containment” policy, led by George Kennan; Graham performed as Clytemnestra for the Greeks. Kennan sponsored Graham as she went “behind the Iron Curtain” to Yugoslavia and Poland, where religious works were foregrounded to fight the Soviet “atheists.” As in 1957, she would perform in West Germany, a Cold War hotspot. In Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Norway, she engaged with European neutrality, nonalignment, and the Non-Aligned Movement that demanded softer power. As Graham aged, she presented increasingly sexually charged works with the cover of modernism and myth. Yet her alcoholism took hold and compromised her work. Many suggested this should be a “farewell tour.”
Cold War Protest in East and West German Political Song