COMMENTARY : Martha Graham Was a Role Model : Dance: She pioneered new parts and ideas for women long before feminism. The dance company she founded performs in San Diego Friday and Saturday.

After the lights went down at a dance concert in North Carolina one night in the mid-’70s, an unusual old woman was seated next to me.

She had a penetrating musty presence, with overtones of curried cuisine. She was eccentric, but not in the dowdy Southern way. Her pulled-back hair and exaggerated make-up, her smallness, the chin-up posture and the way she moved her hands, all convinced me she was a former dancer.

A young man hurried to her before the curtain went up. He mumbled something, touched her arm and rushed off. Someone else came over and bowed. She nodded regally. This was a former famous dancer, I realized. Martha Graham.

The famous dancer, choreographer, poet, dramatist, ultra-expressionist, mystic, and 20th-Century revolutionary rendered me speechless. Making small talk with Martha Graham is rather like asking Shakespeare the time, dance critic Clive Barnes once quipped.

Graham watched the stage for a while and left in the dark before intermission. None of her supereminent aura glittered onto to me that night to change my life. But I had been in the presence of a powerful female, an artist whose accomplishment, persona and reputation were self-made. She and her art were her own invention, not a Hollywood fiction managed and directed by the male establishment.

Apart from her formidable influence in the dance world from the 1920s until her death in 1991 at age 96, and besides her legacy of 180 dances made in her own dance language, Graham was a testament to the possibility of greatness for women in the arts, for independent women with vision and artistic integrity.

Graham was not interested in being a model for aspiring female artists, however, even in the midst of the women’s movement, when I encountered her.

Moreover, her numerous dances that featured major female figures, such as Medea, Jocasta, Phaedra, Judith, Joan of Arc, Emily Dickinson and others, were not intended to send a feminist message to the world, but rather to match the mythic proportion of her own talent and ideas.

According to Yuriko (who goes by only her first name), a former company dancer and now, at 72, associate artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Graham merely did what she had to, to be able to dance what she wanted to.

“It was always necessary for her to do what was right for her and not do what society thought was right,” Yuriko commented last week in a phone interview before heading to San Diego. The company is performing two retrospective concerts at the Civic Theater, tonight and Saturday, presented by the San Diego Foundation for the Performing Arts.

“Martha wanted to be very truthful to herself as a dancer,” Yuriko said. “Choreography was not her main focus, dancing was. But to be able to do what she believed in, she had to choreograph so that she could perform.”

Graham danced on stage into the 1960s, but her most evocative dancing happened decades earlier, in the 1930s and 1940s, when her choreography was especially intense, shocking and transformative. Of the eight dances to be performed here in two different programs, five are revered works from this peak era.

Graham made dances that rejected the gravity-defying impetus of ballet, and consequently developed a “strong belief in the human body expressing human feelings,” Yuriko explained. “This is where her so-called contraction and release idea came from, because the body cannot function without contraction and release--breathing, the lungs, digestive system, childbirth, and so on.” This idea was the foundation for the famous Graham technique.

Dance that arose from a body process, expressing, as Graham desired, “deep matters of the heart,” and presented in a non-linear dramatic way was an important departure from the choreographic ideals of Graham’s male colleagues and predecessors.

Her new approach was based in the feminine principle, a fact that reflected her interest in Jung’s psychological writings. But essentially, she was just being Martha, doing what she had to do, as Yuriko put it. “She was just all human emotion.”

Being Martha meant interpreting, from a woman’s perspective, some themes that had traditionally been interpreted by men. Three dances on tonight’s program are good examples.

Her popular “Appalachian Spring” (1944) ennobles the women pioneers of early America as much as the men, and in the brilliantly conceived character of the Revivalist, puts fear of sexuality squarely in the male realm.

“Errand in the Maze” (1947) has a female--instead of Theseus of Greek myth--descending into the labyrinth to battle the monster. “Embattled Garden” (1958), includes Lilith in the Adam and Eve story. (Lilith refused to lie with Adam, according to Hebrew legend.) One critic commented with humor that his dance may have helped spark the sexual revolution.

Yuriko was the original Eve in “Embattled Garden,” which she said was created for her and Bertram Ross because Graham loved the way they danced together.

Yuriko, who is Japanese American, said she was the first minority in the company when Graham hired her.

“This was unusual at that time,” she said, adding with emphasis, “The war (World War II) was still on. It was 1944.

“When I got the permit to come out of Gila River Relocation Center (internment camp) in Arizona to relocate myself in New York, my first stop was the Martha Graham Company.” The California-born dancer had seen Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and other modern dance innovators perform in Los Angeles before the war.

Yuriko believes Graham brought her into the company out of a love for Japanese culture and Zen philosophy, and not necessarily to rectify political wrongs or inequities.

“She was the first to have blacks in her company,” Yuriko added. “But she didn’t do it for that purpose. It was right for her at that time and had nothing to do with revolution or with teaching society that this is the way it should be. She just lived it.”

Having a mix of cultures among her dancers had nothing to do with Graham being decorative either, Yuriko said. In choosing her dancers, “she went for what she needed--the body, personality, and temperament.”

Without Graham to choose and coach her dancers, the company will likely evolve away from a pure-Graham focus. In the meantime, Yuriko sits through hours of classes and studio rehearsals, instructing and offering insights into the characters’ emotions, much as Graham did.

“Toward the end of her career, Martha was not able to show the movement. . . . When I think about it, it was much easier for dancers of my time, because she was capable of showing us in movement what she wanted. So we just reproduced it.”

Yuriko said she thinks the current company of 25 dances “better than ever.” She attributes this to their hunger for details, the highlights and nuances in Graham dances that enhance the technique.

Without Graham present to direct and explain her philosophy, it is questionable whether company dancers of the future will understand the highly designed, aphoristic Graham style. (Typical Graham: “Dance is about the regality of order, the tyranny of time, and the blood memory of humanity.” “Blood Memory,” by the way, is the title of her recently published autobiography.)

Or whether they will fully grasp Graham’s exploration into ritual, deep primal drives, aspects of the goddess, or the mythological female characters, like Medea in “Cave of the Heart” (1946), who “explodes” to the tips of a dancer’s hair.

“Cave of the Heart” is on Saturday’s program along with “El Penitente” (1940), a 10-part drama of purification through penance among a flagellant sect in the American Southwest.

These potent dances are balanced in mood by two atypically lyrical efforts, created when she was in her 90s. “Temptations of the Moon” (1986) is a simple, idyllic mating dance, set to Hungarian folk tunes orchestrated by Bela Bartok. “Maple Leaf Rag” (1991), her last completed work, takes bemused swipes at her own notorious narcissism.

“It’s a delightful piece, “ Yuriko said. “She pokes fun of her technique, at all the human aspects. You talk about man and woman--it’s all there.”

Dance writer Margaret Lloyd said Graham dances never leave you where they found you. She offered this advice in 1949:

“The best way to get to the heart of Martha Graham’s dance is to get in direct line of communication and don’t let words get in your eyes. Lean back, and let the Theater of Martha Graham take its course.”

* Martha Graham Dance Company perform s at the Civic Theatre, 202 C St., today and Saturday at 8 p . m. Tonight’s program: “Embattled Garden,” “Steps in the Street” (1936), “Errand into the Maze,” and “Appalachian Spring.” Saturday program: “Temptations of the Moon,” “El Penitente,” “Cave of the Heart,” and “Maple Leaf Rag.” Tickets, from $10 to $35, are available at the Civic Theatre Box Office 236-6510 or by calling TicketMaster.