From A to B to Z

"I do not know whether my dance will live," Martha Graham once said. "This is not my concern. If the ideas and principles of movement I have created pass into the general stream of dance, I shall feel amply satisfied." Lately, however, the grande dame of modern dance has displayed a somewhat less cavalier attitude toward the body of 144 works that she has created over the course of 43 years. Not only is she beginning to film some of them for posterity, but a number of less familiar pieces have been revised and restored to her recent repertory as well.

Last week the Graham company opened a two-week stand at Manhattan's City Center. For the occasion, there was one totally new piece of choreography, and recent works like Cortege of Eagles (1967), but there were also revivals of dances that some of her fans had feared might die with the dancer. The opening-night program included the serene Canticle for Innocent Comedians, a work inspired by the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi, and last performed in 1953. There were other old favorites, like the 1946 Dark Meadow and the 1947 Errand into the Maze, both symbol-laden ritualistic works, which give the current programs far more the look of Graham retrospectives than was the case in previous Manhattan appearances. From the looks of it all, Martha Graham, a month short of her 75th birthday, is finally reconciled to being a part of history.

Well she might be. The extraordinary reputation of Martha Graham as a creator of dance steins not merely from the fact that she invented a new alphabet of movement, but that she then also applied that alphabet to the making of words and sentences. Any modern dancer today owes practically his whole range of action to her pioneering. More important, Martha Graham incorporated that vocabulary of movement into a series of dances that leave an audience both stunned and baffled, touched and terrified by the power of motion to create a mirror of the human psyche. Says Teacher-Choreographer Jeff Duncan: "Graham's meaning to today's dancer is that she gave him an awareness of the power and mystery that lies in the human body."

The Graham philosophy of movement evolved from a desire to expand the stylized, confining vocabulary of ballet, which had been worked out largely as a series of infinite variations on two basic motions, the walk and the bow. To Graham, any human movement was a dancer's possibility, the fall to the floor no less than the leap into the air. She brought the alphabet forward from A and B all the way to Z. She emerged when Sigmund Freud was a major cultural hero. Partly as a result of his influence, she developed a symbolism that replaced ballet's traditional boy-meets-girl, boy-throws-girl-into-air narrative forms with an infinity of experience, overt and implied.

Expanding Language. No choreographer alive has a greater number of disciples. Many of them, though, resist the Graham method of constructing thematic works. Her sometime student Paul Taylor, for example, holds onto the taut angularity of the Graham movement but works it into dances that bypass her symbol-ridden style, and favors more abstract, plotless design-pieces. Graham herself, however, finds new possibilities in the old forms while still restlessly reaching out to expand her own language. This season's new work, The Archaic Hours, involves such familiar Graham themes as the immutability of human experience, racial memories and archetypal figures, while drawing heavily on a style of movement not extensively explored by her in the past--the stiff-legged, ritualistic fierceness of ancient Japanese and Javanese drama.

Martha Graham the dancer was once the best exemplar of Martha Graham the choreographer. This is no longer true, and some sentimental fans would prefer that she retire to the sidelines. Nonetheless, she still appears on an average of once per program, carefully choosing her roles to conserve her waning energy. The legs no longer can do precisely what the mind commands, but only death will still her commanding presence--a living monument to a revolution in dance.

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