GODDESS: Martha Graham’s Dancers Remember.<i> By...

In Robert Tracy’s oral history “Goddess: Martha Graham’s Dancers Remember,” dancer Matt Turney describes performing in the Graham work “Errand into the Maze”:

“[T]he rhythm of your heart--it’s racing. You exhale and stabilize. Each moment so attenuated there is time enough to notice everything: the cough in the front row, the stagehand in the wings, and time enough to calculate and take a chance, defy gravity, precede the beat into the air, delay the landing. Time is not inevitable. It can stop long enough to lose yourself and find yourself again between two beats of a conductor’s baton.”

This “communion,” as the experience is termed by contemporary dancer Murray Louis, has an intensity that dancers long to repeat. And it is that desire that threads its way through each of these three books. Their genres differ more than their essential theme: Dancers and choreographers--most of whom begin their careers as dancers--struggle to display their skills, to alter perception, to elate, inspire and astound.

Athletes and accountants may share similar compulsions, but dancers have the advantage of pursuing extremity in the more elevated name of art. In dance lore, sanctity and sweat are recurring conjunctions. For example, in the 1948 film “The Red Shoes,” the famous exchange between the movie’s ballet impresario, Boris Lermontov, and the nascent ballerina, Victoria Page--”Why do you want to dance?” asks Lermontov; “Why do you want to live?” Page replies--has the certitude of a religious vow. But Page’s abdications will not be absolute. She will fall in love with the young composer Julian Craster, and the movie’s central motif will become the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between life and Lermontov’s austere conception of art.

There aren’t many dramatic films about dance, so “The Red Shoes” remains near the top of any short list. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (from Pressburger’s screenplay), the film boasts a number of fine performances: Anton Walbrook’s shaded Lermontov; Leonide Massine’s infectious intensity as the ballet master Ljubov; and the luminous credibility of the 21-year-old Scottish dancer Moira Shearer. (It’s interesting to note the healthy appearance of both Shearer and fellow film ballerina Boronskaja. The era of George Balanchine’s bone-thin dancers was yet to come.) Good as “The Red Shoes” performers may be, none of them is able to obscure the film’s creaking melodramatics. And yet, evidenced by the current reprinting of the 1978 Powell-Pressburger novelization, “The Red Shoes” dances on.

To some degree, time itself has enriched the tale. Anyone, for instance, who finds the Lermontov-Page conflict altogether passe, need only recall the more recent saga of Balanchine and his New York City Ballet acolyte, ballerina Suzanne Farrell. When Farrell married fellow dancer Paul Mejia in 1969, Balanchine’s hostility toward Mejia caused the young couple to leave the company. (Farrell later returned to NYCB but without her husband.) Michael Powell, whose other big film was “Black Narcissus” (1947), finds the endurance of “The Red Shoes” puzzling. He thought the film’s initial popularity might be explained by the proximity of its release to the end of World War II. “We had,” he writes in his autobiography, “A Life in Movies” (1987), “all been told for ten years to go out and fight for democracy, and now that the war was over, ‘The Red Shoes’ told us to go out and die for art.” In Powell’s posthumous memoir, “Million Dollar Movie” (1995), he less generously describes the durable “Red Shoes” audience as “millions of fifty-year-old frustrated ballerinas.” What Powell appears to have overlooked is that “The Red Shoes” is about a young woman who must choose between two powerful men, both of whom represent aspects of love. In Lermontov’s case, moreover, the passion is not carnal but aesthetic; it is for her art, for the greatness he knows she can achieve. That factor alone is likely to ensure “Red Shoes” video rentals and book sales for many more years.

As a novel, “The Red Shoes” offers up a number of clunking metaphors--”The young man peered out into the street and saw the Rolls blocking his view, large and impressive, like the rump of an elephant.”--as it dutifully pads out the Pressburger screenplay. The only substantive change appears at the story’s end: In the film, it is clear that Page hurls herself over a Monte Carlo railway trestle intent on suicide, and the novel implies that she is recklessly attempting to join her lover, who is waiting on the platform.

