Martha Graham as celestial blaze, supreme, severe, and unknowable: this was the story. ![]() As the New Yorker’s Joan Acocella writes in her engrossing 2001 account of the affair, “With the flame gone, what was the need of altar and priests? Graham said repeatedly that it didn’t matter if her works survived her, and some see her will as proof that she meant this.” Perhaps, as some elder critics insisted, I was simply born too late. Everything about the woman was epic why not the will to destruction? I couldn’t fathom what then seemed an entirely dark drive, any more than I could adequately absorb the roiling, psychosexual productions the troupe presented upon resuming performances. I remember being especially struck by how Graham’s final act was received, and what that reception revealed of the Graham mystique: regardless of whether they loved or were indifferent to her art, big swaths of the dance world believed that the choreographer anointed Protas not in an end-of-life confusion but fully understanding the move would spell disaster for those who had dedicated their lives to maintaining her work. ![]() I was a naive college graduate, new to New York, and the outsize drama was beyond me. Only in 2002, after a ruinous series of events had shuttered the entire organization, did the troupe win the rights to most of Graham’s repertory. The controversial heir laid claim to the Graham repertory-a body of work foundational to modern dance, not to mention the Martha Graham Dance Company’s reason for being. Graham had died in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, leaving her estate to Ron Protas, a man decades her junior who had become her close companion late in her tumultuous life. WHEN I BEGAN WRITING ABOUT DANCE in the early 2000s, the Martha Graham Dance Company was only just staggering out of a horrifying limbo.
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