Richard Move has been impersonating Martha Graham for more than six years now. Graham died, at 97, in 1991. As dance dynasties go, that’s more than enough time for the synthetic icon to overtake the real one. Most people in the audience last Saturday night, February 8, for Martha@Sanders (presented by CRASHarts) probably encountered Martha Graham late in her life, when she’d gotten too old for sex, booze, and dancing, when she’d glamorized her company and smoothed out her choreography a bit so it wouldn’t frighten anybody. This is the Martha that emerges in Richard Move’s ever-more-exquisite performance.

Martha@ started as a drag show in a minuscule downtown–New York club. Once a month or so, the diva would appear with a new slate of guest stars from the dance world. The show was an underground sensation, an insiders’ delight. It played to its first big general audience two years ago, at the Town Hall. Since then, I think Move has been tiptoeing along the borderline between camp and commemoration.

Martha@Sanders looked less like performance art than lecture-demonstration. Wearing several outfits, extreme makeup, and a pouffy coiffure, Move/Martha regaled the audience with anecdotes, inspirational readings from her memoirs, and descriptions of her legendary dances. She sprinkled her monologue with names of celebrities, all of whom, she assured us, owed their success to her training or example. Divinely self-important, she accepted help from a cringing techie when the microphone didn’t work, then sneered to the audience, " She must be a student. " But this outrageous persona melted into a ladylike genius before anybody could get too offended.

The audience got to hear Martha Graham talking — Move has her throaty patrician inflection down pat — and see flashes of her on the screen, but her dance was never more than a subtext. From time to time, Move would perform small simulations from the repertory, recreating the ecstatic gestures of Appalachian Spring and Frontier, the anguish of Night Journey and Lamentation, the jutting eccentric line of Satyric Festival Song.

Katherine Crockett, who joined the actual Graham company after its founder’s death, performed the " company, " acting as Move’s demonstrator and dance partner. As Move read descriptive passages from Graham’s autobiography, Crockett went through some Graham floor exercises. Then, in a fascinating reconstruction, she performed the actions of Medea’s blood-curdling " Dance of Vengeance " from Cave of the Heart, as Move/Martha read Graham’s own notations.

Here we were looking at four or five layers of image-making, initiated by Graham herself, who was a master at that sort of thing. Her Notebooks (1973) were assembled by Nancy Wilson Ross from her journals and dance notations to convey her brilliance in stark, telegraphic terms. Just taking the book off the shelf gave me a jolt of renewed connection to the artist who called herself " doom-eager. " Tapping into such sketchy memory aids is standard practice for recovering lost dances. But just as Graham’s notebooks fail to tell the whole dance — or even the whole Graham — Move’s " Dance of Vengeance " offers only a visualization of what can be said about a certain sequence of actions.

Move’s gestural facsimiles and Crockett’s acting out of the verbal descriptions, pay their respects to the dances but don’t convey the dances’ dynamism, their sexual tension, their unique theatricality. With Bernard Herrmann’s movie music accompanying most of them, instead of the original scores, they suggest a lush decadence that begs to be parodied.

Richard Move must have to be really crafty to negotiate the legal barricades surrounding Graham’s very name, let alone her work. His strategy has been to build a performance that’s carefully distanced from the enterprise she left behind, which is just now emerging from years of litigation and inactivity. Move’s dance impressions, perhaps intentionally, don’t really translate into Graham’s choreography. It isn’t the dance, but it isn’t the anti-dance either. It doesn’t really represent the work, but it doesn’t comment on it or get past it.

In previous shows, Move has had a group of young dancers who not only fleshed out the choreography but submitted adoringly to Martha’s abuse — Crockett wasn’t nearly so servile. Past invited guests, like Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer, added hilarious conversations and their own dances to the evening. In its reduced dimensions, the show is less funny. There’s more " Martha, " but less Martha.

The show was preceded by a delicious 15-minute collage by filmmaker Charles Atlas of clips from bizarre Hollywood dance numbers — chorus girls on pointe, girls diving into a swimming pool with their high heels on, Jerry Lewis impersonating Carmen Miranda, Groucho Marx doing the lindy — and other exotica, including strippers, trance dancers, Watusi, The Rite of Spring, and, yes, moments of Martha Graham.