DANCE REVIEW : Invasion of an Icon : Martha Graham and Co. introduces the modern idiom to Orange County in a pair of uneven performances.

In the beginning, there was Martha Graham.

She was a force of nature, marvelously cantankerous and wondrously productive, from the start. She has been a seminal influence on dance and dancers for more than seven decades. As countless canny observers, as well as her own savvy publicists, have constantly pointed out, she is to her art what Stravinsky is to music and Picasso to painting.

She inspires hyperbole even above and beyond the call. “Not to have seen ‘Night Journey,”’ gushed the critic of the New York Times 13 years ago, “is not to have lived.”

At 96, Graham remains--or at least seems to remain--an active, provocative participant in the vast expressive sphere she personally created. She has become an icon. She is a genius in the realm of abstraction and compression, a high priestess of kinetic Angst .

She also happens to be glamorous. Her board of directors includes Mrs. Gerald R. Ford (a former student), Liza Minnelli, Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor. During the curtain calls after her most recent premiere, a floral tribute was delivered to her by no less a terpsichorean than Madonna.

Call Graham a living legend if you must. But make it a feisty, probing, illuminating and occasionally fallible legend.

Whatever the label, Graham represents an indomitable, revolutionary spirit. She invented a language of movement and symbols that has been universally imitated and, perhaps most flattering, wickedly and deliciously parodied. Even now, she continues to add to the vocabulary.

Until this weekend, the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1986, had shown no interest in modern dance. Under the circumstances, it seemed particularly fitting that the Graham company--which no longer visits California as often as one would wish--should be the first of its kind to enjoy a solo engagement in the hallowed hall of Costa Mesa. The old pioneer is still opening doors.

Although Graham did not personally accompany her dedicated flock on this occasion, she sent an eight-piece repertory sampler that told an appreciative audience all it had to know. Well, nearly all.

The company has, of course, changed rather drastically in focus and character with the passage of time. Although today’s barefoot dancers are obviously proficient in the vaunted Graham technique, one almost expects them to don toe shoes and tutus on command. They seem able to do anything, and to make it look easy as well as poetic.

But--a big but--they seem a little bland. In the old days, Graham ensembles projected more weight, more fervor, more personality. They worked harder. They could be a bit rough, but they had more distinctive faces.

Many crucial nuances got lost in the vast open spaces of Segerstrom Hall on Friday and Saturday. The mechanical horror of taped orchestral accompaniment, moreover, often reduced potentially spontaneous gestures to rote exercises. Nor was aesthetic appreciation enhanced by a PA system that blasted even the most delicate music as if it were mauled Mascagni in the bloated climax of “The Godfather Part III.” Even so, one could savor the unique compulsion of Graham’s voice in telling combinations and permutations. She still offers object lessons in communicative focus.

She still finds vitality in the depiction of psychological desolation, sexual agony and inner turmoil. She still surprises, even mesmerizes, the viewer with suddenly distorted extensions, impossibly angular balances and crazed rhythmic contortions. She still makes the primitive look elemental, still develops terminal essays in tension and release.

The first of the two successive programs opened literally with Graham’s voice. “Oh, Louis,” her basso purred via a recording, “play me the ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’ ”

She used to say that, we are told, to her musical guru, Louis Horst, when the muse of inspiration didn’t happen to be cooperative. “Maple Leaf Rag,” Graham’s 180th work, turns out to be a mildly clever diversion for a nostalgic choreographic angel. To the funky strains of Scott Joplin, she makes her dancers (clad in chic Calvin Klein unitards) perch, rock, bounce and spring on a long and narrow joggling board that impersonates a barre.

Terese Capucilli, the current Graham surrogate, prances most pertly, often in harmonious tandem with the muscular Floyd Flynn. The corps executes some neat acrobatic maneuvers, interspersed with cute mock quotations from ancient Graham classics. Maxine Sherman keeps punctuating the non-narrative by crossing the stage with circular flourishes of a voluminous gray skirt. Chris Landriau pounds out the rags at an onstage piano with elan.

The innocence is light in weight, fuzzy in exposition, but mildly beguiling. Economy is the saving grace here.

Contrary to her reputation, Graham doesn’t deserve to be called “mirthless Martha.” Remember “The Owl and the Pussycat”?

The other major novelty on the agenda was “Steps in the Street,” which dominated the program Saturday night. Created in 1936 and reconstructed from a film, it is a bleak but poignant study of political alienation. One woman in black--the magnetic Laura Jiminez--is shadowed and eventually defeated by a corps of 11 implacable counterforces.

The linear definitions are stiff. The rhythmic development becomes monumental with variation and repetition. The cumulative compulsion is terrifying.

Wallingford Riegger’s original score, alas, has been lost. Its replacement, the finale of “New Dance,” Opus 18B, sounds too lush for the lean choreography.

Similar musical problems beset “Deep Song,” a moving evocation of the Spanish civil war performed in the Friday bill. This long-forgotten solo was reconstructed by Capucilli from Barbara Morgan’s photographs (no such credit appears in the program). When the music provided by Henry Cowell in 1937 could not be found, someone decided to substitute the same composer’s “Sinister Resonance.” Given the bitter, ultimately tragic resonance of the choreography, the score hardly seemed sinister enough.

Joyce Hering rose and fell, twisted her long torso in stoic pain, and manipulated her flowing skirt with florid brio that offset her heroic determination. The misery was finely muted.

Otherwise, the two programs offered Graham business more or less as usual.

“Appalachian Spring,” the signature piece that opened the festivities, looked correct yet pallid, as if the passions had been freeze-dried. Christine Dakin (the Bride) and Maxine Sherman (the Pioneering Woman) struck knowing poses. Donlin Foreman (the valiant Husbandman) and Lyndon Branaugh (the fiery Revivalist) seemed almost interchangeable in roles once illuminated by the likes of Merce Cunningham and Erick Hawkins--not to mention Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev.

“Temptations of the Moon” (1986), billed as a “springtime romp” for celestial characters, teetered uncomfortably on the brink of caricature. The in-joke at the end, when the participants literally count out their steps, suggested a fatuous afterthought. Nevertheless, the dancers, led by the willowy Thea Nerissa Barnes and the ever-urgent Steve Rooks, looked fine in their Halston finery and responded to the sonic cues of Bela Bartok with gusto.

The Saturday program opened with a properly lyrical performance of the now inevitable “Diversion of Angels” (1948). Christine Dakin was the timid, enigmatic protagonist, attentively seconded by Denise Vale in “Herodiade” (1944). This chronically introspective vehicle does not wear its years very gracefully, Isamu Noguchi’s sparse set notwithstanding.

“Acts of Light” (1981), the grand finale, offered three keynotes of late-Graham expressionism. An overtly erotic, wildly athletic, daringly tangled duet by Maxine Sherman and Kenneth Topping gave way to a searing lamentation by Capucilli, followed by a climactic celebration to the sun by the impeccably stylized masses.

The cliched romanticism of Carl Nielsen’s music clashed, as always, with the austere rituals on the stage. The friction cannot be accidental.

Nothing is accidental with Martha Graham.