Martha Graham Dance Company.

MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY CITY CENTER, NEW YORK, NY APRIL 6-17, 2005

Martha Graham spent her first 30 years as a choreographer building the repertory that made her famous. She spent the last 30 years of her life undoing it. Now, after a costly legal battle that allowed the Martha Graham Dance Company once again to dance Graham's greatest works, artistic directors Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin have taken it upon themselves to restore their magic as art.

This is no easy task. Decades of performance can change a work, even a classic like Appalachian Spring, which exists on film with most of its original interpreters. Accents shift; gestures change shape; details are added, others lost; the personalized emotion of the actor replaces the impersonal mask of the ritual celebrant; musicality disappears. The work needs to be rethought, measure by measure, stripped, cleaned, and restored to its bones.

The results thus far are mixed. Sketches from Chronicle looks superb, its all-female collective galvanized by despair, its leader, especially as danced by Fang-Yi Sheu, intoxicated with power. Sheu inhabits Graham's roles not by imitating her but by infusing the movement with a contemporary athleticism and physicality. Intensely expressive, she pulsates with angst in contractions, whips up her leg like a command, distorts her body into a stylized, modernist geometry. In Errand Into the Maze and Cave of the Heart, she and the impressive Martin Lofsnes brought new life to Graham's dated, phallocentric narratives.

Primitive Mysteries, by contrast, still needs work. In part, this is because the simple, repeated movements--heavy footfalls, sudden, percussive contractions, hunched-over runs--demand a weight and stopwatch precision that the ensemble's 13 women did not always achieve. The emphasis on design also posed a problem. Often the dancers seemed to imitate the shape of a gesture rather than generate it from within.

Despite its luminous Aaron Copland store and live orchestra, Appalachian Spring fared poorly. Not only were the second-cast principals weak, failing to command the stage, but they also sentimentalized the action. With her small-scaled movement and perky face, Virginie Mecene turns The Bride into an ingenue with no qualms about her future, while David Zurak makes The Husbandman a happy-go-lucky groom. The anxiety that once darkened the choreography (and can still be heard in the music) is gone.

After a long hiatus, Deaths and Entrances returned to the repertoire. "A drama of poetic experience," according to the program, in which "three sisters, perhaps like the Bronte sisters, relive their childhood and youth, and their relationships with each other and with the men they have known." The work recalls Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, which premiered in 1942, a year before Deaths.

Both are period dramas, set in an oppressive society; both are about three sisters, with a heroine--Hagar in Pillar, Miki Orihara as the protagonist in Deaths--who wears her passions on her sleeve. Both, moreover, are told as flashbacks, jumping from past to present, memory to dream through the mind of the protagonist. Graham nods to Tudor in the pose of her opening tableau, the frills and ballet slippers of The Three Remembered Children, and the sisters' tangled emotions. Finally, like Tudor, she has two lovers jostle for the protagonist's heart--the sexually masterful Dark Beloved (Christophe Jeannot) and the companionable Poetic Beloved (Tadej Brdnik)--both of whom she ultimately rejects. In a sense, this is Hagar's story told from a woman's point of view.

Despite two powerful duets for the heroine and each of her lovers, outstanding performances from the entire cast, and stylish new costumes by Oscar de la Renta, Deaths is a flawed work. Meandering and episodic, at 45 minutes or so, it is too long. To some extent, this is the fault of Hunter Johnson's score, which lacks the drive and musical quality of Copland's Appalachian Spring of William Schuman's Night Journey. Different music could have made Deaths and Entrances a tighter, more unified work.

Whatever its weaknesses, Deaths evinced a discipline and clarity of vision strikingly absent from Martha Clarke's Sueno, the season's much-publicized premiere. Despite the references to Goya's etchings, suggestions of rape, and occasionally impressive visual effects, Sueno never quite added up. Moreover, even with the borrowings from flamenco, the movement vocabulary was thin, with very little formal choreography.

A palpable excitement filled the air at Graham performances this season. Young lates were in the audience and musicians in the pit. Above all, many of the works revealed the essence of a repertoire that can still feed the soul and mind, even in the 21st century.

For more information: www.marthagrahamdance.org