“There was nothing to do but make heads,” Isamu Noguchi remarked about his life in 1929.¹ From his studio atop Carnegie Hall, Noguchi sculpted one figurative portrait bust after another. “It was a matter of eating,” he explained.² That same year, Martha Graham took the seat across from the sculptor, posing for not one, but two portraits. Graham was one of nearly one hundred patrons to sit for a bust by Noguchi in his early career, but she was the only individual for whom this encounter would evolve into a decades-long collaboration with the artist. 

In 1935, six years after Noguchi completed the two portraits of the already-renowned modern dancer and choreographer, Graham asked Noguchi to create a stage design for Frontier, her then-two-part dance work capturing the courageous spirit of the American pioneer woman. Having already abandoned the painted backdrops and dense ornamentation of classical ballet settings (a radical move at the time), Graham had, until that point, been performing her modern dance works on empty stages. By bringing a distinctively sculptural approach to stage design, Noguchi’s work with Graham marked an even further departure. 

Describing his conception of Frontier’s set, Noguchi said he had “thought to catch the essential sculpture of space” as “a limitless illusion,” a fitting sentiment for a dance about the perceived boundlessness of westward expansion in the nineteenth-century United States.³ With only a fence and rope, a simple gesture, Noguchi bisected the depth of the stage space.⁴ Even with this first scenic design, he was considering the entire volume of the stage—“the whole mass of air, that cubic piece.”⁵ Thinking in three dimensions (beyond the floor and backdrop), Noguchi brought dance sets into the modern era, creating a space not compromised by decoration or illustration.

Throughout their thirty-year collaboration on works for the stage, Graham approached Noguchi with proposals for dances whose subjects spanned Greek mythology, the American Southwest, global conflict, contemporary life, her own biography, and movement itself. Often, Graham would develop ideas for her dances in notebooks, scrawling choreographic notation, ruminations, and fragmented excerpts from her broad lexicon of references. A fraction of her notebook entries from the 1940s to the 1960s, published in 1973 after Graham gave them to the editor of her memoir, contain illuminating insights into the beginnings of her creative process. Beyond illustrating how Graham’s own philosophies influenced her choreographic work, her writings also reveal her most frequented sources—T.S. Eliot, Carl Jung, William Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri, to name a few. One subject Graham considered extensively in these notebooks was the Garden of Eden, which she researched by consulting the Old and New Testaments as well as Hebrew folklore.

As they worked together over the years, Noguchi and Graham developed a real sense of rhythm. Once Graham distilled what she wanted a dance to capture, she presented it to Noguchi with specific requests for the set—an essential prop, for example. “Martha would call on me to rise to the occasion,” Noguchi said. “She is the one who always came to me with her requirements and the myth she wished to encompass. My role was to respond.”⁶ These conversations usually occurred during Graham’s characteristic late-night work sessions. Noguchi endearingly remembered many nights when his phone would ring at two in the morning, Graham’s hallmark “Now, Isamu,” waiting for him at the other end of the receiver before she divulged her most recent fascination. Sometimes, she gave Noguchi a few excerpts of the score, which she also commissioned specifically for her dances. Then she hung up and Noguchi got to work. He began by developing the concept in his studio, constructing and designing in a “scale model of the stage space.”⁷ This practice allowed him to envision the total environment he was creating in the theater and how it might interact with both the dancers on stage and the audience, which Noguchi believed were equally essential to the ritual of performance. Working with Graham meant, of course, working on a deadline: the rigor of a performance schedule gave Noguchi weeks (if that) to create his sets. But Noguchi, known for working slowly and deliberately with stone, embraced this change in his practice. “It doesn’t get fouled up in pretentiousness,” he explained.⁸

Expectedly, Noguchi liked some of his stage designs more than others. Some he flatly dismissed. In a 1979 conversation, dance critic Tobi Tobias asked Noguchi about his set for Graham’s Chronicle (1936), of which a revised and admired version remains in the Graham repertory. Noguchi waved it away: “it wasn’t that important.”⁹ Other stage designs, meanwhile, seemed to Noguchi not only significant but completely united with his independent sculptural practice. His plywood set design for Hérodiade (1944), for example, reflects the interlocking stone sculptures he was working on at that time. Instead of using bolts or screws, Noguchi relied solely on gravity and carefully balanced weight distribution to assemble the marble slabs. The precarity of the sculptures was perfectly suited to adaptation for Hérodiade, which centers on a middle-aged woman confronting her mortality.¹⁰ On the work, Noguchi writes, “I was doing on the stage that which I had already been doing in sculpture . . . It’s my sculpture coming to life in the theater, in actuality of a setting, of relationships.”¹¹ This vision did not go unnoticed: reviewers of Graham’s programs often extolled Noguchi’s works, one even regarding his set as the “brightest aspect” of the dance.¹² And in interviews, Noguchi spoke frequently of his satisfaction with the works he made for Graham, having demonstrated to himself that he could translate his artistic practice into the theater environment.

Embattled Garden (1958) was one such work.

