Athleta Dei

"I wish," Martha Graham once told an intense admirer, "that instead of trying to read meaning into every kick of my foot, you'd judge me the way a Seattle sportswriter did. He compared me with the high hurdlers and said I had them all licked." Year after year, as both choreographer and dancer, Martha Graham has continued to jump higher and more daringly than anybody else in the dance world. Last week she was back in Manhattan, moving audiences with her typical mixture of exuberant wit and vibrant theatrical presence.

Gaunt Looks. The 21-member Graham troupe presented a selection of exotically titled Graham dances that are already becoming modern classics--Seraphic Dialogue, Embattled Garden, Diversion of Angels--plus two new works. Acrobats of God and Alcestis. Choreographer Graham took the title of Acrobats from the "athletae Dei,'' the early Church Fathers who subjected themselves to various self-imposed disciplines. Their modern counterparts, suggests Graham ironically, are the self-sacrificing devotees of the dance.

On an almost bare stage (set by Isamu Noguchi) dominated by a fantastical red classroom "barre'' that resembled a misshapen ironing board, five sets of dancers twisted in a brilliant but broadly exaggerated spoof of technical dance movements to Carlos Surinach's wittily parodistic score. At one point, three girls stood on the wide barre casually doing deep knee bends while three male members of the company lying beneath them mirrored the action in reverse. Choreographer Graham's part in the whole thing consisted of sulking behind a screen, emerging occasionally to freeze the whip-flicking ballet master with gaunt looks.

Alcestis was one more contribution to the Graham cycle of Greek drama that already includes Night Journey (Jocasta), Cave of the Heart (Medea) and Clytemnestra. Around the central props--a massive, grey stone wheel and tower--the 27-minute work unfolded in episodes of tortured simplicity. Alcestis. danced by Martha Graham, writhes on a ramp with King Admetus in a series of languorous embraces; Thanatos (Death) struggles with Alcestis in a sinuously elegant dance; the hand of Hercules, bearing a single white lily, is suddenly thrust from the center of the wheel, symbolizing the rebirth of life.

Fierce Impressions. Although the audience took to Alcestis, Choreographer Graham was characteristically dissatisfied: she had not had enough rehearsal time to make movement and symbolism jell. At 66, tiny (5 ft. 3 in.) Martha Graham still works a ten-hour day. coaxing and bullying her dancers into shape. At her School of Contemporary Dance on Manhattan's East 63rd St., she has eight teachers to help her with some 200 pupils, but it is Graham's own fiercely compelling personality that produces the most lasting impressions. Often she will break off an exercise, recalls a former student, "to quote a poet or philosopher if she thinks it will make us leap higher." Although she now lives in a terrace apartment on Manhattan's East Side, Graham maintains the Spartan life her arduous art calls for: no drinking, daily workouts on the barre. And she is as uncompromising as ever in her approach to her audience. "I want to make people feel intensely alive," says she. "I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.''

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