Four Great Graham Women Go Forward.

Who can replace Martha Graham? The answer, of course, is no one, although everyone agrees that her company, school, and treasury of works must live on. Graham died in 1991 at age ninety-seven, leaving a company and school in vigorous condition despite its continuing financial struggles. Not much has been heard from the company lately, however. Until a three-week season at the Joyce Theater last month, it hadn't been seen in New York City since 1994, when "Radical Graham" was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But Graham's legacy, like her life, is full of phoenixes, and several may now be about to take flight. Last year artistic director Ron Protas, whom Graham had trained and had appointed, gave the first American regional ballet company the right to perform one of her works, beginning, it is hoped, the growth of a new audience.

Further necessary changes are in store for the coming century as well. Graham's company and her oeuvre, one of the great legacies of American art, have been presided over solely by Protas, heir to Graham's ballets. This year, while remaining overall administrator of artistic matters and casting as he devotes his considerable energy and knowledge to the Graham Trust, he will begin to share power with the four dancers whom he has appointed Graham's artistic heirs: Janet Eilber, Christine Dakin, Joyce Herring, and Terese Capucilli--all fervent disciples nurtured by Graham during their formative years, all major interpreters of her work. Different in personality and temperament, they share the dedication to and the artistic investment in the Graham legacy needed to preserve it for the twenty-first century.

JANET EILBER

When Protas appointed Janet Eilber to be co-artistic director of the Graham Trust and artistic director of the company, beginning in the summer of 2000, he was, she says, drawing on her career credentials outside as much as inside the Graham company (she danced for it from 1972 to 1979 and intermittently thereafter). She was identified particularly with such roles as St. Joan in Seraphic Dialogue (1955), Jocasta in Night Journey (1947), and the early solos Frontier (1935) and Lamentation (1930). Eilber left the company in the 1970s to embark on a career on Broadway (Dancin') and in movies (Whose Life Is It, Anyway?) and TV dramas and sitcoms, but she worked with Protas reconstructing and directing some of Graham's ballets in Europe, such as the Paris Opera Ballet production of Temptations of the Moon.

Assuming the responsibilities of the Graham Trust is her biggest assignment so far. "The trust is the guardian of the Graham image," she says, "the organization responsible for licensing her ballets to other companies and universities. At first I didn't realize what a big job I was taking on, getting involved with the Library of Congress, for example, in its purchase of a sizeable collection of Martha's notes and papers last year. The preservation and documentation of Martha's work is very much in our laps. I have to see that everyone who is trying to achieve this is `on the same page'--working together--which is difficult when so many of us, if asked what's the most important thing about Graham, give you as many different answers. We seem to agree, however, that her drive to connect passionately with the audience in the most impactful way was among the most important."

Eilber's responsibilities include organizing various projects, some in conjunction with the Library of Congress, in collaboratively exploring the state of the art in dance documentation. "We could start with a CD-ROM," she says, "where you'd have a performance of a ballet; click on talking about how you could reconstruct the set, where it should be put onstage; click on designer comments and images of the costumes; click on a statement by the artistic director; click on a dancer demonstrating a movement from all sides; so that a hundred years from now someone could pick up this reconstruction bible and really have an accurate picture of how to present a Graham work.

"We've already talked about documenting Yuriko's coaching of Primitive Mysteries, and we'd also welcome sponsored master classes with such venerable Graham alumni as Stuart Hodes, Pearl Lang, and Peter Sparling, maybe recording them in a panel discussion commenting on each exercise."

Continues Eilber: "As pejorative as the term museum is in the dance world, we have to think of Martha's legacy as a marvelous permanent collection, and we should take a page from today's museums, which rearrange their collections into new theme groupings like, for example, `Picasso and the Weeping Women.'" She envisions programs such as "Signature Graham," that would concentrate on Graham's influence on American music, and "Frontier Project," that would commission choreographers who "would hopefully have an understanding of Graham's traditions but would celebrate Martha in their own way. And we've got the Ensemble going, our junior branch, and plan to commission works for them to try out for the company." There's also talk of doing a live production of the 1957 Nathan Kroll film documentary on Graham, A Dancer's World.

CHRISTINE DAKIN

Christine Dakin's appointment as joint associate artistic director with Terese Capucilli was the culmination of Dakin's more than twenty years as a brilliant exponent of such Graham roles as Medea in Cave of the Heart (1946), Jocasta in Night Journey (1947), the Bride in Appalachian Spring (1944), the title role in Clytemnestra (1958), and both One Who Dances and One Who Speaks in Letter to the World (1940). Dakin also had several works choreographed on her by Graham, notably the principal part in Phaedra's Dream (1983), which she danced in Paris with Nureyev as her partner; Tangled Night (1986); and The Chosen One in The Rite of Spring (1984).

She received a Dance Magazine Award in 1994 and both Rockefeller and Fulbright grants toward her pioneering dance work in Mexico. Dakin cheerfully confesses that, while still a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she was preparing for a career teaching dance because she considered herself too old to become a performer. She changed her mind when, after several auditions and an apprenticeship, she joined the Graham company and became one of the outstanding interpreters of her generation.

Now, like her three colleagues, she's embarking on her own errand into the maze of professional responsibilities. "It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life--mentally, physically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually," says Dakin. "It's tremendously necessary for Martha's work to be seen widely, and I'm dedicated to that. Terese [Capucilli] and I have the responsibility for the workings of the company in rehearsal, classes, teaching, and coaching the repertory. We're the last generation to work with Martha, and it's something that we're proud of, but we're also finding people with special strengths to come in and work with us--there are so many generations that are willing to contribute. I take satisfaction in the opportunity to work in a way that I learned from Martha. The challenging thing is that because I'm in a position of responsibility it means that I have to say, `This is what I think is right.' As a dancer, I've never really had to make that kind of statement professionally to somebody else before. I find myself saying, `Yes, but it isn't good enough,' and I know that the people who came before, including Martha, were saying the same thing. So it's never going to be what you think it ought to be."