In a conversation with dance historian Robert Tracy in the early 1980s, Noguchi revealed his affinity for the design: “I like that piece very much . . . I wish I could have the Embattled Garden set here at the museum. It would be nice.”¹³ Hoping to make his desire a reality, Noguchi wrote to Graham in 1984 and asked if he could acquire the set for his collection. Graham obliged, with the condition that Noguchi supervise the creation of a performance copy for the company’s use. When the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum opened to the public in 1985, Noguchi prioritized displaying the Embattled Garden platform in the permanent collection alongside just two other stage designs—the rocking chair from Appalachian Spring (1944) and the spider dress and serpent from Cave of the Heart (1946). Noguchi never said outright why he favored the set for Embattled Garden so much, but perhaps it is because he sensed how well the work exemplified his sculptural contributions to dance.

Embattled Garden debuted in 1958 at the Adelphi Theatre in New York on West 54th Street. A high-drama score by Carlos Surinach, lighting by Jean Rosenthal, and a two-element set by Noguchi accompanied Graham’s choreography and costuming. Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company since 2005 and former Graham company dancer (1972–99), pointed to the cultural influences throughout the work in a recent conversation. Deeply familiar with the piece, Eilber remarked on how Surinach infused the music with his Spanish heritage.¹⁴ The titling of the score’s various sections motions to this. While the first section’s Italian title, “Allegro ma non troppo,” indicates only the tempo—“played quickly, but not too quickly”—the three following sections utilize the Spanish term tiento, referencing a music genre that originated in mid-fifteenth century Spain. The titles of the three “tientos”—“de Queja,” “de Pena,” and “de Alegria”—translate to lamentation, sorrow, and joy, respectively, sketching out the dance’s emotional arc. Across the romantic, dreamlike strings and also the more urgent, horn-forward sections, Spain’s effect on Surinach and his composition for Embattled Garden rings clear. Correspondingly, Graham’s costume designs derive from Spanish flamenco, with the women in long ruffled dresses and the men in high-waisted black trousers. Noguchi’s use of vibrant reds and yellows in the set echoes these same references, and all of these elements support the drama that runs through the choreographic narrative.

Danced by a cast of four—Eve, Adam, the Stranger (or the Serpent), and Lilith, Adam’s first wife—the work presents Graham’s interpretation of Eden, which was no placid paradise. For Graham, Eden was as much about sex as the sacred, a playground for temptation, desire, and carnal awakening. The original program notes from 1958 read:

In her notebooks, Graham explores many of the themes at play in the quartet: innocence and maturity, fall and redemption, virtue and temptation, faith and infidelity. Both in her writings and in the dance, she examines these dichotomies primarily through Eve, who begins as a character of remarkable naiveté. In this way, Eve is aligned with certain aspects of the Garden itself, which Graham characterizes in her notes: “The return to the Garden — / To faith –– / To innocence –– / To first things ––” as well as “Garden in the desert — / an oasis of hope — faith / symbol of re-birth — / continuity of life —”¹⁵ But the Garden is not entirely innocent. Within it are the Serpent and Lilith, who embody the deviance, lust, and mischief that instigate Eve’s coming of age as well as the series of tensions in the work’s plot. According to rabbinic literature, God made Lilith from soil, as he made Adam, which granted her independence and a sense of self. Believing herself his equal—they were made of the same dirt, after all—Lilith refused to submit to Adam, resisting subservience to her husband. When creating Eve, Adam’s second wife, God sought to avoid this outcome by forming her from Adam’s rib; born of him, she would always be devoted.¹⁶

This is the place from which Graham’s quartet begins: a faithful Eve, her steadfast Adam, and the scheming Serpent and Lilith, whose crusades, seductions, and knowledge of the “outside” lead Eve and Adam away from each other and toward what Graham describes as “the poison of [the Stranger’s] wickedness, which is lust, the root & beginning of every sin.”¹⁷ Guided by this ancient narrative, Graham and Noguchi made dynamic contributions in movement and sculpture which, together, present audiences with an impassioned staging of the affairs in Eden.

The curtain opens to reveal the cast’s four dancers spread across Noguchi’s two sculptures for the stage. The Stranger is hanging, inverted, on the stage-right element, Noguchi’s interpretation of the Tree of Knowledge, while Lilith is cooling herself with a red Noguchi fan at the sculpture’s base. Cultural historian Diane Apostolos-Cappadona defines the fan as a “mythical symbol of betrayal and deceit,” and, citing dance scholar Genevieve Oswald, identifies its effect on Lilith’s demeanor as “underscor[ing] her cool, sophisticated detachment.”¹⁸ Apostolos-Cappadona then offers an additional interpretation, writing that with “its triangular form, the fan also symbolizes the female genital area which is, as a result of the Fall, hidden and forbidden.”¹⁹ As explained by the two scholars, this interplay between the fan’s shape, Lilith’s attitude, and the resulting symbolism gestures to the charged nature of all the elements on the stage. 

