One moment in a lifetime. (Attitudes).

To an archaeologist seventy-five years sound more like a professorial tenure than an era, but to those of us who, like T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, measure out our lives in coffee spoons, it's a pretty decent life span. So, here we are: Dance Magazine is seventy-five years old, and it obviously behooves all of us motley crew associated with the magazine to celebrate the event. So I sat down at my computer and stared at it--and my computer with its rectangular and wickedly blank Cyclops eye stared back.

Then, after a week or so of intermittent glaring, inspiration struck--well, actually it crept in sideways around the corner of my office door like a wary New York cockroach. Why should I not be completely personal? After all, it reasoned, during those seventy-five years, for fifty-nine of them I had been going to dance at least three to four times a week; I had been writing about dance since 1948 and associated with Dance Magazine, first as its monthly London correspondent, since 1956. Now during those six decades (let's stretch it a year), what dance event had most influenced me personally, and what was that same event's current fallout?

Put that way--whether it was particularly germane to the magazine's seventy-fifth or not (and I soon kidded myself it was)--I had no difficulty at all. The event was the Martha Graham Dance Company's first appearance in London at the Saville Theater on March 1, 1954.

For me it was something like Saul's conversion on the way to Damascus. As I wrote in the British magazine Dance and Dancers at the time: "It is as an inventor of dance movement and image (the two are as one in her work) that she reigns supreme. She coins phrases hot-fresh from the mint, seldom repeating herself; she babbles magic words like an idiot-child or poet." Martha wasn't all that pleased with the phrase "idiot-child"; I had, of course, meant "idiot savant." Still, the impact of my first immersion in Graham (I saw about eighteen performances during that three-week season) was remarkable.

Nor was I the only one so impressed. It is often suggested that Graham's first London season was a failure. Not so--the reviews of the older, Establishment critics were largely unperceptive, but the younger audiences and younger critics loved her. Her orchestra audience may have been sparse, but her balcony was almost consistently full. And as the news spread, there was a massive aftershock from that first Graham exposure.

It took time, but the influence of Graham in particular and eventually, American modern dance in general, spread throughout Western Europe like blood seeping raggedly across blotting paper. It was not that Europe had not seen expressionist or contemporary dance before; it was not all an impregnable citadel of toe shoes. There had been contemporary dance in Europe before Graham--Mary Wigman, Harald Kreutzberg, Kurt Jooss, and many others--but it was Graham and American modern dance that were to prove the touchstone to the future.

Thinking of the enormous influence of Graham and, a decade or so later, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and the others, set me also to considering the impact of Graham teachers, such as Jane Dudley and Robert Cohan, and the founding of the late Robin Howard's London School of Contemporary Dance, the first major contemporary school in Europe based on American rather than German dance styles. That was only a beginning. Soon dance, American-style, proliferated in the Netherlands, France, Germany; it began with disciples working in studios and eventually advanced, as in the United States, into the college system. It is amazing to observe the concentric patterns of American dance, going out and nowadays coming back, throughout the last four decades of the twentieth century.

Yet then I came to the less pleasant aspect of my Graham conversion--the present plight of the Graham repertoire, school, and dancers. And, bang, I come down like Icarus to the turbulent sea. Coincidentally (in the circumstances you might say ironically), the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance was founded the very same year as Dance Magazine: 1927. But it has less to celebrate than we have--its past is dusty, its present is largely in mothballs, and its future, though brightening, is still shrouded in mist.

The school itself is now, after a nasty hiccup of a hiatus, back on its bare feet. However, since May 2000 the Graham company has been mothballed over ongoing legal tussles and tangles. The legal issues are far from simple; they involve matters of copyright, intellectual property, ownership, and legacy. Ron Protas, the hero caretaker of Graham's last years and the owner, by Graham's bequest, of the copyright to her ballets and choreography, is arrayed on one side, and the board of the Martha Graham Dance Company on the other. There are now glimmers of light--as I write, the Graham board is preparing to honor the troupe's seventy-fifth birthday with a real, live performance. The legacy and testament of a woman called Graham hangs in the balance, but even while hanging, still lives in hope.

Seventy-five years (by the way, did I mention that I am exactly the same age as the magazine?)--it's not so bad. Consider the alternative. Like the magazine, I look back on a period of extraordinary growth in dance. An English-speaking, London-born New Yorker--I switched base airports in 1965--I have chosen to symbolize our seventy-five years of life by my discovery (along with Europe) of Graham, partly because of its worldwide significance. And on the personal side, it was this burgeoning fascination with American dance that caused me to leave London and promenaded me home.

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