E-Mail This Article to a Friend Classics in rehab Martha Graham in New York BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

NEW YORK — Nearly 15 years after Martha Graham’s death in 1991, her company is beginning to reconstitute the style and the repertory that established the choreographer as a prime force in 20th-century dance. The two-week season at City Center that ended Sunday exhibited some positive signs, but the Martha Graham of the future is still a work in progress.

The ephemeral works of a dance artist are always endangered once the creator is no longer around to look after them or hold together the institutions that brought them into being. Right now, some of the most influential American dance organizations — New York City Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, the companies of Alvin Ailey and José Limón — are struggling with ongoing identity crises. The Graham enterprise has had a particularly difficult transition.

When the choreographer named her associate and confidant Ron Protas as her heir, she precipitated a 10-year turf war between Protas and the Graham board of directors. Still worming its way through the appeal process, the legal dispute over the right to produce her dances has mostly gone in the company’s favor, but operations almost ceased for a while. The continuity a dance company needs to pass on its style and the interpretation of roles grew thin without the test of regular performing.

One of the great challenges faced by the present curators is the way Graham’s work changed over the decades. Schooled in the show-biz exotica that was Denishawn, she launched her own career with stark abstractions, moved through patriotic flourish and nostalgic romance, ensconced herself in Greek tragedy, and slid into histrionic decadence during her last years. The technique developed, grew harsh, grew soft; costumes and sets were remade; music was recorded, amplified, scaled down. What we see as Graham repertory today is a composite vision drawn from co-artistic directors Terese Capucilli and Christine Dakin, the exemplars who survive from earlier generations, and a contemporary sensibility suited to today’s dancers and audiences.

Graham’s reputation was established through her own solo performing and her women’s company of the 1920s and ’30s. Primitive Mysteries (1931) and Chronicle (1936) may be even more stunning today than in their own time, with their ranks of women treading and wheeling in contained militancy. There was nothing really "natural" about these massed bodies that surged forward shoulder to shoulder in ritualistic line-ups, their arms jutting in threatening angles, torsos contracted, feet drumming into the floor. They conveyed a suppressed excitement that burst out like a collective yell when they began leaping in circles.

Graham channeled emotions forbidden to women — anger, aggression, sexual heat — into twisted underground root systems and spiny projections of movement. She could even make ladylike sentiments seem dangerous. Years after the sexual revolution, the best Graham dancers can make your earlobes crackle.

The extraordinary Taiwanese dancer Fang-Yi Sheu did the solos in the mostly posthumous reconstruction Sketches from Chronicle and played Medea in the 1946 dance of vengeance Cave of the Heart. Sheu doesn’t illustrate emotions or give them away melodramatically. She’s contained, moving with great economy from the center, so that a very slight shift seems monumental; a big change of gesture seems inevitable. She "gets" Graham on a more profound level than some of the other featured dancers, whose attempts to act out the drama make it banal as a sit-com.

Graham’s dances, especially the dramatic ones from the 1940s on, can seem hermetic, focusing as they do on women’s inner turmoil and unconsummated desire. The season revival of Deaths and Entrances (1943), based ostensibly on the Brontë sisters but perhaps subliminally on Graham and her own sisters, has always baffled the viewer. A serious and restrained Miki Orihara played the central role in a different style against Virginie Mécène and Katherine Crockett as her overwrought siblings. This is a dance about memory — Graham was undergoing Jungian analysis. The dancers didn’t establish its subtle interplay of inner and outer consciousness, time past and present.

Uneven casting plagued Appalachian Spring but couldn’t sink it. There were wonderfully spatial dances by the four women of the ensemble and a spidery, accusatory Maurizio Nardi as the Revivalist. Aaron Sherber kept the orchestra moving at a spirited pace, and that prevented the wedding in the wilderness from getting sentimental. Heidi Stoeckley was a calm and smiling Pioneer Woman. Mécène’s ecstatic Bride and the good-looking but un-physical David Zurak weren’t much of a match. Mécène and Crockett once again hammed it up as Eve and Lilith in the 1958 sex quadrille Embattled Garden, with Zurak as Adam and a reptilian Martin Lofsnes as the Stranger.

The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival June 29 through July 3; call (413) 243-0745.