Behind Lilith, thick green and yellow painted stripes adorn the tree’s curving trunk, which grows out of a low red base in the shape of a tear. Pointed toward the center of the stage, four red rattan rods, or branches, jut out of the tree’s side. Lilith and the Stranger stare across the stage at Adam and Eve, who are perched atop Noguchi’s hybrid depiction of Eden’s forest and its mythic apple. For this piece, Noguchi built a platform with eighteen vertical rattan-rod stalks emerging from its surface. The slightly inclined structure comprises the forest floor and also represents the core of an apple. Its two oblong cutouts, which Noguchi deemed the apple’s “seeds,” allow dancers to submerge beneath or stand atop the platform.²⁰ Painted with a pattern of geometric shapes alternating between a deep green, black, red, maroon, orange, and gray—“the skin of the apple”—this stage design is one of Noguchi’s most vibrant, matching the vivacity of Graham’s choreography.²¹ And like Lilith, Eve also wields a red Noguchi prop in this opening scene: a comb she runs through her long hair.

For many of her dances, Graham asked Noguchi to create “a place of retreat” on the stage where dancers could return to throughout the work, a set element that was distinctly theirs.²² This established close relationships between the characters and Noguchi’s sculptural designs for the work’s duration. Graham introduces this dynamic in the opening pose of Embattled Garden: throughout the dance, Lilith and the Stranger consistently retreat to Noguchi’s Tree of Knowledge, while Adam and Eve find their place on (or in, or under) Noguchi’s apple platform. 

Since joining the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2005, principal dancer Lloyd Knight has portrayed both Adam and the Stranger in Embattled Garden, and in a recent conversation, he emphasized the crucial role of the dancer’s “place” on stage in Graham’s works. When performing as the Stranger, Knight experiences Noguchi’s tree as his “playground” and “home base,” saying, “I start off the piece by hanging upside down on it. [The Stranger] is always wrapped on it or walking up and down the tree. By the time I got to the stage after all the rehearsals, it really felt like it was my baby.”²³ And as for Adam, Knight expanded, “The Garden [platform] for me is holy and sacred. I’m there with Eve and it holds a special place for me and that character. My role is to always protect her and what I see as my home, our home.”²⁴ Knight’s strong connection to the sculptures suggests their active role in shaping the dancers’ performances, amplifying Graham’s vision for the characters. Noguchi’s statement that the set’s “form then is my projection of these ideas” clarifies that his designs embody or reflect certain qualities the dancers also seek to express, reinforcing this intimate link between the performers and their environments.²⁵

From its unusual curve, Noguchi’s Tree of Knowledge, for example, can be read as a kind of deviant tree, possessing the same aberrant nature as Lilith and the Serpent. But its acidic coloring and tapered design invite other readings beyond just a peculiar-looking sapling. Most clearly, due to its stripes, shape, and proportions, the sculpture evokes a snake’s tail. The tree is the Serpent. It looks like one, slithering down the stage and into the subscape under the stage floor, as though into the Underworld itself. With all its curves, bends, and strange, unsettling branches, the tree reflects the Serpent’s craftiness, his seduction, his wickedness. Its seeming descent beneath the stage references the Serpent’s biblical association with the devil, and for Graham and Noguchi, the relationship between evil and lowliness more broadly. The tree’s design also gestures to Noguchi’s larger interest in the subterranean.²⁶

Yet the sculpture is not only a site of descent. Noguchi’s tree additionally enables the Stranger and Lilith to ascend the stage space. By scaling the steps at its rear, the dancers can climb the tree to a higher plane than Eve and Adam can access on their platform. Because the set element specifically represents the Tree of Knowledge, and Lilith and the Stranger’s heightened awareness of the outside world is what threatens an otherwise peaceful Eden, the dancers’ elevated access to the environment above the Garden floor symbolically links their expanded consciousness to their spatial ascent, bridging psychology and physicality.

Similarly, Noguchi closely aligned his apple platform with the circumstance and qualities of Adam and Eve. In contrast to the tree’s tall height, the platform’s base is low, meaning Adam and Eve can only achieve a slight elevation off the ground. This may represent their initial lack of access to the loftier wisdom possessed by the Stranger and Lilith. Another notable feature is the thicket of rattan rods that grow out of the platform’s surface, which simultaneously creates a protective covering from the space outside and an obstacle to move through. It indicates both the more sheltered existence of Eve and Adam as well as the difficulty they face as they move from immaturity to maturity.

More than a symbolically rich habitat for Adam and Eve, the platform exemplifies Noguchi’s pioneering approach to set design. In the biblical narrative of Eden, Eve and Adam’s consumption of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge leads to their banishment from the Garden. Commonly thought to be an apple, the fruit is a now-archetypal symbol of temptation and sin. It would have been straightforward for Noguchi to design an apple prop element—similar to one that he made about a decade earlier for Graham’s El Penitente (1944)—that Eve and Adam could have plucked from his tree and taken a bite out of, directly representing their fall.

Instead, Noguchi enlarged the apple and made it, in his words, “a rudimentary landscape” that the dancers could exist within.²⁷ By turning the apple into an environment, Noguchi enabled the dancers to spatially explore what fascinated Graham so much about the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve’s “place” in the dance, then, is the atmosphere of temptation itself. They explore it both together and independently, testing the limits of their commitment to each other. 

