TV Reviews : Bravo Showcases 3 Martha Graham Works

The title of “Martha Graham in Japan” might lead you to expect a documentary on the Graham company’s 1989-90 Asian tour. In fact, we see Graham only in vintage stills and Japan not at all.

Instead, this 90-minute telecast on Bravo cable remains wholly absorbed in three dance dramas: “Errand Into the Maze,” “Acts of Light” and “The Rite of Spring.”

Scheduled for 4 and 10:30 p.m. today on “The Texaco Performing Arts Showcase,” the Graham program shows us how her company danced during the final year of her life. Though two of the works had been taped in Denmark just six years earlier and shown on PBS before being issued on VAI home video, the casting of the Bravo performance, where different, makes it preferable.

Unfortunately, the Japanese and Danish directors prove equally misguided in bringing Graham’s stage choreography to TV. Especially in “Rite of Spring” (the rarity on the telecast), Ki-ichiro Ito keeps cutting from a partial view of a single body to a long shot of the entire stage: disorienting in the extreme and ruinous to the perception of how Graham uses the whole body for dramatic statements.

Choreographed in 1984, “The Rite of Spring” uses Stravinsky’s score in a study of ritualized, communal brutality toward a sacrificial “Chosen One” (Christine Dakin). We’re told this sacrifice will ensure the community’s survival, but Graham’s focus stays on the grotesque victimization practiced by a male power structure.

“Errand Into the Maze” (1947) internalizes this theme by making the monstrous male figure that terrorizes a woman into a projection of her self-doubt. To music by Gian Carlo Menotti, Graham adapts the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur for Freudian and feminist purposes, creating a lead role that allows Terese Capucilli to showcase the expressive variety and detail of Graham technique.

Capucilli’s dancing also strengthens “Acts of Light” (1981), a three-part suite to music by Carl Nielsen in which Graham reworks in miniature key ideas from her earlier choreographies. The opening duet uses body-sculpture to celebrate human love. The central “Lament” is essentially a solo for a woman enveloped in stretch fabric. The group finale explores the body’s varied movement resources, building to a rapturous, engulfing virtuosity.

Steve Rooks, Maxine Sherman, Young-Ha Yoo and, especially, Kenneth Topping give fresh, authoritative performances in major roles in the program, with brief spoken introductions clarifying Graham’s approach to each work.