Dancing Into A Financial Maze

The great choreography of the past lives, if it lives at all, in the dancers of the present. Right now, the choreography of Martha Graham lives most fully in the volcanic performances of Fang-Yi Sheu. To watch her dance is to understand immediately the grounds for Graham’s exalted reputation as the mother of modern dance and to lose any doubts about whether Graham’s work can survive. Yet doubts remain.Graham founded her company 80 years ago. In the dance world, landmark anniversaries like this are typically cause for weeks of hoopla, performances, and parties; the Graham company will celebrate its 80th anniversary in its hometown with a few lectures and free events but only a single full-scale performance, tomorrow at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. That’s all the nation’s oldest dance troupe can afford.The recent history of the Graham company is one of financial, administrative, and legal calamity. When Graham died in 1991, at the age of 96, she willed all her property to Ron Protas, her decades younger companion during her last years. When Mr. Protas, who had no dance or administrative experience, took over as artistic director, the stage was set for a battle over the Graham legacy. Ten years later, after the company board ousted Mr. Protas, that battle came to a head in a lawsuit. A federal district judge ruled that most of Graham’s dances belonged to the company, not to Mr. Protas, setting the troupe free to perform again in the fall of 2002. (More recently, the Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Protas’s appeal. And that, it would seem, is the end of the line.)The legal victory seemed to give the company new life, a phoenix-like energy noted by reviewer after delighted reviewer. But the damage had already been done. While the legal rights to its repertory and even its name were in dispute, the organization had trouble attracting the funding that all dance troupes need. The dispute forced it to cancel engagements and, briefly, to disband. Before Graham’s death, the company’s debt had already been mounting; during Mr. Protas’s reign and the ensuing lawsuit, it grew to unmanageable sums. And instead of disappearing along with the legal troubles, the debt kept growing – even after a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2004. By the close of the company’s City Center season the following April, it had reached $5 million.As an emergency measure, the company’s board forgave $1 million of that debt, but more fundamental changes were clearly in order. Spending was drastically cut, and last May, the four-person directorate was consolidated into one position, held by Janet Eilber, a star Graham dancer in the 1970s. In January, La Rue Allen, who has extensive experience as a dance administrator, took over as executive director.“There was a notion,” Ms. Allen said, “that we could grow our way out of our financial problems on a for-profit model: Invest in a fabulous product and people will buy it.” The 2005 City Center season – planned when the company was already $4 million in debt – featured a world premiere, four revivals, and two weeks of performances accompanied by a 28-person orchestra. The musicians alone cost $184,000.It was a gamble that didn’t pay off, at least not financially. But the very idea of budgeting a profit for the City Center season, Ms. Allen said, showed a disregard for the realities of the dance world. (Most companies make their money touring; a New York season is more a fixed cost than a revenue-generator.) “The people who planned it put the company back together, but we should have stopped the rapid growth process a little sooner. The company was behaving as if we could get those grants” – like the atypically huge Mellon gift – “all the time. They believed the world would rediscover Martha Graham, and that would solve all our problems.”(Ms. Allen’s predecessor, Marvin Preston, made large personal investments in the company. Upon resigning, he converted a sizable loan into a gift. The organization still owes him money. “It would a gratifying thing,” he said, “to see them be able to pay that.”)The board’s director, Francis Mason, a board member since 1974, pins his hopes on international touring, pointing beyond upcoming engagements in Germany and Greece to dreams of conquering Russia and China. “We’ve got the world waiting for us,” he said.That the well-connected impresario Paul Szilard has taken Graham on as a client is in itself a mark of confidence, though the Budapest-born Mr. Szilard is more cautiously optimistic than Mr. Mason: “When they are coming back,” he said, “I’ll know they have been there.”After the heroic, Graham-like drama of the legal battle, Ms. Allen’s practicality and fiscal conservatism are probably in order, and it’s a good sign that the troupe recently doubled its engagement fees. But the fierce belief – the idea that, as Mr. Mason puts it, “All you have to do is see Graham’s work, and there’s a shock of recognition” – dies hard. The Graham repertory un questionably includes some of the greatest dances of the 20th century.They are, however, of a different era, forged in a grandiose high-modern aesthetic at odds with contemporary sensibilities. Times have changed, and the artistic challenges caused by lasting so long may outweigh the financial ones.“All of the company’s problems,” Ms. Eilber said, “delayed for 15 years the big question: Who are we going to be without Martha Graham?” The main obstacle, Ms. Eilber said, is that the founding mantra of modern dance – out with the past, in with the new – has become self-defeating. She described her plans for helping contemporary audiences connect with Graham’s work as a kind of curating, “trying to discover the dance equivalent of museum audio tours.” So far, she’s introduced curtain speeches, explanatory videos, and chronological programming that tracks Graham’s artistic development.The gala performance tomorrow follows that strategy, establishing the background for Graham’s breakthroughs with works by her mentors, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, and an early Graham piece in their mode. Then come the breakthroughs themselves – “Heretic,” “Lamentation,” “Steps in the Street” – followed by excerpts of 1940s gems like “Appalachian Spring,” a rare revival of “Part Real – Part Dream” (1968), and finishing with “Maple Leaf Rag” (1991), Graham’s last work. For some Graham glamour, there are guest stars: former Alvin Ailey virtuoso Desmond Richardson joining 6-foot-4-inch Graham impersonator Richard Move to give a more contemporary, gender-bending twist to the “Part Real” duet.Notably absent on the program are the premieres customarily part of a big event. Introducing dances that stand alongside Graham’s idiosyncratic oeuvre is part of Ms. Eilber’s plan, but she knows it is a daunting challenge. Over the years, the company has commissioned works from Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, Susan Stroman, and others, but none have stuck. Last year’s Martha Clarke dance inspired only a lukewarm response.Such new works aren’t solely a bone for audiences and funders. They’re crucial in attracting, developing, and retaining young dancers. Mastering Graham technique requires an enormous investment of time and energy, and as much as dancers dream of testing their mettle on Graham’s Medea or Jocasta (as actors dream of playing Hamlet or Lear), they also yearn for roles to be made specifically for them.And much more than curtain speeches, dancers are what keep Graham’s work alive. A dancer like Ms. Sheu almost justifies the all-you-have-to-do-is-see-it idea, and her presence in the company is the greatest sign of its artistic health. During the gala, she has just three minutes to dance the epic tale of Cassandra in a tiny excerpt from “Clytemnestra,” Graham’s longest and most monumental work. The recent turmoil, Ms. Sheu said, has been very hard on the dancers, and she is uncertain about her future with the company. One hopes that the casting of the company’s greatest performer as a prophet of disaster whom no one believes will turn out to be a happy irony.April 18 at 7:30 p.m. (Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Place at Washington Square South, 212-521-3667).

Dancing Into A Financial Maze

More from the New York Sun

Georgia Lawmakers Advance Bill That Would Let Property Owners Sue Local Governments for Not Enforcing Anti-Homeless Laws

Mossad, CIA Worked With Iranian Kurds ‘For Months’, Source Says

From Libya, Ukraine Launches Drones Against Russian Ships

The Vatican Takes a Stand Against Cosmetic Surgery, Decrying the ‘Cult of the Body’

Fearing a Lockout in November, Newsom Joins Chorus Calling for Some Democrats To Consider Quitting Governor’s Race

Retail Gas Prices Skyrocket Across America at Fastest Pace Since 2022 Amid Conflict With Iran

Colorado Governor Hints at Clemency For Imprisoned Trump-backed Election Denier Tina Peters

Democrats’ Vitriol Over Trump’s Iran Strikes Overlooks His Constitutional Authority