In this way, Noguchi revolutionized set design. He did not simply facilitate a narrative. His gift—and what made his collaboration with Graham so spectacular—was his unique ability to understand Graham’s intentions, and his subsequent ability to help her realize and enhance them by interpreting them sculpturally. In doing so, Noguchi enriched the narrative and influenced the actual movement possibilities of the dance; his sculptures were frequently as essential to the choreography as a partner in a pas de deux.

For Graham, who disliked purely decorative theater settings, this level of involvement was key. She wanted the stage designs to play an active role in her work, saying that “a set for me is nothing unless it is used. I’m not interested in a backdrop . . . I don’t want a static.”²⁸ Janet Eilber has emphasized this further, describing how Graham instructed dancers to invest in Noguchi’s sets, and how she, as artistic director, has continued Graham’s practice: 

Noguchi’s responsibility, then, went beyond representation. Graham was not asking the sculptor to create, as in classical ballets, a stage design that would merely establish the setting of the dance—a mantel to represent an interior, a tree to represent a forest, a chandelier to represent a ballroom. Graham demanded that the sets have functionality and purpose beyond symbolism, and Noguchi understood this expectation: “She uses them as extensions of her own anatomy.”³⁰

In Embattled Garden, Noguchi’s set pieces occupy many such roles. Frequently, they amplify and complicate the quartet’s dramatic conflicts. In the dance’s initial vignette, Adam wanders through the rattan-rod branches of Noguchi’s apple platform, which gently vibrate as he walks. When the Stranger descends from Noguchi’s tree and begins prowling toward Eve, he disrupts the quiet scene and sets off the sequence of power struggles that form the dance’s plot. The trio uses the different planes and elements of Noguchi’s apple vigorously, which escalates the power dynamics among them. For example, exasperated by a kiss the Stranger plants on Eve’s neck, Adam takes out his anger on his wife and pushes her forcefully into the platform’s cutout. With Eve beneath the forest floor, the two men fight above her. And in the moments Eve eludes the Stranger, avoiding his advances, he hunts her through the platform’s branches, pushing apart the thicket. The trio ends with Adam deflated over the apple’s front edge. To his misfortune, much more agony awaits him over the course of the dance.³¹

Near the beginning of Embattled Garden, Noguchi’s set further contextualizes a pivotal on-stage transformation. After a few cycles of flirtation, betrayal, and subsequent hostility between the four dancers, the Stranger whisks Eve away from Adam and the apple platform. Lying on the floor with her knees bent, Lilith awaits Eve’s arrival at the base of Noguchi’s Tree of Knowledge. The Stranger seats Eve on Lilith’s knees and Eve reclines over her torso, her long hair grazing Lilith’s stomach. As if in a rite, Lilith presents a ribbon and wraps it around Eve’s hair, binding it into a ponytail at the crown of her head. Adam, distressed by the scene, inches toward the trio and then away, beating the ground, his hips, and his chest in his affliction. He writhes across the stage until he eventually collapses, again, onto Noguchi’s platform, his face full of agony, his hand on his forehead.

We can understand Adam’s melodramatic display as his response to the loss of Eve’s purity signified by this scene. In the New Testament, Corinthians 11:15 reads, “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.”³² Graham’s styling of the dancers and Noguchi’s red comb prop both illuminate this edict. Graham distinguishes Eve and Lilith physically through their hairstyles: the virginal Eve’s hair hangs loose, cloaking her, while the awakened, wily Lilith’s is pulled into a tight updo. Noguchi accentuates this distinction by providing Eve with a comb to run through her hair; Lilith has none. Their hairstyles reflect their respective chastity, or corruption. It follows then that Eve would have her hair down, maintaining her “glory” to her husband and in the eyes of God, while Lilith has her hair tied back, signaling her autonomy and ostentation.³³

But in binding Eve’s hair, Lilith and the Stranger strip Eve of this glory, of her innocence, and propel her into a deeply carnal awakening. Noguchi aptly characterizes the event: “The Garden of Eden is the time of puberty.”³⁴ It is fitting that this shift transpired under Noguchi’s Tree of Knowledge, whose curve symbolizes the deviant spirit of Lilith and the Stranger and whose height gestures to the “higher” consciousness they exposed Eve to, which leads to Adam’s unraveling. Following this transformation, it is also challenging not to view Noguchi’s tree as a comb itself, the branches now legible as the teeth of a comb, the trunk as the shaft.

When Eve breaks free from Lilith and the Stranger’s grip, her newfound awareness of her body is clear. She touches her pelvis, fluttering her hand in front of it as if it’s alive for the first time. She clutches her hips and rubs her hands up her torso, stopping to cup under her breast to draw attention to her chest. Under Noguchi’s tree, ecstasy moves through Eve as the Stranger gropes her body. Though at this moment the site of her awakening doubles as the site of her pleasure, Eve’s newly found knowledge soon causes her great pain. In her published notebooks, Graham elaborates:

And toward the dance’s conclusion, at the most heightened moment of combat, Noguchi’s set elements act as battlegrounds for the conflict. Adam and Eve have just finished a duet of profound intensity, reeling from the trials they endured at the hands of Lilith and the Stranger. With Eve’s expanded sense of the world and Lilith and the Stranger’s frequent assaults, the pair’s love and loyalty have been tested, and tainted. Eve and Adam were both episodically charmed by their assailant’s seductions. Their faith waned and struggles ensued. The full-cast clash begins in this fragile state.

