Imagined Wing is a 1944 Martha Graham work made to a commissioned score, Jeux de Printemps, by Darius Milhaud. It was one of three dances Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned from Graham for a single program at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress on October 30, 1944 — the other two being Herodiade (billed that night as Mirror Before Me, to Hindemith) and Appalachian Spring (to Copland). Isamu Noguchi built the set and Edythe Gilfond designed the costumes; Graham herself did not dance in it, leaving the roles to the Martha Graham Dance Company.
It belongs in a catalogue less for what it achieved than for what it stands beside: a modest, hastily assembled piece premiered on the same bill as two works that became pillars of the American modern-dance repertory. It received tepid notices, was never performed again after its single showing, and survives only through scattered reviews and a later first-hand account of its chaotic making — making it a documented case of a major choreographer's work failing to hold the stage.
What is danced
The article gives no technical description of steps or vocabulary — no positions, holds, or phrases are recorded — so nothing here can be said about Graham's actual movement choices in performance. What is recoverable is structural: program notes called it "a fantasy of theater with several characters in various imagined places," opened and threaded by a Prompter (Angela Kennedy) who recited passages from Shakespeare between scenes, with a Chorus role taken by Yuriko and six other company members billed collectively as "The Performers" — Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, May O'Donnell, Nina Fonaroff, Pearl Lang, and Marjorie Mazia. A reviewer's notes name three settings — the woods, the market place, and a castle hall — with the castle-hall scene individually titled The Lady Distracted in Her Dream.
The most concrete information a dancer or choreographer would want is not about the finished choreography at all but about how it was made: according to Marjorie Mazia Guthrie's later account, Graham disliked the Milhaud score and delayed work on the piece until roughly a week before the premiere, then assigned solos, duets and trios to individual dancers to choreograph themselves, only stitching together transitions two or three days before it opened. That process — collective, delegated, deadline-driven composition rather than a single authored structure — is the substantive dance-historical content the article actually supports, more than any specific step vocabulary.
Context
1944 found Graham at the height of her collaborative reach: on a single Coolidge-commissioned program she premiered Appalachian Spring and Herodiade alongside Imagined Wing, drawing on major American and European composers (Copland, Hindemith, Milhaud) and on Noguchi as a recurring stage designer. The Library of Congress, through Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge's patronage, was functioning as a serious commissioning body for American modern dance and music, putting Graham in direct dialogue with contemporary composition rather than borrowed or found scores.
Imagined Wing shows the underside of that same moment: not every commission under this arrangement produced a lasting work, and the same conditions that gave rise to Appalachian Spring's clarity produced, in this case, a piece composed under pressure and abandoned after one showing. It is a useful check against treating Graham's mid-1940s output as uniformly canonical.
Staging history
The work had exactly one performance, at its premiere on October 30, 1944, and was never staged again. The article gives no record of revivals, reconstructions, or later restagings by the Martha Graham Dance Company or any other troupe.
How to watch it
There is nothing to watch — no film, revival, or reconstruction is recorded — so approach this as an archival case rather than a performance to assess. Read accounts of it against Appalachian Spring and Herodiade from the same program to see how contemporaries measured the three works relative to one another, and note the framing device of a Prompter reciting Shakespeare between scenes, which structured the piece as an anthology of vignettes rather than a single narrative arc.
Structure
- Scene The woodsOne of the settings a contemporary reviewer noted; no details of what was danced in it survive.
- Scene The market placeA second setting recorded by a reviewer; no choreographic detail is preserved.
- Scene The castle hall · The Lady Distracted in Her DreamThe castle-hall scene was individually titled by name; beyond the title, nothing of its content or choreography is recorded.
Structure read from an encyclopaedia article, not from a libretto or score we hold. Confirm against a programme before treating the numbering as authoritative.