Keeper of the Flame : Bonnie Oda Homsey has set out to reconstruct work by the pioneering modern choreographers. At the same time, she is rekindling her own creative fires after years on the sidelines of dance.

Sometimes, as Joni Mitchell once wrote, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Or, as in Bonnie Oda Homsey’s case, until it’s been lying around ignored for a decade or more.

A former lead dancer with the Martha Graham company, Homsey has worked with some of the premier figures of ballet and modern dance. But until last year, she let those experiences lie dormant while she raised kids and pursued other ventures.

Then it dawned on her. “The realization, in retrospect, of who these masters were that I had had the opportunity to work with was truly amazing,” says Homsey, seated in her Spanish-style Los Feliz home. “I had just tucked it away in a drawer.”

Last April, Homsey and the company she founded and then let lapse more than a decade ago, the Los Angeles Dance Theatre, picked up where she left off. They presented a bill of reconstructed solos by pioneering modern dance choreographers of the 1930s and ‘40s in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Picasso and the Weeping Women” exhibition.

The evening featured Homsey, Los Angeles Dance Theatre co-director Janet Eilber, former Jose Limon soloist Risa Steinberg and Cal State Long Beach dance faculty member Michele Simmons in works by Graham, Pearl Primus, Isadora Duncan, Anna Sokolow and others. Significantly, it was also the first time the Graham company allowed the modern dance legend’s works to share a bill with those of other choreographers.

Homsey and her collaborators realized they had found a mission.

“If these choreographers’ work isn’t kept alive, we lose the legacy,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons why I came back to dance after a 12-year absence.”

The project continues Friday and Saturday when the Los Angeles Dance Theatre presents “The Indomitable Spirit of Woman” at the Luckman Complex at Cal State L.A. The program includes works by Duncan, Graham, Agnes de Mille, Jane Dudley, Eve Gentry, Eleanor Campbell King, Doris Humphrey and Helen Tamiris and will be danced by Homsey, Eilber, Steinberg and guest dancer Mary Anne Santos Newhall.

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You can see the once and future dancer in Homsey. A petite 43-year-old who looks a decade younger, she is of Japanese ancestry and was born and raised in Hawaii, where she began her dance studies at her mother’s ballet studio. She went on to join the University of Hawaii Dance Theater before being accepted into the Juilliard School in 1969.

At Juilliard, Homsey fell under the tutelage of Antony Tudor, the English choreographer best known for his psychological dramatic ballets.

“Tudor set me on this path in which I had to (consider) how one uses dance as a tool of communication,” Homsey says.

His teaching methods were sometimes unorthodox, she recalls: “He’d come walking around the class, and one day he stopped right next to me. He didn’t even look at me. He just said, ‘When was the last time you were in Central Park?’ ”

Homsey responded that she didn’t have time for such outings, but Tudor disagreed. “He said, ‘No, you’re going to Central Park and you’re going to actually sit down and watch people,’ ” she says.

His point was that there’s more to dance than movement. “He was trying to teach us that an arabesque is not an arabesque, (it is also) why you are doing the arabesque and what is it supposed to be saying,” Homsey says.

In a similar way, Tudor also pointed Homsey toward her destiny in modern dance: “In one class, he came up to me and said, ‘Have you seen the Alvin Ailey company?’ Then he just walked off.”

It was a traumatic moment for Homsey.

“I felt like bursting into tears because I knew him and he never said anything without a purpose,” she says. “He was telling me that I had to rethink what I wanted.”

Almost immediately she began to shift her emphasis from ballet to modern dance--a transition that may have come none too soon.

“I was fighting so hard to make my body mold to the classical look, and it was getting painful,” Homsey says. “If I had continued that way I would probably have injured myself so badly that I would never dance again.”

Her stature and center of gravity just didn’t conform to the ballet’s ideal.

“In ballet your weight is always lifted, whereas modern dance uses gravity and the pull between two points in a much more horizontal fashion,” she says.

The switch entailed “rethinking a whole physicality in terms of body weight,” Homsey says. “But with that came a sense of freedom, because that’s what my body wanted and was comfortable with.”

I n 1973, after graduating from Juilliard, Homsey joined the Gra ham company. Married that same year, she also found herself and her new husband in a long-distance relationship for the next six years. He was in law school in Northern California and then took a job in Los Angeles.

