Martha's Phantasmagoria

At 68, Martha Graham still has a horror of an indifferent crowd. "I'd rather," she says, "have them against me." Last week her modern dance troupe opened on Broadway for their annual two-week season. After the curtain rose on Phaedra, the first of two new works, there was not an indifferent eye in the house.

Phaedra is, says Graham candidly, "a phantasmagoria of desire." The dance tells the story of Phaedra (danced by Graham herself), who is cursed by Aphrodite with an unnatural lust for her stepson Hippolytus. The spectator is left in no doubt about the nature of her passion--Hippolytus is first seen as only a pair of spotlighted, near-naked loins. Frenzied when Hippolytus rejects her advances, she tells his father that the youth had raped her, and the dance's high point is the visionary enactment of this lie in all the vividness of Phaedra's inflamed imagination.

The dancers writhe in sinuous embraces, quiver with rage or horror, or flash through the remarkably flexible configurations characteristic of Graham. But sheer movement alone is not enough to trace Phaedra's tangled web of emotion. Too dependent on narrative for which it could not always find a language, Phaedra was consistently interesting, not consistently successful.

The other premiere, A Look at Lightning, was better dance and better theater, set to a rustlingly dissonant score by Egyptian Composer Halim El-Dabh.

Lightning arced hotly around the stage in the lithe body of a girl in a metallic leotard (Matt Turney), rousing loiterers into dances that were alternately elegant, calculating or frenzied. Sometimes serious, Lightning was also full of the ironic wit with which Graham occasionally likes to prick the dance world's pretensions. The girl's coolest, most contained movements, for instance, often prompted her partners to shatter the mood with explosive, calisthenic displays.

Aside from the indisputable fact that Martha Graham is not quite ready to retire to her knitting, the performances demonstrated that she has gathered perhaps the best company of modern dancers in the world. The 22 members of the troupe get together but once a year--for the two-week Graham season--yet they work in almost perfect harmony.

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