Martha Graham’s Cave of the Heart and Deaths and Entrances are each so strongly constructed that they are virtually dancer-proof. Nevertheless, it was good to see them danced with economy and conviction by the Graham company last week at the Rose Theater. Graham’s technique seemed as original as ever—and as powerful. The dancers spiraled and pitched and plunged, they scuttled and scurried and shuffled on their knees as well as their legs. And when upright, their legs extended fully into space, these legs were turned-in, part of Graham’s rebuke to balletic protocol and her insistence on the torso as the fulcrum of expressive movement.

Watching Graham’s repertory, one’s attention toggles between trying to relate movement to plotline and studying the steps for their own innate beauty and intricacy. Ultimately Graham is adamant about making her audience back off from trying to insist that things make “sense.” Still, Cave is more linear. It tells the Medea story intelligibly, whereas D/E freely partakes of Graham’s indebtedness to Japanese Noh drama’s fluent and perpetual passage between current, past and future tenses. The program notes inform us that D/E has something to do with the Brontë sisters. There are three adult women, who could be the three Brontës in adulthood. There is a possible representation of their stern parson father. There are three girlish figments, who might be the adult women’s recall of their youthful selves. But like so much of Graham’s work, D/E boils down to one woman’s attempt—here, the most prominent sister—to resolve internal conflicts as well as break through obstructive environment.

The Graham company’s return was really heralded earlier in the month by Paul Taylor, a Graham-alum. Taylor’s new Three Dubious Memories gave us three different perspectives on an embattled love triangle, the story seemingly retold by each material witness in turn. It’s more than a question of point-of-view, for the three different testimonies are impossible to reconcile, let alone corroborate or cross-reference. Taylor’s work frequently revisits Graham territory, but he always does it his way, and he likes to jumble up her rhetoric. In Three Dubious Memories, James Samson is called Choirmaster, and his role combines functions that Graham customarily assigned to different dancers. He is a monolithic center tent absorbing both Chorus—wrestling in Cave with Medea to prevent the inevitable—and protagonist looking-back Noh style. At the end of Taylor’s work, each side of the love triangle returns almost as penitent, like Graham’s Clytemnestra, seeking expiation in the underworld.

Dancer/choreographer Erick Hawkins, who was Graham’s first Jason to her Medea, as well as her lover at the time, complained that Graham in Cave eschewed the healing catharsis that was an essential element of Greek tragedy. This could have been a reflection of Graham’s own personality: She had something of a vengeful nature, and her relationship with Hawkins was tempestuous. This indeed may have made Cave too personal; like all the works she made for herself, it is all about Martha. At her best, however, she made the heroines she danced and created epically relevant. Indeed, her insistence that their particular drives and conflicts deserved center stage was an act of larger repercussions.

Cave dates from 1947 and D/E from 1943, years of ever-increasing absorption into the mainstream of Freudian thought. Kurt Weill’s musical Lady in the Dark opened on Broadway two years before D/E (in the Weill play, an editor-in-chief can’t decide what image to put on her cover or which man she wants to marry). Befitting its context, Lady in the Dark resolved itself in more conventional fashion than D/E: The editor united with her appropriate mate. Graham’s heroine cannot be entirely fulfilled either by The Dark Beloved or The Poetic Beloved. Both Broadway and the concert stage, however, shared implied or explicit rejection of society’s probably-self-serving investment in believing that women’s emotional and erotic drives were any less restless and ambivalent than men’s.

At this moment in time, Graham, who died in 1991 at the age of 96, remains as powerful a presence on the Manhattan dance calendar, and the collective dance imagination, as ever.

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