The most arresting performer in the Martha Graham Dance Company’s current season at the Joyce Theater died 34 years ago: Martha Graham.
In the intriguing premiere “Letter to Nobody,” which the outstanding dancer Xin Ying choreographed with Mimi Yin, Xin dances in front of archival footage of Graham in “Letter to the World,” a 1940 Graham masterpiece inspired by Emily Dickinson. As the image of Graham fades in and out, Xin attacks the task of copying it with full commitment and fitful success, embodying the spiral turns, the vacillations and the forward swoon that kicks a full skirt back and up into a crescent — the move that, captured in a photo, became an emblem of the work.
Near the end, Xin quotes Graham quoting Dickinson: “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Then, in a projected excerpt from the 1957 film “A Dancer’s World,” Graham declaims about total identification with a role, but her face has been replaced with Xin’s. The use of A.I. here reads as an admission of the impossibility of replacing Graham.
It’s a candid encapsulation of the predicament perennially faced by this company and its dancers. In its 99th year, three decades after the loss of its founder, seven or eight decades since the height of her creative powers, the group named after Graham grasps after a legacy that fades in and out yet remains commanding enough to make relative nobodies of all who tend the flame.
Besides maintaining and performing Graham repertory, which this season includes “Frontier” and “Deaths and Entrances,” one tactic the company has tried in recent years is to reconstruct or reimagine lost works by Graham, drawing on photographs and other archival materials and using in-the-bones knowledge of her vocabulary to fill in the gaps. The latest examples are two solos from the late 1920s — “Revolt” and “Strike (From ‘Immigrant’)” — reimagined by the former principal dancer Virginie Mécène. (She first attempted this method in 2017 with the 1933 “Ekstasis.”)
Like most of these efforts, “Revolt” has the look of a photo flip book, of static poses bridged with motion. But poses by Graham are uncommonly potent; that’s one reason her works photograph so well. In Leslie Andrea Williams’s arrow-sharp performance, “Revolt” seems like an exercise in vocabulary development, a study for austere, gutsy 1930s works of protest like “Chronicle.”
“Strike” is something else, though. It, too, is period-accurate, and Xin brings to it the same scary-inspiring authority that she has shown in performances of “Chronicle.” But partially by adding new music — the wind-and-rain sounds of a bass drum in Judith Shatin’s “Adventure on Mt. Hehuan” — Mécène pushes her reimagining into novel creation. Clasping her hands behind her head at extreme angles, Xin could be doing street-style bone-breaking or new way vogue. Present-day protesters could study this one-woman “Strike” for lessons in the projection of power.
The season’s other premiere is “Cortege” by Baye & Asa. At least it’s billed as a premiere; really, it’s a second draft of a work that the company debuted in 2023. I’m not sure exactly what the young dance-making duo has changed, but the piece looks improved.
The lights come up on a long, mounded shape covered in a black sheet, which is removed to reveal a line of kneeling, soldier-like dancers. The work ends with the dancers in the same position, being covered by the sheet again, as if they were terra cotta warriors ready for the next deployment. Like “Cortege of Eagles,” Graham’s 1967 take on the costs of the Trojan War, “Cortege” examines violent conflict.
Spotlights single out tableaus of the fallen, with Goyaesque suggestions of cannibalism and rape. But the choreography seems enthralled by aggressive attack and speed. The excessive detonations in Jack Grabow’s score help to make the dance feel like a video game, a first-person shooter. It’s a fairly engaging contemporary piece, but what the Graham company and its uncommonly versatile dancers gain by performing it remains unanswered.
The best non-Graham work of this season is the best non-Graham work of last season: “We the People” by Jamar Roberts. Its bluegrass score by Rhiannon Giddens, arranged by Gabe Witcher and played live last year, retains its savor in a recorded version. (The same isn’t true of Witcher’s bluegrass arrangement of the paradigmatic Copland score for Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” and the thinness of sound contributes to the overall thinness of this year’s rendition, making the dance even quainter than usual.)
“We the People” is far from quaint. The music could swing a hoedown like the one that ends “Rodeo,” but Roberts’s choreography has the frontal attack of hip-hop and the energy of a roadhouse just before fists start to fly. Solos in silence that precede each of the work’s four sections have a gestural clarity that recalls Graham’s description of her own works as fever charts of the heart. Made as a companion to last year’s revival of “Rodeo,” “We the People” resonates more strongly with “Revolt” and “Strike.” Like few of the company’s commissions, it complements Graham.
Martha Graham Dance Company
Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.
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