What becomes a legend most, especially when the legend in question is a towering figure in American dance and no longer inhabiting the body — and mind — that created countless danced personae, including a hopeful pioneer bride in Appalachian Spring, a terrified Ariadne in Errand into the Maze, the trapped Bronte sisters in Deaths and Entrances, the betrayed, murderous Medea in Cave of the Heart, or the real, very real reclusive poet Emily Dickinson in Letter to the World?

I’d venture to say a heartfelt, technically accurate performance of the work, and one that trusts the audience to recognize what they’re seeing. Errand into the Maze certainly fit that bill when Graham Company dancers Xin Ying and Ethan Palma danced it last month at Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The piece is Graham’s woman-centered version of the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, and Xin Ying’s agitated skittering steps in reaction to Palma’s looming, stalking menace carried the full weight of a piece that Graham said many times was about the conquering of fear. 

Missing from the  performance were Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s set and the horned headdress for the Minotaur, a creature of Greek myth who has a man’s body and the head, tail, and hooves of a bull. Instead, Palma danced with what looked like a flesh-toned stocking mask pulled over his head, making him resemble one of the characters in the television series The Walking Dead rather than the mythic Minotaur.

Because many of Noguchi’s sets and costumes were seriously damaged  by Hurricane Sandy in 2021, the company has had to make do with substitutes such as this one, or omit them entirely from the dances, a crying pity since Graham and Noguchi were more often than not two minds with but a single thought when it came to what a ballet (yes, that’s the term she used) would look like.

The show opened  with Suite from Appalachian Spring, excerpts from what Graham biographer Deborah Jowitt has called the choreographer’s best-known and best-loved work, arranged by Graham company artistic director Janet Eilber. With a score by Aaron Copland, sets by Noguchi, and costumes designed by  Graham, Appalachian Spring premiered in 1944, during the Second World War, at a time when American artists of every discipline were creating what we now refer to  somewhat patronizingly as Americana.  The great critic Edwin Denby reviewed it in its first season thus:  

“[It]  has a mysterious coolness and freshness, and it is no glorification by condescending city folk of our rude and simple past; it is, despite occasional awkwardness, a credible and astonishing evocation of that real time and place. To show us our country ancestors and our inherited mores as real is a feat of genius no one else who has touched the pioneer subject in ballet has been able to accomplish.”

While Denby doesn’t name those ballets, he undoubtedly had Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid and Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo in mind — both of them, incidentally, set to music by Copland.

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There was no mystery, let alone coolness and freshness, to be seen in the Suite from Appalachian Spring, although the members of the cast did remarkably well given the truncated choreography and limited set. Granted,  these excerpts were never advertised as the complete work, but they weren’t promoted as the Reader’s Digest version of an American classic, either.

The performance began with Eilber standing in front of the closed curtain, stage right, a script in hand, from which she read to us from Graham’s correspondence with Copland, in part to inform us of the choreographer’s process, and also to familiarize us with Graham’s place in the pantheon of American dance. 

Since White Bird has brought the Graham company to this city at least three times, maybe four, in the 28 years of the presenter’s existence, and before that the troupe — founded 99 years ago, in 1926 — performed at what was then the Civic Auditorium on various tours, I think it’s safe to assume that a substantial portion of the audience already had that information and was there to see the work. 

In addition, my companion for the evening, a member of the dance community, was one of a number of audience members who had learned Graham technique in summer workshops at Reed College. Does Eilber, a gorgeous dancer and well-known interpreter of Graham’s work, and her anointed successor as director of the company, and one of the people who unquestionably saved it from collapsing several years after Graham’s death, think that because we’re 3,000 miles away from the self-designated dance capitol of the world we need to have Appalachian Spring, a great example of American art, EXPLAINED?  

Admittedly, some explanation of why the character of the Pioneer Woman was removed from the cast, and the sexually suggestive choreography for the Preacher and his four young women followers was toned down — here, the followers looked as if they’d danced right out of the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers — would have been welcome. But that was omitted from what amounted to a curtain-raising lecture demonstration. 

The dancers did the best they could with what they were given; I was disappointed in Antonio Leone’s performance as the Preacher (originally the Evangelist), a role originated by a young Merce Cunningham, whose restrained jumps made him look more like an insurance salesman than a savior of souls. The sexual undertones of the original choreography for the Preacher and the followers have been erased, a disservice to Graham, who once commented that for “such revivalists it was often 99 percent sex and one percent Christianity.”  Appalachian Spring in its complete form is a many-layered piece. As a suite, it leaves a dry, bitter, medicinal taste.

Of the two contemporary works, commissioned by the Graham Company to attract younger audiences and show Graham’s influence on the current generation of choreographers, Jamar Roberts’ We the People was the more engaging and artistically successful. Set to an intensely danceable score by Rhiannon Giddens, We the People moved swiftly, and thematically bore some relationship to the spirit of Appalachian Spring, with movement references to American history and culture, some of them painful: There are a couple of brief sequences that are clearly about police brutality toward Black men, one of them a stomach-churning vignette that made the voice of Rodney King calling for his mamma ring in my ears. 

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If I saw much more of the influence of Alvin Ailey than Graham, that’s understandable: Roberts danced with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre for many years, and was resident choreographer there from 2019 to 2022. In a program note, Roberts states,  “Against the backdrop of traditional American music, We the People hopes to serve as a reminder that the power for collective change belongs to the people.” Something to think about these days, along with Martha Graham’s 1930s grieving solo Lamentation.

Cave, Israeli choreographer Hofesh Schechter”s collaborative effort with the dancers, which premiered in 2022, concluded the program, and it took a very long time to do it. There is a profound difference between dancing that you watch — theatrical art, if you will — and dancing that you do; and while the dancers were obviously having a whale of a good time on stage, I found myself deeply, profoundly bored.

The piece takes its title from Graham’s masterpiece Cave of the Heart, in which Graham as Medea vomited her own entrails, represented by Noguchi as a red fabric rope. Cave has nothing, zip, nada to do with Graham; why pretend that it does?

Please, artistic directors everywhere, show a little trust in the audience. Take a leaf from the book of the late Arthur Mitchell, founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem: “If it’s good, the audience will like it,” he said to me years ago.