Martha Graham

"Of all my ballets ('Appalachian Spring') is the one I cherish the most," wrote seminal modern dance choreographer Martha Graham in 1987. "Aaron Copland wrote the music for me and first called it 'Ballet for Martha.' I choreographed it and danced it with my then husband Erick Hawkins." Many modern dance watchers also have tended to cherish this work among Graham's sizable output of great ballets.

In the beginning, there was Martha Graham. She was a force of nature, marvelously cantankerous and wondrously productive, from the start. She has been a seminal influence on dance and dancers for more than seven decades. As countless canny observers, as well as her own savvy publicists, have constantly pointed out, she is to her art what Stravinsky is to music and Picasso to painting. She inspires hyperbole even above and beyond the call.

Modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, who grew up here before founding her New York company 63 years ago, is considering a second home for her dance company in Santa Barbara. Under preliminary plans laid by Graham associates, the performing and teaching residency would last six weeks to three months each year, beginning as soon as February, and might team the world-renowned dance company with UC Santa Barbara.

Star ghosts have always wielded undying power in the dance world. More than a century ago, for instance, a ballerina named Pierina Legnani specialized in executing 32 of the high-velocity whipping turns, called fouettes, on pointe. So choreographers put that bravura feat into her roles.

It seems as if the obituaries had hardly run before people were booting up their computers to produce books on Martha Graham, the most richly gifted and most personally vivid artist in the history of classical modern dance. In the course of her 96 years, Graham, who died last April, was first considered a renegade, then an acknowledged genius, and finally an institution; now she's well on her way to becoming an industry. Actually, the most important entry in the first round of publications, Agnes de Mille's "Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham," was in the making for over two decades and circumspectly awaited the great lady's passing.

After the lights went down at a dance concert in North Carolina one night in the mid-'70s, an unusual old woman was seated next to me. She had a penetrating musty presence, with overtones of curried cuisine. She was eccentric, but not in the dowdy Southern way. Her pulled-back hair and exaggerated make-up, her smallness, the chin-up posture and the way she moved her hands, all convinced me she was a former dancer. A young man hurried to her before the curtain went up.

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.

In the ever-hopeful dance world, fabled but luckless companies struggling to regain their former stature find no shortage of cheerleaders heralding a new golden age. But, as with the Bolshoi Ballet's attempts at a comeback in the last few years, it's too soon to wax ecstatic over the recently reconstituted Martha Graham Dance Company.

Martha Graham, the diminutive giant of dance, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She died of cardiopulmonary arrest caused by congestive heart failure, said Ross Alley, director of marketing with the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. Graham, who transcended the word choreographer and attained a dominance that extended far beyond the footlights of her art, was 96.

Though they were worlds apart geographically, their dance traditions separated by centuries, Javanese dance master Bagong Kussudiardjo, 66, says he and the late American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham share the same spirit.