The Stranger recruits Lilith from her perch under the tree, and they leap onto Noguchi’s platform, where Adam and Eve reside among the branches. Each dancer takes a hostile stance at one of the platform’s four corners, shifting their eyes between their ally and their two opponents. It is the only moment in the work’s duration that all four dancers stand on the platform together. They unite, however vindictively, in Noguchi’s environment of temptation, the once-protected place from which Eve and Adam’s maturations began. Now, with Lilith and the Stranger’s total invasion, there is nowhere left for Eve and Adam to hide, no way to avoid their desires.

The Stranger makes the first move, pulling Eve, and then Lilith, off the platform and onto the floor between Noguchi’s two set elements. Adam pounds his chest, a sort of battle cry but also a display of his frustration with all that transpired in the Garden. (Throughout the dance, Adam consistently reveals his nostalgia for Eden’s origins, his wish for an innocence now lost in the Garden, and his desire to be saved.) Reluctantly, he joins the three at center stage, and they circle each other like boxers in a ring, awaiting the opening punch. Adam reaches his hand toward Noguchi’s apple platform and slides it up one of the rattan rods, his desperate plea to return to the lost peace of Eden before its corruption.

With Adam consumed by his wistfulness, Lilith ascends the height of Noguchi’s tree, readying to strike. The Stranger yanks Adam from the platform and shoves him across the stage toward the tree, where Lilith attacks him from above by climbing from the trunk onto his shoulders. Adam swirls dizzily across the stage with Lilith on top of him, completely overwhelmed, while the Stranger stands on top of Eve and drags her back toward the apple platform, away from her husband. It is a clear moment of Noguchi’s design facilitating the choreography. Without the elevation offered by the tree, Graham would have had to invent a different and likely more arduous way for Lilith to arrive in the lift. Instead, Noguchi’s design allows for an efficient transition from sculpture to dancer. 

The combat lasts for several minutes, only concluding when Adam and Eve cling to each other at center stage—their effort to become less vulnerable to the Stranger and Lilith’s interferences. It is unclear who the duel’s victors are, but the sadness emanating from Eve and Adam makes it hard to perceive them as any kind of champion. Graham imbues the last moments of the dance with dense religious imagery. At center stage, Eve sinks to the floor, and Adam reproduces the image of the crucifixion: his arms extend to each side of the stage, his elbows and wrists hang limp, and his head falls toward his right shoulder. He then collapses in front of Eve’s lap, and she cradles him, their pose directly referencing Michelangelo’s iconic Pietà (1498–99).³⁶ The once-childlike Eve now adopts the role of Mary, the afflicted mother, representing her own coming-of-age. Adam is the suffering Christ. In this case, he has crumbled under the tribulations of Eden—his wife’s maturity, her new wisdom, and his lost utopia.

Graham choreographed the dance’s end to reference its beginning. She reused the same spatial structure on the stage: Lilith and the Stranger retire to the Tree of Knowledge, and Eve and Adam retreat to the apple platform. But although the dance ends with the performers in their opening places, the stage is thick with change, especially for Adam and Eve. Now, Eve does not tend to her own hair, and there is no space between the couple. She sits beneath Adam, clutching his leg and torso. He stands behind her, stroking her ponytail against his body, mourning her lost innocence while looking up toward the sky. Lilith and the Stranger gaze triumphantly at the couple across the stage. At the last moment, Adam reaches up his hand—a potential last plea, a questioning—“why me?”— or an expression of dismay for what ensued under the rule of God in Eden.

Embattled Garden is a true collaboration in the sense that it is both exemplary of Graham and Noguchi’s individual artistic practices and an incredible model of their shared work. The dance speaks to their mutual interest in both religiosity and eroticism. And Noguchi well understood Graham’s long-lasting fascination with legend: 

Like Noguchi, Janet Eilber was also exposed to Graham’s unwavering attraction to myth, and she refers to Graham’s continuous attention to legend as part of her “creative signature.”³⁹ To Eilber, Graham’s transformation of a biblical tale with a “contemporary attitude” in Embattled Garden was quintessential, born out of the choreographer’s interest in the timeless, cyclical nature of an archaic narrative’s central themes.⁴⁰ In Embattled Garden, Eilber names “jealousy, toxic masculinity, wanderlust, and sexual attraction” as Graham’s primary motivators.⁴¹ She proposed that for Graham, using the first couple in existence to examine these ideas was a tool to heighten the comedy and message she was trying to convey to modern audiences.