The separation was difficult, but the time was pivotal for Homsey’s creative development.

“It took a while to understand Graham because Graham is not just (about) physical shape,” she says. “What she showed me was a different kind of discipline of the mind and a release of both the light and dark sides of the heart.”

As a vehicle for Homsey, Graham chose to revive her dance drama “Phaedra” (1962).

“The subject is not particularly pleasant,” Homsey says. “There’s incest and betrayal, so it’s not a light and pretty ballet. (Graham) felt that there was something in me that had not been revealed yet and that this piece would force me to go to places as an artist that were uncomfortable.

“She certainly kept me off balance, but that’s what she did to all of us as artists. It was in that state of ‘off balance’ that you found your mettle.”

In 1978-79, Homsey took a year’s leave of absence from the New York dance world and joined her husband in Los Angeles. It was then that she founded the Los Angeles Dance Theatre.

“The concept originally was a repertory dance company,” she says. “In the first year we reconstructed Ruth St. Denis’ ‘Salome’ and also works by Lester Horton, who had the first Los Angeles Dance Theatre.”

In the following year, however, Homsey began to lose faith in her ability to guide the 15-member troupe. “I just didn’t have enough experience administratively,” she says.

She rejoined the Graham company for one final season in 1981, then returned to L.A. for good. But the Los Angeles Dance Theatre didn’t get back on its feet.

“After I came back I realized that I just wasn’t cut out to be an artistic director, so I let the company lapse in 1982,” Homsey says. “I did a lot of panels, had some babies and also did a lot of theater.”

Homsey spent the 1980s pursuing an acting career (with small roles in TV, film and local theater) and raising her three children, but dance was always in the back of her mind. She kept up with classes and her dancer friends, and every once in a while, the idea cropped up of reviving her company. But, until last year and the Picasso show, it never quite took off.

The next chapter in Homsey’s dance career really began with her friend Janet Eilber. The two had been roommates at Juilliard, and Eilber was a fellow former Graham dancer. Through a contact at LACMA, Eilber had learned that the museum was looking for programs to go with the Picasso show.

Both she and Homsey thought the pairing seemed like a natural fit: “The women who were choreographing in that era were the revolutionaries who were putting emotion into dance, doing what Picasso was doing visually,” Eilber says.

It was “terrifying,” Homsey says, to be back onstage again. But the LACMA program went over well. Times’ dance writer Lewis Segal called the bill “remarkable” and noted that Homsey gave “performances of great immediacy and detail” in Jane Dudley’s “Cante Flamenco” (1944) and Eleanor King’s “Road to Hell: Wrath” (1941).

It went so well, in fact, that Homsey and Eilber immediately started planning for this week’s sequel. (They also have another show in the works, “Trailblazers: Dancers of Change,” which will pay tribute to Agnes de Mille and Donald McKayle as part of the “Summer Nights” series at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in September.)

Moreover, the continuing project has proved to be a profound source of inspiration for the two longtime friends.

“Choreographers in that day were the ones who were determined to make a statement with dance,” Eilber says. “They were saying, ‘We’re not going to be girls in a row with feather boas anymore.’ ”

That commitment also applied to the choreographers’ offstage lives.

“Women who were choreographing were also well-read,” Homsey says. “They could pick up a score and get in there with the musicians. They were speaking from a strong (knowledge of) what was going on politically. There’s a fervor that goes beyond just dance.”

It’s a timeless--and timely--lesson, the dancers say.

“ ‘The Indomitable Spirit of Woman’ will hopefully continue this exploration of the past in order to help guide us in the future,” Homsey says.

“American modern dance is a fairly young art,” she continues, “so it’s important to have those connections made to the younger generation.”

Adds Eilber: “It’s time to do this. Part of what’s passed on is that fervor that those ladies had, but these choreographers are passing now and there won’t be a way to reconstruct these works.”

“The happiness,” Homsey agrees, “is in the research, in watching the tapes of these women performing over and over again.

“I feel that I’m finally able to bring together diverse aspects of my life in order to give back to the dance what the dance gave me when I was young.”*

* “The Indomitable Spirit of Woman,” Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m., $18-$22. (213) 466-1767.