In the spirit of Graham.

IF ANYONE can be in two places at once, it's Marianne Handy Hraibi. Determined to see the Martha Graham Dance Company perform in New York City on May 9, 2002, she was also scheduled to teach dance classes at the St. Johnsbury Academy in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Hraibi knew that if the Graham Company lost its court case, the performance might be the final appearance of the last few dancers coached directly by Martha Graham. Her solution? Take the St. Johnsbury Academy students to New York with her--all one hundred of them. She raised $10,000 in donations from the Academy, the students, the community, and her family, and on May 9, she and her high school students bused to New York, saw the concert, and fire next day attended a master class with Stuart Hodes, longtime teacher al the Graham School.

Hraibi is a small woman with fire hard body of a dancer and a constantly humming energy. At 56, she can still demonstrate all that she teaches. Wearing a black, low-back leotard with a wooly black body suit rolled at the waist, she leads the ninety-minute accelerated class through the Graham spiral contractions series. Then the students reverse the series while Hraibi observes. Next she teaches a Vivaldi variation of her own that demands more subtle movements.

"I love the Graham technique," she says. "I may he a nobody in the Grand Union in St. Johnsbury, but I don't care as long as they know me at the Graham studio."

And they do. Pearl Lang, famous Graham dancer and choreographer, said, "I teach a lot of teachers. Many of them never return to study, and when their students come, we can tell. Marianne has a personal quality ... enthusiasm, which is good for students, but she is also careful. Marianne comes back as often as she can to master her technique. That makes all the difference. She knows what she can do."

Hraibi began teaching at the St. Johnsbury Academy in 2000, when she heard that the college preparatory school in the Vermont mountain community where she grew up had a dance faculty position available. She auditioned by teaching elementary Graham technique, arguing the merits of it as both a fundamental movement study for all students and as a foundation for a preprofessional dance program.

In 2001 the new Charles Hosmer Morse Center for the Arts opened at St. Johnsbury Academy, giving Hraibi a new studio with a compressed wheat floor. She teaches both a beginning and an accelerated class five times a week. Her courses are worth one academic credit a semester and may be repeated.

HRAIBI'S DANCE education began with ballet lessons at age 12 with Betty Low. She got her first taste of Graham technique in a summer course offered by Flora and Georgia Cushman. In 1965, she attended Connecticut College and the American Dance Festival, where she studied with Graham as well as Yuriko, Jose Limon, and Betty Jones. After finishing her BFA at Boston Conservatory in 1969, she danced with Talley Beatty, June Lewis and Company, Richard Englund & Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Yuriko & Company. In 1971, she was the official Graham demonstrator for Moss Cohen.

Hraibi's private life both compromised and broadened her dance life when she met (in 1971) and married (in 1973) Saher Hraibi in Lebanon. When civil war broke out in 1975, they lost everything, and in 1984 Hraibi took their two young sons back to St. Johnsbury for safety while her husband remained in Lebanon to work. The family later reunited in Beirut only to flee from danger twice more. However, wherever she was, Hraibi continued to teach, summers in Vermont's Burklyn Ballet Theatre and winters throughout the Middle East.

After settling in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1986, she began teaching for the Dance Collective, and in 1995, Dartmouth officially invited her to teach on campus through the athletic department, where she instructs a mix of students, staff, and professors. She now drives daily the hundred-mile round trip between St. Johnsbury Academy classes and Dartmouth College. "I live in my car," she says with a laugh. "But my students! Without them I do not exist."

AFTER SHE learned that Rebecca Wright was teaching ballet at St. Paul's Academy in nearby Concord, New Hampshire, the two decided to exchange master classes. When Hraibi took her St. Johnsbury students to perform at St. Paul's, Wright asked her to teach Graham technique to her students every other week. It wasn't long before nearby Phillips Exeter, Philips Andover, and St. Andrew's Academy also became interested in exchange. Through an informal consortium the schools reach out to the area's resident dancers (Moses Pendleton and Steve Paxton live nearby) as visiting dance masters.

Hraibi convinced St. Johnsbury to use leftover funds from the New York trip to establish the Ned and Sarah Handy Fund for Dance in honor of her mother, who died in August 2003. The fund will provide scholarships for low-income students and help bring visiting artists such as Kennet Oberly, who set a ballet on Hraibi's St. Johnsbury students for a December 2003 concert.

According to William Vinton, chair of the St. Johnsbury Fine Arts Department, "The spirit of Martha Graham is alive and well at the St. Johnsbury Academy due to Marianne Hraibi's influence. She has been able to establish a true culture of dance here al St. Johnsbury."

Sharry Traver Underwood danced for Agnes de Mille, Michael Kidd, and Hanya Holm, and was a member of the Charles Weidman Dance Company.