SPRING STEPS.(Martha Graham Dance Company development)

Last month, New York's dance audience was offered something it isn't used to anymore: a bonanza. First came the Martha Graham Dance Company, at City Center. The Graham troupe is still recovering from the terrible period it went through in the nineteen-eighties and nineties--that is, just before and after Graham's death, in 1991, at the late and unwatchful age of ninety-six. During that time, the dancers went in for near-comical overacting. Now they are calming down. This season, Elizabeth Auclair, as the virgin in "Primitive Mysteries" (1931), really acted like a virgin. Fang-Yi Sheu, who has become more or less the star of the company, led "Sketches from Chronicle" ...