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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Martha Graham Dance Company, which recently completed a two-week season at the Joyce Theatre, looks as though it's just been let out of jail. As has been widely reported, Graham, when she died in 1991, willed all her property--presumably including her repertory--to Ron Protas, a younger man (forty-odd years her junior) who had been her closest companion in her later years. With this legacy, and without any formal training in dance or in administration, Protas became the artistic director of her troupe. There followed a decade of mounting misery, which culminated, in 2001, in a lawsuit. Finally, last summer, a federal district court ruled that most of Graham's extant dances were not hers to will to anyone: some of them she had legally assigned to the company years before, while the majority of the others belonged to the troupe as "work-for-hire." This decision, which Protas is reportedly appealing, no doubt accounts for the exhilarated manner the Graham dancers showed at the Joyce.
But, in fact, this famous troupe, the oldest dance company in America, had been in trouble long before Protas took over. Graham, who was born in 1894, choreographed for sixty-five years, but she was in top form for only the first half of that run. In the nineteen-fifties, after the breakup of her marriage to the choreographer Erick Hawkins--and as she began contemplating the end...
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