Entertainment

Graham it all! Smart tribute

It’s hard work keeping a legendary choreographer’s spirit alive. Martha Graham’s company has taken a daring, postmodern approach — only half the dances on Tuesday’s opening night of the company’s New York season were hers. The other half were works about her artistry. It seemed as if the company was taking apart her legacy and reassembling it from a different perspective.

Classic Graham holds up. “Night Journey,” a 1947 retelling of the Oedipus legend from his mother Jocasta’s point of view, is one of her best. It’s a mythic story with a larger-than-life heroine set among Isamu Noguchi’s evocative, primitive sculptures.

Graham compresses time; the tragedy has already occurred when the curtain rises. The Joyce’s stage compresses space. The nine dancers seem to crowd it, and that concentrates the drama. The corps gasps and shudders as the dancers move around in a tight knot.

Katherine Crockett gave a performance worthy of Jocasta, a woman trapped by a passion for a man she didn’t realize was her own son. She’s imposing, and when she cradled Orpheus (the handsome and wiry Tadej Brdnik), she seemed to dwarf him.

Graham’s work was surrounded by works about Graham. An opening film montage by Peter Sparling, “Beautiful Captives,” links Graham’s psychological works — the “inner landscape” that gives the evening its title — to Hollywood, and such stars as Bette Davis in “Now, Voyager.”

Other choreographers have their say as well. In “Lamentation Variations,” they riff on Graham’s iconic 1930 solo, “Lamentation.” First we see parts of a silent film of her performance, and then three contemporary responses. All are stronger for their pungent brevity.

Aszure Barton doubles the solo into a tense duet that turns the lamentation into a voyage in darkness. Renowned Graham impersonator Richard Move concentrates on the drama. Crockett, her hair flowing free, progresses slowly across the front of the stage, suspended in a honey-colored glow.

Lar Lubovitch’s equally brief variation uses the whole company. In it, a couple sits on a bench, the man cradling and lifting the woman. In front of them is the corps, all dressed in Graham’s signature stretchy fabric tube. By the end, the dancers have all shrugged off their cloth prisons. A lamentation, perhaps, but with the hope of comfort.

This program repeats tomorrow and Sunday evenings, in rotation with two other bills.