Frontier (ballet)

Frontier is a solo dance choreographed by Martha Graham to music by Louis Horst. The set was designed by Isamu Noguchi; Graham created the costume. The work began as an ensemble piece, Perspectives: Frontier and Marching Song also known as Frontiers (Perspective No. 1) and Frontier. The ballet's Marching Song portion was set to music by Lehman Engle. The work premiered on April 28, 1935, at the Guild Theatre in New York City. By the end of 1935, Graham was performing Frontier exclusively as a solo. The piece was the first of her works to explore American identity through an archetypal character.

Approximately seven minutes in length, Frontier is the first of Graham's "American" modern dance works, a group that includes American Document (1938), American Provincials (1934), Panorama (1935), El Penitente (1940), Letter to the World (1940), Salem Shore (1943) and Appalachian Spring (1944). In its solo form, the piece was subtitled American Perspective of the Plains.

In her autobiography, Blood Memory, Graham wrote that her family's move West by train was the inspiration for Frontier. "Tracks in front of me, how they gleamed whether we went straight ahead or through a newly carved-out mountain. It was these tracks that hugged the land, and became a part of my living memory. Parallel lines whose meaning was inexhaustible, whose purpose was infinite. This was, for me, the beginning of my ballet Frontier." The work meshes with Graham's stated goal to create a "uniquely American" dance form, to help "bring forth an art as powerful as the country itself."

Frontier was the first of Graham's ballets to feature scenic elements. All of her previous dances had been performed on a bare stage. She commissioned sculptor Isamu Noguchi to design the spare, but evocative, set. A rough log fence, two rails supported by two upright posts, sits at center stage. Two lengths of rope are arranged in a V-shape that stretches from either wing of the stage to meet in a point behind the fence, an effect suggesting limitless perspective. It was Noguchi's first effort at creating a stage set. He would continue to design for Graham's work over the next five decades.

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