Meanwhile, Noguchi’s like-minded captivation can be traced back to his mother, the writer Léonie Gilmour:

Noguchi’s early introduction to religion and mythology influenced him for the entire span of his career; he continuously turned to these esoteric references. They appeared both in his works’ conceptual development as well as in their titles, such as Paphnutius (1924), Cronos (1947–86), and Euripides (1966). They were rarely literal representations of the figures or narratives, but abstractions. Noguchi captured their spirit without relying on mimetic depictions. The same can be said of Graham and her work in modern dance. Graham was not interested in a mere restaging of a narrative according to existing literature; she identified key tensions and dynamics in the myth and magnified them. Sometimes, she even rewrote them entirely. One of the most reliable ways Graham did this was to swap out the male protagonist for a female one, telling the story from a formerly unsung perspective. She did with myth what she also did with design. Noguchi told Robert Tracy, “Martha in her use of my sets enriched the meaning. I may have suggested something, but she specifically puts it into experience. It is a new experience . . . It comes to life.”⁴³

Noguchi and Graham were also both invested in exploring the erotic. Graham often created dances based on myths or themes laden with sexual tension, and sometimes, when the sexual aspect in the source material was less apparent, or not apparent at all, Graham would imbue the dance with her own salacious energy. The erotic was not just embedded into the dances on a narrative level but integral to the Graham technique, which uses the pelvis as the wellspring from which all other movements emerge. When Graham called on Noguchi to match her intensity, he did not shy away. Just a few years after Embattled Garden premiered, Noguchi and Graham collaborated on Phaedra (1962), a work that was quickly protested by two members of Congress who considered it too lewd to be performed abroad.⁴⁴ For the dance, Noguchi designed a set element formally titled “butterfly piece” but which he admitted was really a “womb.”⁴⁵ The butterfly’s “wings” opened to reveal Aphrodite, who Graham instructed to sit with her legs spread open to the audience, mirroring Noguchi’s design. The criticism from Congress did not stop Graham from staging the work, evidencing her commitment to eroticism. Noguchi appreciated this about Graham. Reflecting on Embattled Garden, Noguchi said, “Sex and violence were what Martha was trying to show. I like that piece very much.”⁴⁶

Some of Noguchi’s work not made for Graham has this same edge, although Noguchi was often cryptic about its sexual content. She and She #2 (1970–71), for example, are two post-tensioned marble sculptures whose forms mimic a person on their hands and knees, as though in a supported plank position, or leaning back onto the palms of their hands with their chest pointing upward toward the sky. The narrower marble at their highest points indicates a neck sloped up from a shoulder and torso, and what Noguchi refers to as She’s “liplike protuberance” and She #2’s “cup,” respectively, are legible as genitalia.⁴⁷ Discussing the work’s forms, however, Noguchi offers only, “I leave judgment to others.”⁴⁸

Noguchi’s Night Land, or Night Voyage, a marble tablescape from 1947, also engages with erotic themes. In a conversation with art historian Katharine Kuh, Noguchi first describes the table as depicting “things that happen at night, somber things,” but then adds, more undeniably: “It’s an image of people in bed.”⁴⁹ When Kuh, surprised by Noguchi’s interpretation, mentions she thought it was only a landscape, Noguchi clarifies, “It is a landscape in the sense that you can think of people as landscapes—a human landscape . . . I’m also playful sometimes.” With Noguchi’s reading, the table becomes a topographical field inviting the kind of exploration, navigation, and play among people sharing a bed. Its cavities and contours evoke an array of sensory experiences, perhaps even suggesting erogenous zones.

Noguchi’s physical installation of his work in The Noguchi Museum alludes further to his interest in the erotic. Most notably, his deliberate placement of the phallic Ding Dong Bat (1968) in front of another marble work, his ringed Sun at Noon (1969), suggests penetration.

Noguchi and Graham’s joint attraction to these themes deeply enriched their work together for many years, and the two spoke highly of each other and their collaboration. In interviews, Noguchi esteemed Graham and all they achieved together. When asked about the innovative nature of their artistic partnership, he was upfront about its impact on him. “With Martha Graham, [I learned] the emotional factor of objects,” Noguchi once said—no small admission from such a prolific sculptor.⁵⁰

Noguchi’s work with Graham in the theater also corresponds to his long engagement with public art. Much of Noguchi’s practice was involved with the idea of usefulness. He viewed art as “being part of living, not just part of art.” Wanting his work to enhance how people experienced the world, he stated, “I don’t look at art as something separate and sacrosanct.”⁵¹ Noguchi integrated this philosophy across his expansive projects, creating playgrounds, plazas, architectures, and mass-manufactured designs. And even with his more traditional sculptures, Noguchi was fascinated with the diverse ways people could experience them as spatial tools and as creative or intellectual stimuli. Noguchi’s role as a set designer fit neatly into this aspect of his practice and broadened his understanding of relationships between his work and people. When designing for the stage, Noguchi saw transformative possibilities between the set, the dancers, and the audience, whom he believed could inhabit the stage design via the dancers.⁵² He was not just designing for Graham and her dance company but was transporting the viewing audience into Graham’s fiction itself. In the theater and his work outside it, Noguchi sought to create meaning for everyone who encountered his works. He was always investigating how space could become an experience, how sculpture could become life.

