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Martha first danced for the Denishawn School. Although her role was rather inferior, she made her first professional presentation in a dance program called A Pageant of Egypt, Greece and India. Her first solo, Serenata Morisca, was what changed her from student status to professional status. While at Denishawn, she also taught dance lessons to children enrolled in the school, some of them only being three years old. She was with the Denishawn School from 1916 to 1923, when she decided to look for something different in New York.
When Martha left Los Angeles, she immediately got a job with the Greenwich Village Follies. She was the star for two years. Here, she made up her own dances, which were always fascinating and arousing. At this time, she was also a Broadway star. She showed great devotion to dancing and to her career as a dancer; nothing else mattered to her, not even her fans. She made things very difficult on herself. Although she made good money, had many fans and much stability dancing for the Greenwich Village Follies, she left in 1925 to teach. .
In Rochester, New York, she became co-director of a new dance department at the Eastman School of Music. While teaching dance lessons at Eastman, she was able to experiment on her students, and make up her own choreography, without the influence of anyone else. A year later, in April 1926, Martha choreographed her first concert, which was done by three of her students from Eastman. Through her works, she began to illustrate what a dancer was supposed to be feeling on the inside through their dance movements. Many of the movements were done on the ground, because Martha thought of the floor as a direction. At Eastman, she created many other works, such as Revolt in 1927 and Immigrant in 1928. Both of these dances were of "social comment", and were described as characterizing "the cult of ugliness", many people were appalled by her new style of dance.
