Martha Graham Dance Company.

"Radical Graham" was a risky, but shrewd, marketing concept to promote the Martha Graham centennial celebration in New York City and to focus attention on the revolutionary aspects of the late dancemaker's compositions from the 1930s and 1940s. As the season launch of BAM's Next Wave Festival, the repertory allowed audiences to experience the nonconformist nature of this artist, who was singularly influential in the development of American modern dance. Graham once stated in a curtain speech, "You must keep alive the wonder. You must listen to ancestral footsteps, but you must never look back." Her words summarize the achievement of the company's stunning presentation of nineteen of her works, some of which had not been reproduced in fifty years.

The photographs of Barbara Morgan, who collaborated with the youthful Graham for days at a time to perfect a single image, functioned as a Rosetta stone for several of the reconstructions. Diane Gray, the ensemble's associate artistic director, used this archive to reassemble "Satyric Festival Song" (1932), originally part of Dance Songs, which also included "Ceremonial," "Morning Song," and "Song of Rapture." Along with other sources, Terese Capucilli and the troupe's rehearsal director, Carol Fried, tapped these "ancestral footsteps" to review three excerpts from Chronicle (1936): "Spectre-1914," "Steps in the Street," and "Prelude to Action."

Deep Song (1937), the chilling solo of torment kindled by the Spanish Civil War, was also pieced together with help from the Morgan collection. Celebration (1934) owed inspiration for its new life--now replete with costumes by Donna Karan--to these pictures, along with the dedication and muscle memory of a host of Graham's dancers who appeared in the piece originally. While lots of heroines were evident both onstage and behind the scenes, Pearl Lang, a Graham dancer during the seasons of 1941--1954 and 1970--1978 who serves as the centennial artistic advisor, deserves special accolades. As revival director for Deaths and Entrances (1943), Heriodiade (1944), Dark Meadow (1946), and the evening-length Clytemnestra (1958), she has restored the dramatic power to some of Graham's important masterworks.

Released just prior to the Brooklyn appearances, The Technique of Martha Graham by Alice Helpern was a stimulating intellectual companion to the performances. The core of the book is a collection of the early Morgan photographs and a chronicle of the direct relationship between Graham's philosophy and her technique, which evolved in response to expressive needs for making tangible her vision of the inner landscape of the human heart, mind and spirit. In watching the dances unfold on the stage, especially from the Denishawn solo Serenate Morisca (1918) through Heretic (1929) and Lamentation (1930), viewers could see how Graham generated her movement vocabulary out of her own womanly body, fusing physicality with emotion and evolving structural form out of breath, the stuff of life. Through dances from the next two decades--particularly in Cave of the Heart (1946) and Errand into the Maze (1947)--spectators watched the technique grow to clarify social issues and to delineate distinctive characters purely through gesture, timing and group interaction.

With Clytemnestra, audiences shared the pinnacle of these phases of Graham's growth as an individual and as an artist. There would be other periods when her explorations revealed quite different interests, before she died in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, but none so rooted in the rigorous process of examining the depths of her own creativity. From the exotically perfumed solo of 1918 she had gained, over forty years, the technical vocabulary and theatrical skill to explore the concept of the protagonist's spiritual rebirth and reconciliation with her son Orestes in the underworld. Before Graham, the idea of Aeschylus's Oresteia as a suitable topic for dance drama would have been unthinkable. Such was the radical nature of her iconoclasm and her commitment to dance as the most honest vehicle to convey the distilled essence of humanity.

Quintessential Graham was on view with Janet Eilber's performance of "Satyric Festival Song," a sardonic evocation of mirth, "the thing itself." Hair flying as she enacted the puckish tricks of clowns from Attica to Albuquerque, Eilber personified Graham's wit with artful crudity. Tossing back her head in silent guffaws, smacking the air with flattened palms or merely poking out a big toe while glancing over her shoulder at the audience, Eilber embodied the force of laughter.

Not surprisingly, the season was a special triumph for all the company's principal women. Christine Dakin--as Clytemnestra, Medea and Ariadne--stopped hearts with the clarity of her dancing. Capucilli simmered into mad, technical explosions in the role Graham made for herself in Deaths and Entrances and plumbed the depths of sorrow in the red-shroud solo "Spectre-1914" that announced the coming of World War I. Denise Vale, in Deep Song, and with Joyce Herring in Primitive Mysteries (1931), confirmed the dignity and strength that are fundamental to so many of Graham's characters. And there are also younger female dancers to be reckoned with, like Miki Orihara as the virgin in El Penitente (1940) and as the princess in Cave of the Heart, along with Kathy Buccellato as She of the Ground in Dark Meadow.

In spite of fine performances by Floyd Flynn as the Husbandman in Appalachian Spring (1944), Kenneth Topping as Orestes, and Donlin Foreman in all his roles, Graham's men play second fiddle to her women. Males are sometimes merely presented lustily as juicy hunks, or the bare cheeks of their derrieres become decorative ornaments, as in the epilogue of Clytemnestra. The battle between the sexes is a ubiquitous theme in dances from the late 1930s forward and often show us Graham at her most futuristic.

Differences in textures and tensions between earlier performances and those of today are occasionally jarring. When "long gray woolens" are refashioned in spandex, the results are not always pretty. Appalachian Spring is a case in point. The homespun feel from the black-and-white film of Graham herself at center stage has been sacrificed in the shiny pink dress Herring wears as the Bride and in the frothy organza puffed sleeves of the Followers. When overly milked, gesture can give, not character, but caricature, as was the case with Pascal Rioult's interpretation of the Revivalist. And too much rehearsal polish can sometimes result in mechanical counting, rather than dancing to the pulse--an annoying tendency of the group in Heretic.

Nitpicking aside, the ensemble rode the crest of a grand season, enormously enhanced by live music at all performances, with Stanley Sussman conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The wonder was kept alive, and Graham's dancers continue a forward-looking stride.