Graham’s life as a dancer and choreographer was also indelibly changed by Noguchi. His objects on the stage did not just occupy space but created it anew. Noguchi constructed worlds for Graham to inhabit and explore, and with his designs, he enabled Graham to communicate even more viscerally with her audiences. As an independent dancer and choreographer, Graham had already innovated a rich and affecting movement vocabulary of contractions, spirals, and releases. But her work with Noguchi expanded the deep emotional quality inherent in her movements by giving it a world to exist within. Graham explained that Noguchi’s sets “opened for me an entirely new area of behavior on the stage.”⁵³ She recognized the singular nature of their collaboration, something that could only arise from their particular artistic union: “[T]here was an unspoken language between Isamu Noguchi and me. Our working together might have as its genesis a myth, a legend, a piece of poetry, but there always emerged for me from Isamu something of a strange beauty and an otherworldliness.”⁵⁴ Although most often grounded in some existing subject, each Graham and Noguchi work was, in a way, an unprecedented construction, even for Graham. In her autobiography, she wrote, “Isamu walked and directed our blood memory. He took me to images that I had never contemplated before and gave new life to works I had created.”⁵⁵

Although Graham and Noguchi’s official collaboration concluded almost sixty years ago, their work is ongoing. Many of Noguchi’s designs are still in use by the Martha Graham Dance Company, almost ninety years after Noguchi created his first stage set for Frontier (1935).⁵⁶ Lloyd Knight revealed the sets’ sustained importance to him: “[I]t really completes the world that you and the audience need to envision and understand the story, which is so important for me as a performer . . . When we’re rehearsing the dances without the sets, it always feels like something’s missing.”⁵⁷ Janet Eilber has also said how present Noguchi and Graham’s collaboration feels. Each time a dancer rehearses with Noguchi’s set elements for the first time, each time another audience sees how Graham’s choreography fits into Noguchi’s environment—or vice versa—and now, each time Eilber commissions a visual artist to create a set for a new dance work, Graham and Noguchi’s imaginative history is brought to life once more.⁵⁸ 

Noguchi and Graham did not just innovate within each other’s artistic practices, but at the intersection of dance and the visual arts more broadly. They expanded a tradition that Sergei Diaghilev initiated with set commissions for his own company, the Ballets Russes. Working with modern artists like Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurencin, and Joan Miró, Diaghilev positioned his ballet company at the forefront of the avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s. But even though Diaghilev laid the groundwork for integrating modern art into dance sets, the Ballets Russes stage designs still relied heavily on painted two-dimensional backdrops. Noguchi and Graham’s abandonment of this flatness was revolutionary. They introduced new dimensionality in their collaboration, originating the use of sculptures for the stage in modern dance. Their work prefigured many further developments in the field, from the inclusion of minimalist artwork to the use of cinematic projection. Two of the most prominent twentieth-century modern dancers and choreographers, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, trained under Graham and emerged from her company. Both would eventually collaborate meaningfully with visual artists themselves, including Alex Katz, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, David Hockney, and Robert Morris. Noguchi and Graham’s legacy—in performance and re-performance, in modern dance and sculpture, and in the history of artistic partnership writ large—reflects the longevity and elasticity of their subject matter. Their works, so often rooted in myth, capture the essential spirit of a story, an idea, or a feeling, but are not encumbered by the burden of perfectly reproducing a given narrative or moment. Like the biblical tale of Eden, the collaboration between Noguchi and Graham has staying power; and in each staging of Embattled Garden, the two artists invite audiences to delve into the depths of memory.

Natalie Ginsberg is an art historian, dancer, and MA student in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. She previously worked as curatorial assistant (2023–24) and curatorial intern (2022–23) at The Noguchi Museum, and she is currently the Curatorial Intern of Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute. She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University.

The Noguchi Museum extends special thanks to the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Transcripts of archival materials are available by request to accessibility@noguchi.org.

¹ Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World (Harper & Row, 1968), 19.

² Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 19.

³ Isamu Noguchi, quoted in Anna Kisselgoff, “Martha Graham Dies at 96; A Revolutionary in Dance,” New York Times, April 2, 1991.

⁴ From the central point at the back of the stage where it connects to the floor, the rope extends not only upward but forward toward the audience, with either end reaching the upper corners of the proscenium arch. Through this design, Noguchi uses the fundamentals of first-person perspective to create spatial depth on the stage beyond its two-dimensional representation.

⁵ Tobi Tobias, “Interview with Isamu Noguchi,” Oral History Archives, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, 11.

⁶ Kisselgoff, “Martha Graham Dies at 96,” New York Times. 

⁷ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 123.

⁸ Isamu Noguchi quoted in Robert Tracy, Spaces of the Mind: Isamu Noguchi’s Dance Designs (New York: Proscenium, 2001), 207.

⁹ Tobias, “Interview with Isamu Noguchi,” 10.