JOYCE HERRING

As associate director of the company school, Joyce Herring has the task of supervising instruction of Graham's revolutionary technique. She's also a regisseur of the Graham Trust. Recalls Herring, "I remember that when Martha was asked by a dance critic what she felt about the continuation of her works after her death, she said, `I'll feel that I will have succeeded if my movements become part of the dance vocabulary.'" (Graham, during the last years of her long life, used to joke when in a dark mood that she would "settle for" a job teaching modern dance at a small college in the Southwest--an unlikely fate preventd by the tireless devotion, care, and fund-raising efforts of Protas.)

The school is particularly important today, says Herring, "because there will be fewer and fewer dancers who knew Martha and benefited from the way she taught. She looked at a dancer as a human being working as a whole, toward a broad education." These days she is concerned that while it will be policy to make Graham's works available to other companies, those movements may not be danced properly: "So much depends on the dancers ability to perform that vocabulary. If the school, the trust, and the company work close together it will be best. We need support from everyone--even those who left the Graham fold over many years, such as Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp. I'm excited by the fact that Susan McGuire, a brilliant teacher, is back. Yuriko returned to coach Primitive Mysteries [1931] for the Joyce season. I'm trying to get Linda Hodes to teach classes and, of course, we have Pearl Lang, one of Martha's greatest interpreters--an indispensable source--on hand as senior artistic advisor."

The trust, she believes, is essential: "The repertory should--judiciously--become an available part of the dance world so that more people are able to see the pieces. There will be times when they may be done better than others, but like a Shakespeare play, each is a gem--sometimes the light that shines on it is dim, sometimes brilliant, but it's always there. Great works invite that kind of variety. That's why it's so important that the school and company continue--so that somewhere in the world you can see the real thing."

Herring joined the Graham company in 1981 and became a principal in 1986. High points in her career include dancing the central role in American Document (1938), which she performed opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov, and her involvement in the creation of ten Graham ballets. She's also active in her husband's group, the Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre. She's on the faculty of the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase, and serves as guest teacher with several dance organizations.

TERESE CAPUCILLI

The middle child in a big family steeped in musical theater, Terese Capucilli sang, acted, danced tap and ballet, and developed a taste for the dramatic a long time before she essayed such dark, compelling Graham roles as Hecuba in Cortege of Eagles (1967), One Who Seeks in Dark Meadow (1946), one of the sisters in Deaths and Entrances (1943), and Graham's 1937 solo Deep Song. Today, as co-associate director of the company, she's keenly aware of the challenges and responsibilities of the job and is prepared to meet them. "I'm the kind of person who, if the door is open, I'll take that step into it," she says. "It doesn't take much of a push with me."

Graham, she recalls, "taught me to constantly ask myself questions. As an artist you must be willing to tear yourself inside out. The first of Martha's own roles that she entrusted to me was Errand into the Maze [1947]--when I felt that I was totally unprepared for it! Having carded that through, I set up a great work ethic for myself. And now, I believe that I hold within myself the capacity to be able to relay to certain dancers the love of the work."

Her faith in continuity was severely jolted by the tearing down this winter of the building that housed the Graham studio at East 63rd Street and Third Avenue for almost half a century. She laments, "The history behind that building is unbelievable. I know that everything is being documented, with much going to the Library of Congress. The barres and floorboards that Martha used are being taken up and preserved. But it's a terrible wrench."

Setting a Graham work on ballet dancers, which Capucilli accomplished so brilliantly with Appalachian Spring at Colorado Ballet this past fall, was, she says, "an experience that tore me apart. Ballet dancers can be responsive and understanding, but in the future, will Martha's work be seen in the right way if dancers previously unfamiliar with the vocabulary don't know, for example, how to get off the floor into a pitch turn except superficially? That's what's hard about licensing these ballets, if they deteriorate as they're passed down. You work in the technique for twenty years and it becomes part of your being, every sinew. You don't move without that vocabulary's essence in your blood. How do you give another company, another dancer--no matter how well trained in another technique--the sense of that?" It is a question much debated in the dance world these days.

Meanwhile, she is happily preparing programs and repertory and rehearsing the company, both here and in the temporary studios: "I feel that I'm putting one foot in front of the other to keep Martha's ballets alive and to instill them in these dancers--ours and others, because I do enjoy the rehearsal process--passing on what I know of the work. Many of them never knew Martha. I feel a responsibility to give them an idea, an inspiration. We all have a very strong emotional connection, and that's why we're here--that's what keeps us working through all the turmoil."

Although strategic planning has been interrupted by the sale of the building and the temporary housing of the school and offices downtown, all believe in the company's ability to rise to even greater heights as the next century approaches. Eilber says, "We have a matching grant of a quarter of a million dollars from one of our board members and another major financial gift. Not only does it make us debt-free, it also gives us working capital for forward motion. Touring has picked up for the year [as a result of fee restructuring]. We've applied for funds for the outreach program in New York City and to the National Endowment for the Arts for specific projects. And now that the ballets can be licensed to universities, there will be a certain amount of required teaching. We have ongoing relationships with some universities that will increase the amount of exposure to Graham technique. We would like to establish biannual conventions where we can all come and talk about technique and performance with generations of dancers who haven't made a real effort to stay in touch with us over the years, yet could be very important emissaries--my sister calls it `Graham amnesty.' We're at the beginning of a new and vital era."

Hilary Ostlere is a senior editor and theater columnist of Dance Magazine.