Martha Graham Dance Company.

The piece opens in half-light: the house-lights partly dimmed, the stage the same. There, in a kind of pellucid gloom, three wolf beads (they look like giant schnauzers, but never mind) seem to rise from the slick, dark floor as from a winter lake. There is a noise like rain, and three black-caped women enter. in an abrupt flash of bright light, they issue silent screams.

Macbeth, Act One, Witches' Scene? No, Robert Wilson's Snow on the Mesa (Portrait of Martha), Part I, "The Wolf-Wife." (Eleven more parts follow.) The most surprising aspect of this dance, to many people, is that - given its creator - there is actual dancing in it. The most surprising thing to me - given its self-proclaimed use of "elements from Shaker life, and from the deserts of the American Southwest, the designs and myths of its aboriginal inhabitants" (I am quoting from the program) - is Wilson's reliance on various Asian dance forms. What with its Balinese, Javanese, and Japanese elements (heavy on the butoh, including a ludicrous duet in which Erick Hawkins and Graham are resurrected as - so help me - Eiko & Koma look-alikes), this bio-epic looks more Denishawn than Graham. Can it be that Robert Wilson has confused Graham. with her longtime designer Noguchi. You'd think Martha had never left Miss Ruth. Yet while Wilson's history is typically unbalanced and deracinated, his mise-en-scene is anything but. His final image - empty stage, night time, snow starting to fall - is evocative, moving, memorable, beautiful.

This is the Wilson paradox (and tragedy). He is an accomplished, vivid, even visionary scenic artist, with the skill and the means to achieve his intentions; he creates dazzling stage pictures. Even at their most spare, his settings are never empty. They are, in fact, complete. The last thing they need is people and a story, but Wilson has chosen to work in the theater. I think the reason he likes slow motion so much - portions of Snow last eons - is obvious: he likes things to stay put, or as put as possible. His solution to his quandary - he is a static artist working in a temporal medium - is appropriative; he uses stuff that already has a lot of content (the Civil War, the life of Einstein, et cetera) and form (German cabaret, Asian dance styles, et cetera) without regard to its actual meaning or context. His is a theater of the antiliterate, where the answer to the question "Why?" always seems to be "Why not?" Why not have a figure with a red veil draped over the head, why not have Kachina clowns, why not have androgynous costuming by Donna Karan, why not have some big black rocks? And why not show Martha drunk in her (highly stylized) bed?

Poor Martha. Except for that part, she might have liked this dance had she seen it late in life, when she had already vulgarized her repertoire and gone Halston. Poor dancers. So beautiful, so tight, so taut, so capable. How is it that their torsos are so unified, their center of gravity so high up? Where are the fine distinctions between and among the ribs and diaphragm and abdomen and pelvis? Where is the landscape of the body? Where is the heart in its cage of ribs? I am not afraid that people will forget Graham; I am afraid people will think this is Graham. Thank heavens for the films, the photographs, the writing. And I was glad to see the "sketches" from Chronicle (1936) and the evergreen Diversion of Angels (1948) on the company's opening night, before the Wilson.

Watching Diversion, with its cart-wheels, its springtime emotion, its clear linear structure, I couldn't help thinking of Paul Taylo's Roses, so like the Graham in certain of its devices, so ironically and so lovingly son-of-martha. Ron Protas, the Graham company's artistic director, seems to think that Wilson is Graham's aesthetic heir; but Wilson is entirely unsuitable, and imperfectly Oedipal. My money's on Taylor, who made love to Mother onstage, and then ran off to found a company of his own.