Martha Graham Dance Company Celebrates 100 Years of Revolutionizing Modern Dance

Martha Graham’s connection with UC Berkeley dates back further than the creation of her own company! Learn more about this revered company and its iconic founder.

By Mark Van Oss, Cal Performances’ Communications Editor

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company returns to Zellerbach Hall for the first time in more than 10 years with performances on Saturday and Sunday, February 14–15, 2026. Programs include classic Graham works such as the iconic Appalachian Spring, the psychological thriller Night Journey, and the anti-war protest Chronicle—all featuring Isamu Noguchi’s original sets—alongside newly commissioned dances by some of today’s most compelling choreographers.

Saturday evening’s performance features Cortege, a new work by the in-demand team of Baye & Asa, created in response to Graham’s seminal war protest Cortege of Eagles. And Sunday’s matinee includes the Bay Area premiere of En Masse by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater alum Hope Boykin, as well as Jamar Roberts’ We the People, a collaboration—part lament, part protest—with roots musician Rhiannon Giddens exploring themes of determination and resistance.

“It’s an extraordinary honor to welcome the Martha Graham Dance Company back to Cal Performances,” said Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen. “Many in our audience remember with admiration the company’s previous visits, stretching from 1970 to their most recent Berkeley appearances in 2014, and the February 2026 engagements offer Bay Area dance lovers the chance to re-engage with seminal works that have defined the company’s past, along with the newly commissioned work—from some choreographers already known to our audiences—that will shape its future. All of this combines to provide a truly not-to-be-missed highlight of the 2025–26 season.”

Martha Graham’s connection with UC Berkeley dates back more than a century, to July 1916, when Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn—then at the leading edge of the emerging modern dance movement in the United States—brought their Denishawn company to the Greek Theatre for a special Dance Pageant of Egypt, Greece and India program. That performance featured 170 dancers accompanied by the San Francisco Symphony and the UC Chorus; present on stage, a promising 22-year-old dancer named Martha Graham.

The rest, of course, is history. Today, Graham is recognized—alongside figures such as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Frank Lloyd Wright—as a primal artistic force of the 20th century. Her distinctive, groundbreaking movement technique has been carried in dancers’ bodies for generations; the works she commissioned have grown and multiplied over hundreds of performances; and her contributions to the art of stage design and dance production are countless.

Indeed, Graham’s name would become synonymous with American modern dance and her school and company would grow to become the training ground for the next generation of American dancers and choreographers, including such luminaries as Merce Cunningham, Pearl Lang, Paul Taylor, Glen Tetley, and Alvin Ailey, all of whom would also form companies and play major roles in the emerging dance programming on the UC Berkeley campus.

Graham founded her company and school in 1926, while living and working out of a tiny Carnegie Hall studio in midtown Manhattan. As early as the 1930s, her dancers reflected diverse cultural backgrounds, and Graham’s commitment to experimentation and attention to contemporary social, political, psychological, and gender issues has forever altered the scope and direction of the art form.

For full program information as well as tickets to Martha Graham Dance Company in GRAHAM100: A Celebration of the Company’s 100th Anniversary, visit the event detail page.