The body is a sacred garment.

Martha Graham (1894–1991), the pioneering American choreographer who helped define modern dance, frequently spoke and wrote about the body as the primary instrument of artistic truth. The line “The body is a sacred garment” is widely circulated in connection with her teaching ethos and her insistence on disciplined training, bodily awareness, and respect for the dancer’s physical instrument. It is commonly quoted in dance education and wellness contexts as a distillation of Graham’s broader philosophy: that movement expresses inner life and that the dancer’s body must be treated with seriousness rather than vanity or neglect. However, the precise occasion and first publication of the sentence are often not supplied in secondary reproductions.

The metaphor of the body as a “sacred garment” frames physical embodiment as something entrusted to us—worthy of care, reverence, and responsibility. In Graham’s artistic worldview, the body is not merely a vehicle to display technique but the medium through which emotion, memory, and spirit become visible. The phrase also implies discipline: a garment must be maintained, and the sacred demands attention rather than exploitation. Read in the context of modern dance, it elevates bodily practice (training, rest, nourishment, and expressive movement) into an ethical and almost spiritual commitment, countering attitudes that treat the body as disposable, shameful, or purely ornamental.