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Minders keepers
The Martha Graham controversy
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

NEW YORK — As the dispute over the " ownership " of Martha Graham’s dances grinds its way through the courts, the real issue emerged last Thursday night on the stage of City Center. After the Martha Graham Company’s performance, the old and new fans who packed the theater burst into an ovation beyond routine applause. You could almost smell the audience’s wonder and gratitude for the chance to see this seriously endangered choreography one more time.

Dances can’t be owned like property. Legal protections may be invoked, but they surround thin air. A dance is just an idea until someone performs it, and only then. It takes many people to usher a dance into the real world: coaches and teachers who preserve the choreography and the style in their bodies; dancers who absorb and interpret it; the whole supporting community of designers, technicians, administrators; and even the audience that accepts the role of witness on any given night. The dance’s " owner " may control and facilitate these circumstances and receive financial rewards and artistic acclaim, but when the curtain falls, the dance returns to the realm of thought.

The latest installment has just concluded in the ownership battle between Ron Protas, the legitimate heir of the great choreographer, and the Martha Graham Center, the legitimate institutional locus of Graham’s work. The court case will determine how the Graham repertory is handled in the future. The Graham Center, which operates the school and company, the evolving but continuous mechanism that has produced her work since 1926, argues it should have the right to produce Graham’s dances independently. Protas, who was Graham’s last close associate, wants to be able to license the dances, via his designated coaches and reconstructors, to companies that can come up with the royalty fees he sets. Some kind of compromise between these options would probably be the answer, but now it’s up to federal court judge Miriam Cederbaum.

Despite the escalating tensions that led to Protas’s ouster as director eight years after Graham’s death, and the ensuing legal imbroglio, the Graham Company maintained that it has the information to perform the dances. The City Center performance was scheduled perhaps as a defiant comeback after a two-year company layoff. In a militant curtain speech, City Center board chairman Francis Mason enlisted everyone in the fight: " The art of Martha Graham is imperishable and should go on forever. "

The company managed to mount five very different works choreographed over five decades. Night Journey (1947), Seraphic Dialogue (1955), and Embattled Garden (1958) were all astonishing again. They all had sets by Graham’s long-time collaborator Isamu Noguchi, with Jean Rosenthal’s luminous, no-tricks lighting adapted by Beverly Emmons, and costumes that looked approximately right.

Graham constantly refreshed and redesigned her costumes; they were never totally stable. The music, mostly written for her, underwent some rescoring over the years, as the small, spare orchestras of the early years expanded and the company started playing up the romantic side of her sensibility. The dancers looked highly charged for the occasion, and nothing seemed overly updated.

No one but Graham could have imagined Seraphic Dialogue, the tremendous dance about Joan of Arc that takes place in a stage-size stained-glass window. St. Michael accompanied by St. Catherine and St. Margaret looks down on Joan (danced by Terese Capucilli, one of Graham’s last protégées) while she remembers herself as a young girl who sees visions, a warrior in the service of God, and finally a martyr embracing immolation. Norman Dello Joio’s dramatic score gives extra impetus to the marvelously expressive movement Graham devised for the four Joans and their heavenly guardians.

In Night Journey Graham told the Oedipus-Jocasta story from the standpoint of the heroine. She looks back on her inadvertent folly in marrying her own son, despite the prophecy of Tiresias and the warnings of a frantic chorus of women. Christine Dakin, another of the late-Graham stars, took the choreographer’s role.

Graham never used up the subject of love and its pitfalls, but in Embattled Garden there’s no real plot. Adam, Eve, Lilith and the Stranger trade partners in a tense, erotic quadrille, writhing and climbing around Noguchi’s abstract jungle of a set. This dance is usually taken terribly seriously, but Thursday’s cast notched up the sly looks and predatory gestures so that you could see Graham riffing on sex-as-wit.

Also on the program was a duet from the 1981 Acts of Light and a questionable reconstruction of the 1936 Steps in the Street. Graham had her lapses, like everyone else, but when she made a good dance, the heavens opened.

Issue Date: May 16-23, 2002
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