Martha's Return

They were all on hand last week--the critics and choreographers, the dancers, designers and devoted fans--to greet the tiny woman with the haunting eyes and the New England Gothic face. After three years, partly spent touring abroad. Dancer Martha Graham had returned with her ballet company to perform in Manhattan, bringing with her a satchelful of Graham favorites and two new works: a sophisticated sexual romp called Embattled Garden and an evening-length ballet titled Clytemnestra, the most ambitious effort in years by the priestess of modern dance.

Garden, with lush, languid music by Carlos Surinach, was a kind of lovelorn-columnist's tour of Eden, with Adam, Eve, Adams's legendary wife Lilith and a hor mone-happy stranger as the disturbed protagonists. In style it was light but pricked with wryly ironic wit. Clytemnestra, with a grindingly dissonant score by Egyptian Composer Halim El-Dabh, was a more impressive work and far more complex. Both its power and its tortuous complexities derived from Choreographer Graham's technique of unfolding the story as a memory of past events sounding shrilly in the echo chamber of Clytemnestra's mind. In four acts, Graham introduced Clytemnestra in Hades, shifted back in time to Clytemnestra's vision of the fate that had led to her murder by her son Orestes, then shifted again to Hades and to the redemption of the mind that had spun out the tale of its own deception. Thus the many-mirrored story was less a study of tragedy's flowering than of the dark roots from which tragedy grows. To translate this study into dance movement was an uncommonly difficult task, and Choreographer Graham did not always succeed. With Clytemnestra (Martha Graham herself) at the ballet's eye, the black-gowned women and loinclothed men about her moved in an unhurried, severely ritualistic style that became occasionally monotonous in the long preludes to violence. But the economy of movement also produced fascinating effects, such as the shuttling plotters' dance in Act II, with Agamemnon's ghost in platform shoes tottering over them like a crippled bird. Throughout, Dancer Graham's movements of whiplike vitality and agonized angularities brought to life the rage in Clytemnestra's mind.

When it was over, the audience rose and gave her one of the finest ovations of her long career. It seemed hard to believe that Dancer Graham is past 60.

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