Attitudes.

New works are a crucial problem. How do you keep a furniture workshop going when the sole carpenter has left the building?

Survival is not renewal. Renewal involves creation and re-creation, and the only creative act the Martha Graham Dance Company has proved truly adept in, since Graham's death in 1991, is the creation of controversy. The latest stirring in this web of well-orchestrated disaster, which took the dance world by surprise, was the board's abrupt firing in May of its current co-artistic directors--the impeccably qualified Christine Dakin and Terese Capucilli--and their replacement by the equally qualified Janet Eilber. Joseph Carman's news story ("Dance Matters," August 2005) explained how Eilber is assuming a new, more comprehensive role as sole artistic director.

Wading through the gobbledygook of the company's official statement, it appears that the changes are being made for reasons of economy (although the expenses of having Eilber commute, even occasionally, between her Los Angeles home and her New York workplace could be considerable) and of fund-raising. Presumably it is thought that Eilber will be a better fund-raiser than her two predecessors. Who knows?

Many people might think that fund-raising was the job of the Board of Trustees, which once succeeded in selling the site of the Martha Graham School at what seemed to be a fire sale price. But let's have no more recriminations--the Graham company has had enough. Let's rather consider the present state of the organization Eilber will be running long-distance.

It is clearly surviving, as a school, as a company, and perhaps most importantly as a style or technique. Yet its last New York season at City Center left questions in its wake, and not simply how well the troupe was currently dancing or maintaining its legacy of Graham works. The former team of Capucilli and Dakin had commissioned Martha Clarke to create Sueno, with, in welcome accordance with a nowadays neglected Graham tradition, a specially commissioned score, here from the Italian composer Franco Piersanti.

The score proved mediocre, but at least, like the rest of the works given during the season, it was played live at considerable yet worthwhile cost. Sueno itself was less welcome. It possessed a phantasmagoric nightmarish atmosphere, as you might have anticipated from a ballet inspired by Goya's gritty, bitter 18th century etchings Los Caprichos. Clarke provided little more than a murky mist of brutality, lacking in invention, with what dancing there was seemingly inspired by dusty flamenco and half-hearted gestures suggestive of matador flamboyance.

Despite the ingenious set by Riccardo Hernandez and the magnificently Goyaesque costumes by Donna Zakowksa, this quiet riot of whores, peasants--including the obligatory hunchback--and nobles added up to infinitely less than yon could get from looking at Goya's own etchings and using that quality which here Clarke, normally a fascinating woman of the theater, so conspicuously lacked--imagination.

It was unworthy of the Graham banner. In fairness, an earlier artistic director, Ron Protas, staged premieres by Twyla Tharp and Susan Stroman with little more success. New works are a crucial problem. How do you keep a furniture workshop going when the sole carpenter has left the building? However, all agree, I think, that the curatorship of the Graham repertoire itself was clearly in very sure hands with Capucilli and Dakin and that the results have been excellent.

The fresh revival after many years absence of the 1943 Deaths and Entrances, as far as my limited audience memory extends, appeared choreographically pristine. Whether that formula of Proustian, "doom-eager" three sisters was inspired by the Brontes, Chekhov, or whatever, it is not a work that I ever understood and, possibly as a consequence, ever liked, even when I first saw it with a 60-year-old Graham more than a half century ago. But it's a significant part of the Graham canon and should be preserved, even though I had reservations about the choice of Oscar de la Renta's new, couturierlike Halstonization of the costumes.

Now comes the really tricky issue: How was the troupe dancing? The general level of dance technique has risen, although there were always individual dancers such as Robert Powell whose virtuosity is unlikely to be surpassed. So, not unexpectedly, the sheer technique of the present company more titan matches that available to Graham in her halcyon days.

Yet, as film buffs say of '30s and '40s movie stars, "They had faces then." Graham's dancers also had more impact, presence, personality, call it what you will. It was a signature emblematic not only of Graham herself, but also of most of her dancers. It's a quality more easily recognized than described. Nowadays it is summed up by Fang-Yi Sheu. Whenever Sheu was onstage, the stage lit up. She recalled the past as none of the others did. The company, with its new artistic director in at least bicoastal place, must now aim for Sheu also to herald the future.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for The New York Post.