Artifacts and Artifice

When modern dance began, around the turn of the 20^th century, performers like Isadora Duncan publicized it as a kind of anti-ballet. Its vocabulary felt natural to the body and looked natural to audiences, the kind of movement that organically expressed human feeling, rather than the academic rigidity of classical dance. Duncan identified her technique as what the body wanted and was divinely inspired to do, whereas ballet, as Yeats might put it, bruised the body to pleasure soul. Modern dance, she argued, connected performers and audiences to ancient cultures, especially that of Greece, exemplifying our true connections to the earth and nurturing our revolutionary American character. These ideas influenced the dance philosophy of other performers, such as Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who borrowed from Egypt, India, and China, as well as the native peoples of America, but who also wanted to remake dancing as an American art.

Martha Graham trained at the Denishawn School, becoming steeped in these ideas. After establishing her own company, in 1926, she developed a weighted, grounded style using expressive and even expressionistic gestures, such as bodily contractions and anglings of the head, a vocabulary she believed tapped into truths about humanity and its myths, while also allowing for a more revealing and virtuosic account of natural human experience. This vocabulary became so well-known that nearly a century later it still corresponds to what many think of as modern dance. In order to express natural truths, Graham created a technique as crammed with striking artifice as classical ballet.

Three decades after her death, the 17-member Martha Graham Dance Company, after an exhausting legal battle over performance rights to her works, looked strong in an August performance at, fittingly enough, the Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob's Pillow, the Berkshires dance center. The company has avoided turning into a Graham Museum in two ways: by commissioning new work, and by initiating in 2007 a continuing series called Lamentation Variations, for which choreographers create short works inspired by Graham's classic 1930 solo, Lamentation, in which, cloaked in a hooded, ankle-length jersey gown, she became a continually metamorphosing, sculptural expression of grief.

Unfortunately in Deo, a world premiere for eight women choreographed by Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith, dance phrases came and went, with little to glue them together, exhibiting many of Graham's mannerisms (convulsions suggesting birth pangs, a mythological theme concerning Demeter and Persephone), but none of her magic. At times it resembled a Graham parody.

The Lamentation Variations, however, fared better, with three choreographers adapting Graham without imitating her style. Remarkably, two of the choreographers—Liz Gerring and tap wizard Michelle Dorrance—had created theirs at the Pillow during the previous week, with rehearsal time limited to a total of 10 hours; Azsure Barton's variation dates from 2007. The performance opened with a brief silent clip of Graham dancing the role. Gerring's variation, for four performers, borrows some arm gestures from the excerpt, then takes off into sustained, athletic balances with the working leg dancing on its own in the air, and slow whirls with softly outstretched arms. It finally doesn't reveal a coherent development, however. Dorrance's dance uses the entire company, moving randomly at first, then working toward coherence. In one strong sequence, three men in the middle establish a pattern of rising and sinking in unison as the others walk around them. Dorrance uses music by bassist Jaco Pastorius, to which she has added her own electronically altered taps. The work thus becomes a ghostly tap number with no one onstage tapping, like Fred Astaire's phonograph recordings, for which he dubbed his taps in.

Barton's variation, a duet for Anne Souder and Xin Ying, is the only one of the three that feels fully realized, with mysterious music by George Crumb, for soprano accompanied by strummed piano strings. The dancers move in unison, establishing their relationship. They lower their bodies at the pelvis, performing shallow pliés, raise their bent legs right and left, barely rotating one leg in a miniature rond de jambe, and face...