She then found music, or commissioned new music from her longtime collaborator Louis Horst, to sustain the inspiration while she created movements to express it. The purpose of Graham's dance was to evoke a heightened awareness of life, to develop psychological insights about the nature of man. Dance was to her an "inner emotional experience." Her themes were often overtly psychological. Characters in her dance plays were divided into two complementary parts, each representing an aspect of the psyche. Her stage sets were filled with huge phallic symbols, as in Phaedra, a rite of sexual obsession. Martha Graham introduced a number of other innovations to modern dance. She established the use of mobile scenery, symbolic props, and speech with dancing and was the first to integrate her group racially, using blacks and Asians in her regular company. She replaced the traditional ballet tunic or folk dress with either a straight, dark, long shirt or the common leotard. Using the stage, the floor, and props as part of the dance itself, in all she produced a whole new language of dance. In 1926 Graham introduced this new language of dance in her first solo recital in New York. Her first large group piece, Vision of the Apocalypse, was performed in 1929. The most important early work was a revolutionary piece called Heretic. Graham toured the United States for 4 years (1931-1935) in the production Electra. During this trip she became interested in the American Indians of the Southwest. One of the first products of this interest was Primitive Mysteries. Her increasing interest in the American past was seen in her dance on the American pioneer women, Frontier (1935), and culminated in her famous Appalachian Spring (1944), in which she recreated in dance what composer Aaron Copland had done in his music. Among her other accomplishments during the 1930s was her performance of the principal role in Igor Stravinsky's American premiere of Rite of Spring (1930). She was the first dancer to receive a Guggenheim fellowship (1932), and she danced for President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House in 1937. Graham founded the Dance Repertory Theater in New York in 1930. She helped establish the Bennington School of Arts at Bennington College in Vermont, where her teaching made Bennington the mecca for avantgarde dance in America. With the later establishment of the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York, she taught a large number of modern dancers who have spread her ideas, techniques, and style to the rest of the world. Graham danced her last role in 1969, but she continued to choreograph.