Unveiling the Mystery.

Martha Graham's sixty-fifth dance, Primitive Mysteries, first performed in 1931 at the Craig Theater in New York City, became her signature piece. In 1964, Graham asked Yuriko (as she is known to everyone) if she would consider performing Graham's role of the Virgin. At first Yuriko hesitated; then she accepted and danced it with resounding success. For the Louis Horst Centennial Gala in 1984 and again for the Martha Graham Dance Company's season last February at the Joyce Theater, Yuriko staged the work and passed on Graham's wisdom to the company's young apprentice dancers.

"When I first started rehearsing to perform Primitive Mysteries in the 1960s," Yuriko remembers, "Martha's inner interpretation became my total focus. I had seen her perform the role of Mary in 1944 and that vivid memory gave me courage. I knew that if I could follow her sense of presence onstage, maybe I would be all right. But I had many questions. The style of the work"--the strange and beautiful unity of Spanish Christianity and the native religion of the Indian Southwest, "was a mystery for me. How would I know what the Virgin was feeling?"

Coached by Graham in the work's three sections--the joyful "Hymn to the Virgin"; the tragic grief of the "Crucifixus"; and the exaltation of "Hosanna"--Yuriko found her heart pounding at Graham's exciting advice. With her artistic integrity, Graham provided a truthful subtext that Yuriko could bring alive beneath the execution of the choreography. "Somehow, because Martha had danced the role," Yuriko explains, "she responded to my efforts and there grew a kind of bond between us. She knew instinctively what I was thinking, doing, and feeling. Directors are often able to see those things, but cannot always make them happen in a performer. It is the person who has done the role who can lead and make others follow."

Sophie Maslow, drawing upon her deep memory, had set the steps for the most recent production; it was time for Yuriko, as Graham had, to direct the group's focus on inner interpretation.

But before she could begin, her first challenge was technique. Primitive Mysteries was constructed in the vocabulary of the time--a percussive period with various kinds of contractions that changed with the visual and inner meaning of the movements. For example, when the group makes an offering to Mary, it employs a different contraction from the higher and more airy ones that push Mary to go to the crucifix, which are different from the contractions that are a reaction to pain and sorrow.

"This generation," Yuriko explained, "is conscious of the shape they are creating. They check the mirror to see if a shape is correct instead of creating the shape from within themselves. There is no life in a movement that comes from the outside. There is only a visceral imitation. Movement must initiate within before it has an outer shape. Film and video have contributed to this habit of outer imitation that is different from the generation that learned a work from live dancers. The result is a copy of a movement--lacking spatial awareness, weight, power, and abstract qualities that cannot be sensed from a screen."

The group began by working on technique. Yuriko noted that this generation of young dancers has legs and arms that seem detached from the center of the body. "To give them an image," she said, "I asked them to see a tree in their mind's eye that begins with roots, grows into a trunk, and then freely spreads and moves its branches upward. We forget that we are part of nature. Martha talked about the spiral growth of plants: We, too, don't move straight up, but grow as everything in the body spirals in rotation to enable us to move in any direction."

Getting deeper into the inner meaning of a movement meets with some resistance from young dancers. "It's scary," Yuriko says, "because we all prefer to sort, analyze, and hide behind physicality. I told the dancers that each role, no matter how small, represents a person, a human being; not a machine, but someone who lives aside, in a geographical location, at a different time, with another scenario. All that has nothing to do with reality, the reality of one's existence, but is about regaining the lost innocence of childhood when you could become whatever you were told to become. A child will become a spider if you ask him to do so. As we grow up, we begin to pretend to be a spider and lose the capacity to become. You have to trust that you will return to being yourself as you are in real life. The dancer has to learn to make this trade again and again between stage roles and real life. You have to just do it until it becomes comfortable. And you know, it's so wonderful when I see truth and individuality emerge in a dancer. I can tell the difference day by day, from moment to moment, if the content is there or if it's not, or when it falters, or drops, or doesn't connect with the next image."

"It all relates to what Martha said to us again and again: `Live the moment.' It takes courage."

Yuriko Kikuchi was born in San Jose, California and undeservedly was detained at the Gila River Relocation Center for Japanese Americans. By 1944, she had made her way to New York City and had become a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company, as well as Graham's assistant and rehearsal director. In subsequent years, she staged a great number of Graham's works. In 1951, she originated the role of Eliza in Jerome Robbins's "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" in the Broadway production of The King and I, appeared in the film version, and staged the production in Japan and England. Yuriko resides in New York City and teaches at the Peridance Center.