Richard Move Brings Martha Graham to Life

With witty puns, savage eye-rolling glances and stiff-jawed dignity, arobed Richard Move uncannily evoked the diva presence of deceased modern dance icon Martha Graham as host of an American Repertory Dance Company program Thursday at California Plaza.

This reconstituted Graham fired off some splendid digs at modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn and his unconsummated marriage with Graham’s idol, Ruth St. Denis. She grandly forgave choreographer Doris Humphrey for calling Graham a thief and a snake, and rejected any designation as a proto-feminist, because equality with mere men had never been an issue for her.

To prove the point, she snapped her fingers and her assistant, the appropriately beefcakey Reid Hutchins, got down on all fours. She then sat on his derriere and continued her sang-froid delivery.

Throughout, Move’s fierce identification with Graham and his use of historical detail, including Graham’s refusal to perform for Hitler at the 1936 Olympics or for American white supremacists later, made the illusion of her presence credible.

But when he danced a distilled fragment of her Oedipal “Night Journey,” with Hutchins as the hapless son-husband, the illusion fell apart, and the act turned toward camp. Still, it legitimately earned laughs and did little to lessen his Graham hommage.

Move’s introductory remarks to the rest of the program of modernist reconstructions proved gracious and informative, strongly establishing Graham’s centrality to this repertory, the sun around which so much of modern dance revolved.

Humphrey’s five-minute solo “The Call/Breath of Fire,” set to percussive music by Dane Rudhyer, was the premiere of the evening. It was danced by a lyrical Nancy Colahan, whose embodiment of Humphrey’s signature fall-and-recovery technique looked too fluid and light to convey what one imagines was the emotional impact and resonance that established Humphrey’s greatness. Ditto, her extension and terminations.

The rest of the program, which last week won a coveted Lester Horton Dance Award for revival/restaging or reconstruction, enlisted either previously reviewed casts or dancers newly seen in some roles.

Among the latter, company artistic director Bonnie Oda Homsey displayed her customary elan in Michio Ito’s “Pizzicati,” dancing far upstage so that her crisp and precise gestures could be projected as huge shadows upon a wall of a neighboring building. And Colahan was an effective bereft beloved in Agnes de Mille’s Funeral Dance from “Brigadoon.”