The Martha Graham company is still looking for economic stability after its long battle to recover the rights to Graham’s dances. Under its new director, Janet Eilber, it gave three performances last weekend at the Shubert Theatre as part of the Bank of America Celebrity Series. The program was choice, four works in different styles, all choreographed between 1936 and 1948. It’s important for the new generation of dancers to grapple with the technical and interpretive challenges of these works, but the company hasn’t yet achieved a consistent style. Beyond the question of uneven technique lurks the greater issue of how to perform the dances for today’s audience.

There’s still a large population that remembers the old modern dance and wants to see some simulacrum of the personal idiosyncrasy, the appetite for exploring movement, that gave modern dance its distinction. But there’s also a new audience that loves theatricality and physical display but finds history too demanding. It’s tricky to find a balance between keeping the integrity of the original work and crafting something that will float in the shallow arts pool of our time.

When the curtain went up on Errand into the Maze, I felt I was looking at something far away, a tiny, perfect model, like a Christmas crèche in a window. Elizabeth Auclair, as the woman confronting her inner fears, lurched and scurried across a space scoured of everything except Isamu Noguchi’s sparse landmarks — some bleached bones, a dried-up stream bed. She battled the Creature, Martin Lofsnes, subdued him, and at last could inhabit the space. The dance looked correct, but remote. The dancers seemed to be trying to reproduce my memories of a dozen bygone performances, not to create some catharsis of their own. Throughout the evening, there were dance pictures that suddenly came to life, then froze again. The company has two exceptional interpreters now, Miki Orihara and Fang-Yi Sheu, and the ensemble can mobilize excitement — the men cartwheeling and lunging in Diversion of Angels, the women jumping for dear life in Chronicle.

Orihara as the Bride in Appalachian Spring gave a stirring performance, motivating — in an acting sense — every shift in the dance, from twittering elation to apprehension, joy, fear, serenity. She danced the turmoil and hope of every newlywed. The Husbandman, Tadej Brdnik, seemed locked into some grim foreboding the entire time.

Graham’s dance-acting innovations, along with her highly articulated, often distorted body movement, fed into the complicated narratives of her great Greek period in the 1940s and ’50s, and their more romanticized successors. But before all that, there was the angular, adamant Graham and her early company of demonic women.

Fang-Yi Sheu doesn’t act out what she’s dancing, but she summons a million feelings from an intense and internally generated movement impulse. In the solo sections of Sketches from Chronicle, this small, seemingly impassive woman became a whirling, flaming effigy of anger ("Spectre — 1914"), then a triumphant spirit of resistance ("Prelude to Action").

The Chronicle sketches are only a token of the original hour-long dance from 1936, which was patched together, mostly by Graham’s dancers, from archival film and photographs at different times in the 1990s. The choreographer probably supervised the big group section, "Steps in the Street," but the three sections now being performed could be thought of as newly choreographed.

"Steps in the Street" looks eerily contemporary, with streams of women striding back and forth, their solid torsos anchoring their madly jumping legs, their arms carved into individual shapes of defense and defiance. Did Graham anticipate today’s taste for spectacle, or did her disciples make a shrewd adaptation of her material?

One of the company’s survival strategies is to convince the public that Martha Graham is still a living force on our stage. The background information provided in the program reads like current biography and completely skirts the fact of her death, in 1991. Artful verbiage and instructional curtain speeches can’t substitute for convincing performances.