Agnes and Martha and Ron.

IT TURNS OUT, oddly enough, that I was present at perhaps one of the final Martha Graham Dance Company performances, and even more oddly, that it took place in Palo Alto, California. That was at Stanford University, where the company (remember the company?), having toured the U.S. extensively, was doing one last show before heading back to New York.

The few scribes in the audience had heard about the blowup between the company's board of directors and artistic director Ron Protas over the question of a new leader, Protas's refusal to relinquish control to artistic director-designate Janet Eilber and his threats to prevent the Martha Graham Dance Company from performing the repertoire, to which he controls the rights. We tracked down the company manager at intermission. (Protas, we were told, had stayed home in New York.) We received sunny reassurances all around. If there was trouble, they hadn't heard of it; they were booked for foreign tours into the New Year. They would go home and rehearse. All was right with the world.

And it certainly seemed that way, or mostly so. The pieces were remarkable. El Penitente re-emerged whole for the first time in many years that I'd seen it. Mikhail Baryshnikov had danced an excerpt at various galas for several years. His brilliant star turn had obliterated, seemingly, the need to see the thing in its entirety. Not, as it turned out, true. Graham in all her colorations emerged that night--the complexity and simplicity of faith, its woefulness and ease.

In retrospect, you have to wonder whether the dancers were, at that point, worrying, seeing the beginning of the end of the place where they'd invested their energies, their passions. Christine Dakin in Errand Into the Maze certainly conveyed that sense of apprehension, and yet ultimately she vanquished the Minotaur.

Graham, in an interview the year before her death at the age of 91, said she'd choreographed Errand during a rough flight into Spain. "The plane did everything but fall down," she recalled. To distract herself, she said, she made up the whole thing, step by step in her head, and by the time the plane landed, she had run through it twice, she was calm and she had a new dance.

Errand's contest between humanity and the forces of darkness is one of the seminal dance/theater portraits of the age. Like dance and art itself, it poses fearsome challenges. Small wonder the dancer cited in a New York Times story about the troupe's travails was appalled when Ron Protas wanted to bind her hands with duct tape during an Errand rehearsal. The choreography, the creature--so Guernica-esque--the brutality, are scary enough.

So is this moment in the history of the company. And so, it would seem, is what Protas has been engineering. It is unfathomable that he would attempt to take Martha Graham's work away from Martha Graham's company; he is no dancer; he has never known how it should be danced, and now he wishes to wrest it from the dancers who do.

At this writing, the Graham board has dismissed Protas as artistic director and suspended operations, dogged by a $500,000 deficit. The idled dancers are asking other companies not to stage Graham's works until a new deal with Protas can be arranged. And all the while, her works go unperformed and her technique, burned into her dancers' and students' brains and bodies, risks extinction for lack of use.

And the speed and spite with which Protas is moving to eradicate the Graham oeuvre are nothing short of breathtaking. In response to the Martha Graham Company dancers' letter asking for a dance community boycott of performances of Graham works, Protas not only withdrew permission for her works to be taught at a July conference at Maryland's Frostburg University (at presstime) but demanded the right to send an observer to sit in on the conference to make sure that no Graham was being taught. He also wanted to take a look at videos of the conference, just to be doubly sure. And oh, yes: No reading from Graham's writings allowed.

If anyone needed further proof that Protas has no concept of Graham's teachings on dance, art and freedom, Frostburg, whatever its outcome, speaks for itself.

There are two huge portraits of Graham in this office and I look at them daily and wonder. If she knew what was happening, what would she think? If she were here again, what would she do? Certainly, Protas was a friend in need when, ill and lonely, she most needed a friend, and a man with a mission when she, for all I know, might have needed him to help focus her energy on building her repertoire and strengthening her company. She trusted him not just with her life, which he was involved with in every aspect, but with her life work.

How did this ever come about?

When choreographer/author Agnes de Mille's Martha, recounting their relationship as artists and friends, was reissued in an updated version, I interviewed de Mille in her Greenwich Village apartment. She wasn't feeling well. Sitting propped up in her big bed, she recounted a conversation she'd had with Protas soon after the death of her husband, Walter Prude: "He said, `You must be very lonely. I must come and visit you often.'" She smiled a wry and wary smile; it was a wonderful example of de Mille's trademark dish-and-diss.

To which Protas might say, But where are Agnes's ballets now? Who is protecting her work?

To which de Mille might have replied, With protectors like Protas, who needs enemies?