After seven years with Denishawn, Graham moved to New York City and struck out on her own, giving solo recitals and eventually launching her own company, in 1929. To raise funds, she danced at the opening of Radio City Music Hall, modeled furs and later gave classes in which she taught such actors as Bette Davis and Gregory Peck how to move. (Richard Boone claimed that to die onscreen, he simply did a one-count Graham fall.) But nothing could deflect her from what she believed to be her sacred mission: to "chart the graph of the heart" through movement. "That driving force of God that plunges through me is what I live for," she wrote, and believed every word of it. Others believed too, partly because of the hurricane-strength force of her personality — the Graham company would always bear an unsettling resemblance to a religious cult, with the choreographer as high priestess — but mainly because she delivered the goods.

Graham came decisively into her own in the '40s, turning out in rapid succession the decade-long series of angst-ridden dance dramas — enacted on symbol-strewn sets designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and accompanied by scores commissioned from such noted composers as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber — on which her reputation now chiefly rests. Cave of the Heart (1946), one of her many modern recastings of ancient Greek myth, contains a horrific solo in which the hate-crazed Medea gobbles her own entrails — perhaps Graham's most sensational coup de theatre and one recalled with nightmarish clarity by all who saw her bring it off.

"How do you want to be remembered, as a dancer or a choreographer?" Graham was asked by choreographer Antony Tudor. "As a dancer, of course," she replied. "I pity you," Tudor said. His words proved prophetic. In her prime a performer of eye-scorching power, Graham insisted on dancing until 1968, long after her onstage appearances had degenerated into grisly self-caricature. Her unwillingness to let younger soloists take over led her to replace her signature pieces with new dances in which she substituted calculated effects for convincing movement. Adoring critics pretended nothing was wrong, but in fact she produced virtually no work of lasting interest from 1950 to her death 41 years later.

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