Coming Off the Bench

Janet Eilber walks stiffly up to the stage at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress. She is tall and long-legged, her hair pulled high into a swingy ponytail, and, at 48, her dancer’s body remains lithe and youthful. But a chronically sore hip, ground down from the high kicks, severe angular movements and sudden jolts of her years as a Martha Graham principal, is having its revenge.

She is here to coach a young dancer from the Martha Graham Dance Company in a performance of “Frontier” (1935), a piece Graham reconstructed for Eilber in 1975. The session is being filmed for the library’s Martha Graham Archive, a several-million-dollar project that aims to document the major works and singular technique of one of the most influential choreographers of the last century.

The younger dancer begins to interpret a phrase from the piece, a tribute to the pioneer woman. Eilber half-mimics her, shifts from hip to hip, all traces of pain momentarily vanished.

“What you have to carve out for the audience is a horizon,” she tells the dancer, hands making a fluid sweep. “Try to see the sun before it comes up,” she continues, and puts a hand to her brow, searching some imagined plain.

The dancer tries it again. “Good! Good girl,” Eilber calls out. “I can remember consciously trying to relax my leg during that part,” she continues, channeling the memory. Then she takes a few moments to riff about the subtext of the dance, the undercurrent of emotion that runs through Graham’s work.

“You’re wiping your heart across the sky,” she says. “All the extremities come after.”

A week from now, Eilber will be back in Los Angeles, where she has lived for the last 15 years, and she’ll be facing hip surgery so that she might dance again. The last time that was possible was in 1997, when she took this same stage to perform in Graham’s “Appalachian Spring,” a role she had danced many years before.

“Pretty much 25 years of my life is in that character now,” she says later in a nearby coffeehouse. “That’s the timelessness of Martha, that’s the genius of Martha. Like the great Shakespeare roles, they can survive maturity, lack of maturity, time or whatever.”

Little did Eilber know in 1997 that perhaps her greatest role for the Martha Graham Dance Company was still to come. Just two years later, she has been designated to carry out the Graham legacy as the company’s second artistic director since the choreographer’s death.

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Life without Martha has not been easy for the company that bears her name. After she died at age 97, there was suddenly no big personality around which the universe turned, no fund-raising lucky charm.

“We no longer had the protection of the goddess,” Eilber remembers. “[The company] needed a big change. It needed to become an institution. You know, if the orchestra was running over [in the past], Halston would write a check for $5,000 to keep us going.”

Under the direction of Ron Protas, Graham’s friend and collaborator, the company stumbled and lost its visibility. Graham met Protas in 1971 when he was a young photographer, and the two were close for two decades. Although he did not have a dance background, Graham chose him as the protector of her legacy and willed him her estate.

But by last season, the Graham company worked for just 14 weeks. Board members who had been lured by Graham’s charisma drifted. The company’s longtime New York City home on East 63rd Street was sold for $3 million earlier this year, to settle debts. It was a melancholic event for those who had done their training in the historic building. But the sale also helped to pay for the first Graham New York season in four years, at the Joyce Theater last February.

The reviews were generally positive, and all were filled with cries of joy that the Graham company was back in the limelight. It was a sign that things were looking up.

Protas has since divided the Graham empire into two main entities: the 18-member Martha Graham Dance Company, the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and its junior Martha Graham Ensemble; and the Martha Graham Trust. The trust is charged with licensing the Graham repertory as well as overseeing the Martha Graham Archive.

Eilber has been co-artistic director of the trust for the last year, commuting to New York one week of the month, staying in a friend’s apartment and leaving her two children and husband behind in Los Angeles.

Next summer, Protas will step aside as artistic director (he will stay on as artistic advisor and head of the trust) and hand over the reigns to Eilber, who plans to relocate to New York. Eilber says she couldn’t resist the opportunity to help ensure her mentor’s legacy.

“It just seemed like the perfect time in my life,” says Eilber, who had been building up the business side of her resume, working as co-artistic director of the L.A.-based American Repertory Dance Company, which she co-founded in 1994 and where she spent a considerable amount of time working on modern dance preservation. She resigned six months ago.

“When I was studying modern dance early in my career, it didn’t have enough history for us to be worrying about preserving it,” Eilber says. “We were very casual about it. We thought, ‘We don’t need to write this stuff down.’ ”

Writing the stuff down is part of a plan initiated by Protas called Vision 2000, aimed at documenting Graham technique and overhauling the company’s board and administration to make it competitive. This includes the recent recruitment of new influential board members, including Southern California arts patrons Lloyd E. Rigler and Charlene Nederlander and actress Vanessa Redgrave.

