Is This Crisis Critical?

SO WHEN, I was asked recently, are you going to write about the Martha Graham crisis? It seemed a fair question, but one to which I had no ready, or at least not very ready, answer. Of course, Ron Protas, the heir to the Graham estate and copyright owner not only of her ballets but even the trademarked Martha Graham name, was rather foolish to imagine that, as a non-dancer, he could function very satisfactorily as the company's artistic director, whether or not that had been Graham's dying wish.

Experience has shown--OK, Diaghilev was that necessary exception to prove the role--that artistic directors of dance companies must, at some level, be dancers in their own right. Dancers and choreographers, ballet masters and regisseurs do not take kindly to non-dancers controlling their destinies or making decisions for them. Clearly, Protas will have to relinquish artistic control of the company, but just as clearly the company's board of directors will have to come to some understanding with him over the repertoire and name copyright.

Presumably cool wisdom on both sides will prevail, indeed will have to prevail, and then after the board has submitted its audited accounts (which I understand have not yet been completed), applications for government and foundation grants, not to mention general fund-raising, will be able to go ahead. One question that does, incidentally, puzzle me is the seemingly low figure that--in these days of inflated Manhattan real estate prices--the Martha Graham School fetched. It was $2.1 million--little more than a modestly sized Park Avenue apartment. Someone, I should think, has picked up a bargain--but then I was never any good at either figures or real estate.

However, although the fate of the Graham company is highly relevant, its present sad situation is not actually the crisis in modern dance that I want to write about. I suggest we need to widen the scope of our worries to include almost all of our modern dance companies. We have to look at both their structure and their continuance--or perhaps we even may have to question their need for ongoing continuance as permanent institutions.

Most art institutions, be they from the fine arts, such as museums or art galleries, or the performing arts, such as orchestras or theater, opera or ballet companies, are usually geographically pinpointed. We understand that the Cincinnati Symphony is in Cincinnati, that the Arena Stage is in Washington, D.C., and that Pacific Northwest Ballet is in Seattle. But modern dance companies normally find their very identity not in where they are situated but in the dancer/choreographer who founded them and, more often than not, has provided all the repertoire.

So what happens when, say, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham or--let's widen the field--David Parsons or Garth Fagan, Bill T. Jones or Mark Morris retire, one way or another, from the field of combat, leaving their companies to the kindness of friends and other strangers? How do they continue? Do they continue? Should they continue? Where are the major heritage works of these choreographers going to find a home? This is a crisis that will affect, sooner or later, every area of American modern dance.

What is happening to the Martha Graham company, discounting all the ugly internecine squabbles, has already happened to the companies led by Jose Limon and Alvin Ailey. Now the Ailey company, although dominated by Ailey's choreography as much as by his character, was always devised and designed as a repertory company. It essentially involved other choreographers making new ballets, as well as building a choreographic library of certain modern dance classics, ranging from Anna Sokolow to Ted Shawn, from Katherine Dunham to Talley Beatty.

To some extent the Limon troupe was similar--Doris Humphrey, Graham's contemporary and rival, was originally its artistic director, and at the beginning, although the works were mostly by Limon, there was always a sizable sprinkling of old and new Humphrey works. Since Limon's death, his major dancers, led by the redoubtable Carla Maxwell, have rebuilt the structure and fabric of the company, maintaining the Limon repertoire but also adventuring into new works. (Donald McKayle functions as a kind of resident choreographer without a specific portfolio.) They even revive ballets outside the normal Limon range, such as Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies, omitting the original pointe work.

The Ailey/Limon recipe for continuance is obviously viable and effective. But how often can it be accomplished? What is going to happen to the Erick Hawkins Dance company, or, perhaps more importantly, some of Hawkins's more significant works? Murray Louis has, naturally enough, joined his troupe with that of his teacher and mentor, the late Alwin Nikolais, but what are the long-term plans or chances of this combined company?

The problem is horribly simple. American modern dance probably needs, logistically, to have repertory companies on much the same pattern as classical ballet companies do today. But this runs counter to the entire creative ethos of modern dance, which has existed and developed on the individualist credo of young choreographers. They learn their craft as dancers under an established creator and then, if their own creative spirits move them, they strike out to form their own companies, intended to dance their own repertoire.

This is fine. This is the way we have always ordered our dance since the days of Isadora, or at least Denishawn. But how long can this ordering continue to function? X starts a company, Y joins X, Y leaves X to start a new company, just as in time W will leave Y. X dies. Y gets bored and takes to the bottle. Both are choreographers of no mean ability. What happens to their work? Is it going to be entirely lost or will W selectively give it a home?

During the next twenty years this pattern--call it the Graham syndrome, if you like--is going to be repeated again and again. Are we going to reject modern dance's past and insist that each generation merely reinvent its own wheel? Perhaps. Some would say that such a procedure of disposal and reinvention would maintain the very spirit of modern dance. So we could say to hell with Martha--or at least to Martha's works--while at the same time asserting that Martha's tradition and perhaps technique were kept alive by disciples whom she never knew. Could be. I'm old-fashioned enough to hope that modern dance's masterworks of the past will somehow find a future. But it's a crisis on the horizon, isn't it?

Senior editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1956.