Chicago Tribune du lieu suivant : Chicago, Illinois • 202

1 1 7 artha nan She performed until the age of 75. Today it is her mind that dances, and the show is captivating. By Linda Winer Oette Davis worships her. Betty Ford works for her. Fanny Brice spoofed her austerity in the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies.

Two congressmen denounced her sensuality in the 1963 House of Representatives. In 1909, she chaired the refreshment committee for the Santa Barbara High School sophomore dance. Next Friday she lectures onstage while her company performs at the Auditorium Theater; next Sunday she turns 81. Martha Graham is still making dances and waVes. She lives these days in an ordinary building in New York's Irish-turned-singles East 60s.

No plaques out front tell passers-by that one of this country's greatest artists has a small, pretty flat on the seventh floor. One has to squelch an impulse to stop shoppers on First Avenue to tell them almost in disbelief that Martha Graham lives down the block. The Martha Graham? Legendary cheekbones, turbans, brain, and incredible nervous system? It's nearly as unreal as if Picasso were painting in a studio in Old Town without -everybody knowing. The Martha Graham, whose personal, isolated dancing style found a truth that became nearly synonymous thru this century with "modern dance." But New Yorkers bustle by with their dirty laundry, on the way to the St. Tropez cleaners.

The Graham impact isn't so much starry as mythic. Dance crusader, heroic persona, intense body sculptor with dark spartan powers, Graham has attracted fanatical admirers and zealot haters thru her epically long career. She stopped dancing just six years ago, at 75. Her torso contraction-release technique has had a life beyond her control, ritualized into cliche in neighborhood dancing schools across the country. Indonesia and Japan teach Graham.

Israel has a company, the Batsheva, fashioned around her. Subsequent modern-dance figures have tended to evelve either thru her style or in rebellion from it. totally self-contained, gorgeous and undefensive, with the kind of articulate genius that refuses to end a sentence without the words that will satisfy her. Little wonder there are rumors she's a clone. "They speak of dance as a dumb art," she says with a quiet, stroking voice and peaceful eyes that mercilessly link with those they're addressing.

"But dancers love to talk. When I could no longer dance, it released my tongue. Of course I use words in old-fashioned ways. I don't hesitate to use the words God, spirit, soul but I don't use them as a present-day cliche. If somebody wants to take them as cliches? That's their responsibility.

Not mine." Graham threw away dance's fairy stories and mindless prettiness. She dug -from toe spine into the gut, searching for things we know beyond conscious mind. Building on the natural inhale-, exhale of the body, she discovered a Freudian, ultratheatrical way of dancing that has lived thru generations of dancers and dance critics. Violent words like wrenching and slashing and sweeping are often applied to her "searches for the inner Her vision was more than the body in perpetual sexual, moral, and intellectual heat, but the heat has helped. Graham will speak Friday at 8 p.m.

in the lecture-demonstration heralded last season in New York. She talks about her technique and her esthetic was a verb before it was a noun and before it was a Her company of 24 many of, them new to Graham demonstrates, then dances a full separate program Saturday at 2. The lecture program makes her reluctant absence from the action less pronounced. People want to see Graham hungrily. And so her intellect dances for them.

"I had my first dancing lesson when I was four," she retells a favorite story with the spontaneity of a memory just crossing her mind. "I told my father a lie, but he wasn't fooled. He said: 'You must never lie because I will always be able to tell from your body. The body never I believe so much in the power of body It ii; the one thing we have in our lives. It's all we've got." Graham was born in Pennsylvania to a physician father and a mother directly descended from Miles Standish.

In 1908, her family's Allegheny Puritanism was cross-pollinated with the open spaces of Southern California, creating a dychotomy that pervades her wwk. Oriental household help in California set the basis for future tendencies towards Eastern kinds of timelessnesr and discipline; and until recently, her work got better reception from the Far East than from Western Europe, where acceptance built slowly. The company attendance records in Jakarta and elsewhere in its ecstatic tour of the East last Oome saw her as the morbid amazon modern, the hollow-cheeked iron maiden surrounded by girls pressed into replicas of the steel woman herself. Others thought her percussive, concentrated discipline purified an American dance tradition fettered too long by European ballet and the pseudo-exctic, art-nouveau dancing of Ruth St. Denis the early Graham idol who got her inspiration for a dance from an Egyptian goddess pictured on a cigaret poster.

At nearly 81, she sits on a couch wearing a turban in her oriental gallery of a living room after rehearsing what the New York press has marveled at as the "rebirth" of her company. Her personal manager protectively warns she's tired and has a cold. One expects to find a dignified, feeble old woman. Instead she is a miracle -j- vibrant, warm, wry, Unda Winer It The Tribune' at nee critic. 7 "I I once spent two miserable months in Chicago," she smiles, revealing an unknown biographical detail about a tour with the Greenwich Village Follies.

She danced with the follies for two years after leaving the Ruth St. Denis-Ted 24 Chicago Tribune Magazine.