Martha Graham Dance Company.

MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY CITY CENTER NEW YORK, NEW YORK APRIL 14-25, 2004

In the thirteen years since Martha Graham's death, many of us have watched and waited. How would the court battles over custody of her repertoire be resolved? Who would run the company? Would enthusiastic young dancers come along to breathe new life into the Graham idiom, or would only those of the powerful middle period--the '40s and '50s--continue to reign?

Although it included some of her more trivial output, the New York season told us much. It ranged from the minor Owl and the Pussycat to the shatteringly beautiful Sketches From Chronicle. All were rehearsed with devotion by Artistic Directors Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin.

A cadre of former Graham dancers has reconstituted sections of her Chronicle, a 1936 diatribe against the effects of war. Now called Sketches From Chronicle, this major work calls forth the utmost in sustained performing vitality. How brilliantly inventive it is when the women boldly stride in reverse or are swept into fierce, spiraling circles. Like Balanchine, Graham used space as a major choreographic element, and although soloists Fang Yi Shue, Miki Orihara, and Elizabeth Auclair displayed the boldness of a trio of Nikes, it was the surging corps that brought the audience to its feet with excitement and respect.

Perhaps because Sketches makes such concentrated use of the women, the season also revived Circe, which emphasizes the men. First presented in 1963, Circe always seemed too hastily made, its animal characterizations literal rather than evocative. This is still true.

The ordeal of facing life's challenges could well seem didactic, but the female characters in Cave of the Heart, Herodiade, and Errand Into the Maze all embark on memorable journeys, and their interpreters yielded fully to the gauntlet thrown by the choreographer.

Fang Yi Sheu does not simply perform, she experiences. As the Ariadne figure in Errand, she turned Isamu Noguchi's spare set into a landscape of fear. And when she encountered Martin Lofnes as the beast, her body, lying on the ground, seemed thunderstruck beneath his zig-zagging gait.

Although Herodiade also deals with a woman's sexual fears, it does so with more formality and with a touch of mystery. Like an actress preparing for the stage, Orihara was tossed between the real and the imagined. Finally, with the help of Auclair as her attendant, she donned her costume and was ready. Both women, while decisive, could have been more layered in their interpretations.

Cave of the Heart is remarkable in the way it dares to penetrate the sorcery-tainted world of Medea. As she whirled in a metal structure designed by Noguchi to be at once gown, pyre, and the rays of the sun, one was swept into the world with her. As Medea, Capucilli devoured the stage like a black widow spider; in the same role, Dakin had a Shakespearean weight. Both needed more daring from the secondary characters in this beautifully wrought tragedy.

The strength in Graham's middle-period works lies in the sustained balance between soloists and chorus. In Night Journey, while Kenneth Topping, as Oedipus, and Dakin, as Jocasta, struggled against their passion, Alessandra Prosperi, the Leader of the Chorus, remained poised like an ancient statue. And in Dark Meadow, the set of Katherine Crockett's bead as she heralded the changing seasons made her seem to hear their hidden language. The groups in both works moved with the relentlessness of predatory birds.

Graham did not often resort to humor in her choreography. When she did, it was usually in self-parody, as in her Maple Leaf Rag. The dance, with its teetering barre and outrageous flirtations, has become more sophisticated since its 1990 premiere. The dancers have burnished their way into it. What might they accomplish if let loose on Every Soul Is a Circus, Punch and the Judy, or Acrobats of God?

What a joy to have a live orchestra, led with conviction by Aaron Sherber, for the entire season. The costumes, under the management of Russell Vogler, still need to be liberated from the fashion-industry influence of Graham's penultimate days.

But let's be grateful. With its legal and financial problems ostensibly laid to rest, the Martha Graham Dance Company is again developing the alchemy of company style and individual statement so significant to her output.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

www.marthagrahamdance.org