DANCE REVIEW : The Power of Movement : Graham’s Troupe Forges New Style in S.D. Performances

Early in Martha Graham’s “Temptations of the Moon,” a dancer solos on a darkened stage while 16 corps members wait in the wings. Suddenly, Bela Bartok’s score surges into a dynamic, declarative statement--a passage so forceful that nearly any other choreographer, male or female, would have sent in the men at this point.

Not Graham. A few women are all she needs to embody such an assertion of power, and the choice reminds us how far ahead her work remains in pursuing an ideal of absolute equality.

Boasting (as always) some of the finest African-American, Asian and Latino dancers in America, the Graham company arrived at San Diego Civic Theatre on Friday for a two-night retrospective, part of its first national tour since Graham’s death last April.

Most companies suffer either upheaval or paralysis following the death of their founding choreographers, but the crises for the Graham institution came while she was alive. Now, if anything, the company looks well on the way to evolving a potent new style, one that downplays psychological complexity in Graham’s work and emphasizes movement design.

Immediately evident in the bold attacks and heightened contrasts of the corps dancing, this style springs in part from the specific interests and capabilities of young American dancers and also from the requirements of performing in enormous opera houses.

Instead of focusing on histrionics--and on the impossible task of matching Graham’s interpretive genius and star power as a performer--it relishes every twist and turn of Graham’s daring, devious imagination. In the shift, the lady who helped invent modern dance suddenly becomes a bona fide post -modernist, with all her meaning found in her movement and spatial choices.

Of course, the transition isn’t complete, and some company principals continue to emote more impressively than they dance. But the San Diego audiences obviously responded to the new look on Friday and Saturday: Whenever a piece seemed to depend on acting, it received the polite applause due a certified monument-of-culture. But when dancing ruled, inevitably the strongest and most sustained outbursts of enthusiasm greeted it.

Nothing, either night, surpassed the ovation for “Steps in the Street” from 1936, in which Graham contrasted the isolation of one woman with the geometric patterning and unison drive of 11 others. Essentially defined through spatial composition alone, the solo role (danced by Denise Vale) never had more complex or virtuosic steps than the corps dancing but nonetheless emerged as a symbol of the suffering outcast engulfed in fascist energy.

Starkly costumed in black on a bare black stage, “Steps in the Street” achieved a startling authenticity, one nearly matched by the performance of the trio “El Penitente,” from 1940. Here, in a passion play inspired by Southwestern ritual, Graham investigated the metaphysical implications of stagecraft and, especially, role-playing, with extraordinary delicacy.

Those who saw the recent, dutiful Baryshnikov-White Oak Dance Project performance might well have marveled at how easily this little work filled a big stage and especially at the wonders of spirit that Kenneth Topping conjured from his simplest actions as the Penitent. Not only did you never worry (as you did with Baryshnikov) that doing all the knee-runs might end his career, but Topping expressed the emotion of the Death Cart episode through every muscle in his back and arms--something way beyond Baryshnikov’s capacity as a modern dancer.

Topping also made the Revivalist’s final solo in “Appalachian Spring” a convulsive, whole-body admission of self-doubt, his fears linking up with those about to be explored by the Bride (Joyce Herring) in a more poignant, less upbeat finale than the company has sometimes offered.

In contrast, two major dance dramas misfired essentially because Christine Dakin conveyed emotion only with her face. Based on Greek mythology, both “Errand Into the Maze” (1947) and “Cave of the Heart” (1946) found Dakin cast in archetypal Graham roles--the fearful Ariadne in the former work, the vengeful Medea in the latter. Each time, she delivered carefully wrought but expressively neutral dancing: Graham’s legacy from her problematic later years as a performer.

If Dakin arguably represents a commitment to that burdensome heritage, Terese Capucilli looks like the wave of the future. Whether cast as the mercurial Crescent Moon in “Temptations of the Moon” (1986), as a troubled Eve in “Embattled Garden” (1958) or a parodistic replica of Graham herself in “Maple Leaf Rag” (1990) she seems to soak up the essence of the choreography and exude it from every pore.

Her face stays part of her arsenal, of course, but it never dominates those brilliant hands or that fabulous spine. In her performances, action is thought, emotion, all that exists--and someone in conflict (Eve, for example) shakes uncontrollably or violently collapses from within.

Even Capucilli can’t turn back the clock, can’t give us the Graham experience that existed when magnificent dancing actors flourished on stages a third this size. However, what she, Topping, some of the other principals and nearly the whole corps can do is bring Graham’s choreography to the dawn of the 21st Century as a series of audacious, inimitable movement events: a life’s work honed and refocused for many lifetimes to come.