Eilber admits that business sense was the last thing Graham passed on to her dancers. “You were as close to the center of the flame as possible, which was your performance that evening,” says Eilber. “I never thought about a board of directors. I mean, I knew there were people we had to shake hands with at the opening-night parties, but other than that I had no concept of fund-raising or any of that.”

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The first time she met Graham, Eilber was a fearless 17-year-old who had little concept of the woman who would cast such a long spell over her adult life. She had been dancing since she was a young girl in Detroit. From eighth through 12th grades, she had four hours of daily dance training at the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan, where her parents were academic faculty members. Her senior year, she was offered an interview with Graham.

“I barely knew who she was,” Eilber recalls. “I was a senior and a good dancer in my own world and totally confident. I came to New York and Martha watched me do my solo and talked to me for about half an hour. She said if I came to study with her then, I could start in her advanced class.”

Her parents insisted she get a college degree, so she went to Juilliard, where she was exposed to the Graham technique for the first time. “I hated Graham technique my freshman year, skipped as many classes as I could. It was very foreign to me, it seemed very cult-ish. I was just a kid from Michigan.”

But she had to do a crash course in Graham techniques to pass her end-of-year exams. “Once I learned them, I started enjoying the classes. I became addicted. It was the combination of the intellectual, the physical, the emotional [that] just clicked.”

In 1972, Eilber joined the Graham Company, starting as an apprentice but quickly moving into solo roles. Throughout the high-flying ‘70s, Graham ran around with Liza Minnelli and Andy Warhol and choreographed many major works. These included “The Scarlet Letter” which starred Eilber as Hester alongside Rudolf Nureyev.

In the late ‘70s, during a hole in her Graham company schedule, Eilber was persuaded to try some commercial work on Broadway. She was intrigued, and in 1980 she took a leave from the company to study acting, moving between New York and L.A. for various film and television roles before settling in L.A. But Eilber says that her eight years with Graham had a deep impact on her approach to performance.

“I learned a lot [about] Martha by leaving her and getting this perspective on how much she encompassed,” Eilber says. “Singing and acting teachers were giving me vocabulary to describe what Martha had taught me, which was this physical form of emotional expression. That if you got what the character was doing, the movement would follow. So I kind of had a whole revelation about Martha after the majority of my career with her.”

She continued to work on her acting career throughout the ‘80s, taking time off to get married in 1985 and have children in 1987 and 1991, and she danced with the Graham company as a guest from time to time.

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Eilber says she feels positive about the last nine months, a “transition” period before her three-year contract begins in July. She is hopeful about the future and encouraged by recent grants from the National Endowment for the Arts ($35,000) and retailer Target ($50,000). Already there is a 35-week tour booked for next spring, including dates in Southern California in April. But she admits that the future without Martha is anything but certain.

“I’m still waiting to see how it’s gonna move forward without the creative head,” she says.

She and Protas are working closely to define her artistic powers. “We have worked out a mutually agreeable plan for the artistic plan for the future, which we both feel is something Martha would give her blessing,” Protas said, communicating through his assistant.

“I have to have some autonomy, and he wants me to,” she says, “but he’s very weighted by Martha’s expectations of him and it’s hard for him to let go totally.”

Eilber says that one of the main keys to her approach will be “to present Martha contextually. She was so busy moving forward, and we were just trying to keep up. She wasn’t historic, she was with us. Now that she’s finite, in a way, we can start hanging the permanent collection on the wall or finding thematically how we want to regroup [it].”

As much as she plans to present Graham as authentically as possible, she isn’t afraid of moving forward either.

“Martha never liked to do the same thing twice,” Eilber says. “When she had a new dancer come in, she would change [aspects of the] roles to capitalize on their power. Whenever there was a new advancement in stagecraft, lighting, costumes, she was voracious about it, while maintaining the essence of the piece. So I think that’s a clear directive from Martha.”

Of the 180 or so works that Graham made, only about 40 are documented sufficiently to be reconstructable. Eilber is anxious to reconstruct Graham’s famous “Clytemnestra,” perhaps with the help of director Robert Wilson. “Not change the choreography,” she says, “but polish the impact to bring [in] audiences who maybe think of Martha as dusty--to remind them that her technique [is] timeless.”

She also wants to develop an environment where cutting-edge choreographers such as Maguy Marin or Pina Bausch would create work in the spirit of “constant change, constant living on the precipice” that Graham embodied.

Eilber is also intent on getting Graham on the curriculum of more American universities and in developing partnership programs and multimedia training materials to aid the generation of teachers who were not taught directly by Graham. And to find and gather some eight generations of former Graham disciples who still have illuminating bits of knowledge to share about the nuances of her technique for the company’s 75th anniversary in 2001.

What does she expect to accomplish in her first three years? She hesitates a moment and then says, “I expect a rebirth of the Martha Graham Company.”