Like all great artists, Graham did not create in a cultural vacuum. Although the ballet had long been dominant, it was not the only genre of artistic dance. There were some important precursors to the modern dance movement Graham started. In the late 1800s Loie Fuller began to lay the basic ground work for a genre that would become modern dance by performing popular dances in a high art setting. She established two of the essential elements of modern dance: freedom of movement and the solo form (Bates, 1980, p. 1). Around the turn of the century Isadora Duncan created and performed dances that evoked cycles of nature such as ocean waves, trees swaying in the wind and the endless turning of the seasons. She built upon the foundations set by Fuller by emphasizing the personal, innermost emotions of the individual as legitimat

On April 18, 1926 the show would go on. Graham and her three dancers, with Horst at the piano, presented 18 short pieces. Set to the music of such composers as Scriabin, Debussy, Satie, Ravel and Rachmaninoff, among others, the show was a mix of styles that progressed from those established at Denishawn to her new inventions. Her early solo titled ôTanagraö, for example, remained strictly within the Denishawn style of Oriental lyricism. While Graham had not yet developed and refined her new style to the extent that it could carry an evening, she did present some powerful and remarkably new compositions that presented the beauty of pure motion. One such piece was ôArabesque No. 1ö in which Biracree, Sabin and MacDonald melted from one pose into another accompanied by DebussyÆs work of the same title.

In the third episode, the lead dancer continues her side kick while the rest parade from upstage right to downstage left. The file marches in unison. Each individual dancer, however, strikes and maintains a different, awkward pose with their upper body. The effect is one of watching a parade of wounded people.

The stage setting for this piece was designed by Isamu Naguchi, with whom she collaborated throughout most of her career. It is a significant element in the composition in spite of its apparent simplicity. It consists of a 30 or 40 foot length of rope and two round, seven-foot, wooden posts placed about three feet apart at a slight diagonal so that they spread slightly as they r