¹⁰ Like Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name, which inspired Graham, Hérodiade draws from the biblical figure of Herodias and her role in the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. In the biblical narrative, Herodias’s marriage to King Herod of Judea is criticized by the Saint because of her previous marriage to Herod’s brother. In retaliation, Herodias’s daughter Salome requests the saint’s beheading after King Herod, captivated by her dance at a party, promises to grant her any wish. Graham’s Hérodiade seems to reflect this narrative on several levels: as the woman (like Herodias) confronts her aging in contrast to her daughter’s seductive youth, heightened by Noguchi’s skeletal “Mirror” set element, which sculpturally reflects the woman’s body; as she contemplates mortality in her chamber beside her doting attendant; and as she awaits the unknown (perhaps the beheading, life beyond it, or her own death).

¹¹ Tobias, “Interview with Isamu Noguchi,” 22.

¹² John Martin, “Dance: Smorgasbord; Many Works, Soloists Fill ANTA Stage,” New York Times, May 9, 1955. 

¹³ Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 158.

¹⁴ Janet Eilber, Zoom interview by Natalie Ginsberg, August 30, 2024.

¹⁵ Martha Graham, The Notebooks of Martha Graham (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 285, 287. 

¹⁶ Martha Graham and the Quest for the Feminine in Eve, Lilith, and Judith,” Dance as Religious Studies (New York: Crossroads, 1990), 123.

¹⁷ Graham, Notebooks, 289.

¹⁸ Genevieve Oswald, “A Vision of Paradise: Myth and Symbol in the ‘Embattled Garden,’” unpublished paper presented to the Jerusalem Conference on the Bible in Dance, Session 11, July 13, 1979, quoted in Apostolos-Cappadona, “Martha Graham and the Quest for the Feminine,” 123.

¹⁹ Apostolos-Cappadona, “Martha Graham and the Quest for the Feminine,” 123.

²⁰ Isamu Noguchi, remarks at the Ninth International Sculpture Conference, New Orleans, LA, March 31–April 3, 1976, transcript appended to Elden C. Tefft, letter to Isamu Noguchi, November 10, 1976, The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_041_001, 2.

²¹ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 128.

²² Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 91.

²³ Lloyd Knight, Zoom interview by Natalie Ginsberg, September 4, 2024.

²⁴ Knight, interview, September 4, 2024.

²⁵ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 123.

²⁶ This idea was explored in the exhibition Noguchi Subscapes at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, June 15, 2022–September 3, 2023, curated by Dakin Hart.

²⁷ Noguchi, Remarks at the Ninth International Sculpture Conference, The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_041_001, 2. 

²⁸ Martha Graham quoted in Robert Gottlieb, ed., “Don McDonagh (A Chat with Martha Graham),” Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 727.

²⁹ Eilber, interview, August 30, 2024.

³⁰ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 123.

³¹ The performance analysis in this essay is based on research conducted using archival video materials. These include recordings of performances and rehearsals accessed at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library and the Martha Graham Dance Company Archives.

³² Corinthians 11:15 (New King James Version). 

³³ The role of hair in Embattled Garden is further explored in Apostolos-Cappadona, “Martha Graham and the Quest for the Feminine,” 124–126.

³⁴ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 128.

³⁵ Graham, Notebooks, 289. 

³⁶ Apostolos-Cappadona, “Martha Graham and the Quest for the Feminine,” 126.

³⁷ Graham, Notebooks, 291, 288, 289, 286.

³⁸ Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 146.

³⁹ Eilber, interview, August 30, 2024.

⁴⁰ Eilber, interview, August 30, 2024.

⁴¹ Eilber, interview, August 30, 2024.

⁴² “Isamu Noguchi: A Visual Autobiography Written with John Becker,” manuscript, c. 1960, The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_PUB_052_001, 7-8.

⁴³ Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 207.

⁴⁴ Anna Kisselgoff, “Graham’s ‘Phaedra’ and ‘Errand Into the Maze,’” New York Times, October 13, 1988.

⁴⁵ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 129.

⁴⁶ Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 158.

⁴⁷ She #2, The Noguchi Museum Collection.

⁴⁸ She #2, The Noguchi Museum Collection. 

⁴⁹ Isamu Noguchi, “An Interview with Isamu Noguchi by Katherine Kuh (1962),” in Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce Altshuler (Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 133. 

⁵⁰ Isamu Noguchi, transcript of lecture given at the International University of Art–Venice, October 11, 1970, The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_030_002, 5.

⁵¹ Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 37.

⁵² Noguchi quoted in Tracy, Spaces of the Mind, 34.

⁵³ Graham quoted in Gottlieb, ed., “Don McDonagh (A Chat with Martha Graham),” 728.

⁵⁴ Martha Graham, “From Collaboration, a Strange Beauty Emerged,” New York Times, January 8, 1989.

⁵⁵ Martha Graham, Blood Memory: An Autobiography (Doubleday, 1991), 223.

⁵⁶ The set designs still in use are often performance copies rather than the originals that debuted with the dance. Frontier is still in the Martha Graham Dance Company repertory.

⁵⁷ Knight, interview, September 4, 2024.

⁵⁸ Eilber, interview, August 30, 2024.