Page wanted to be the greatest dancer in the world. Had she succeeded, one would hope her achievement would have ultimately garnered a more charitable chronicler than Tracy, the former dancer, journalist and compiler of “Goddess.”

The first indication that neither reader nor subject is in totally kind hands is suggested by the book’s cover photo: a blurred, undated head shot of Graham performing in “Clytemnestra,” a work that premiered in 1958 when Graham, in her early 60s, was still dancing. In heavy stage makeup, Graham looks haggard; her glance is sidelong and somewhat sinister. Are we to assume this is Graham as the killer Clytemnestra, or is it Graham herself? In either case, the choice of this Joan Crawford-esque image conjoined with the title’s use of “Goddess” has ambiguous if not derisive connotations.

Not that Graham’s reputation can’t withstand such paltry assaults. This gargantuan figure of American dance created 191 original works: the first, “Choral,” premiered in 1926; the last, “Maple Leaf Rag,” premiered in 1990 (a year before Graham’s death at 95). Artistic assessments of Graham’s works have fluctuated. But even those who dismissed Graham in her mythic middle phase of bone headdresses, nearly nude macho men and Freudian-inspired Noguchi sets might be stunned into admiration by early pieces such as “Primitive Mysteries” (1931).

As is true of many other geniuses, Graham’s personality was a difficult one. She was arrogant; she drank too much; she could be penurious, selfish and cruel. At the same time, she was a woman of principles. An early enemy of fascism, Graham refused to participate in the artistic exhibitions of the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany. Graham was among the first to consistently integrate black and Asian dancers into her company. Though she ran her company autocratically and made great physical and psychological demands on her dancers, many of them adored her and remained sacrificially loyal.

Tracy presents edited narratives by 30 Graham dancers. Organized by decades (from the 1920s to the 1990s), with fine accompanying photographs, these casual but often valuable oral accounts represent major Graham interpreters such as Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, Yuriko, Mary Hinkson, Bertram Ross and Paul Taylor. Regrettably, Tracy provides no chronology or introductory overview of Graham’s career. And as Tracy did in his previous oral compilation, “Balanchine’s Ballerinas: Conversations with the Muses” (1983), the narratives here remain aggravatingly undated. Were the interviews recorded before or after Graham’s death? Were all the interviews done by Tracy? In what setting? In some cases, as in the Turney excerpt, the results of this informality are exhilarating, but in others, Tracy allows the interviewees to demean themselves with revelations that are more reductive than illuminating. For example, Graham guest artist Rudolf Nureyev describes Graham’s dancers as “wanking in front of the mirror for hours and hours and hours,” and portrays Graham herself as “devouring people. . . . A real vampire.”

Graham fares far better on the pages of Jack Anderson’s historical survey “Art Without Boundaries: The World of Modern Dance.” Anderson, a poet and longtime dance critic for the New York Times, previously wrote “Ballet & Modern Dance: A Concise History” (1986), a book that covers similar territory. But the current work has a narrower focus and broader aims. Ballet makes no appearance here and, at center stage, modern dance emerges more fully as an intricate, international phenomenon.

The resulting journey is not without blemishes. For example, the photographs, though fascinating, are undated, while the number of choreographers, dancers and dances Anderson packs onto his pages can make the book seem more like a census than the “chronicle” he describes. Considering the number of people it tries to include, “Art Without Boundaries” may not be for the dance neophyte. However, for those willing to dive in, Anderson offers an enticing, if sketchy, glimpse into rarely traversed dance territory.

Along the way, “Art Without Boundaries” unearths some wonderful bits of performance esoterica. In the 1930s, for instance, the Berlin refugee Valeska Gert danced (depressingly, it seems) in a Greenwich Village bar where Tennessee Williams once washed dishes. A few years later, reports Anderson, the elegant American modern dancer Ruth St. Denis “aided the war effort by working as a riveter.”

Despite its indisputable insights and pleasures, “Art Without Boundaries” may have attempted more than it could gracefully encompass. The bouncing about from Scandinavia to Israel to Japan is exhausting. Though the book is comprehensive, there are debatable omissions. Understandably cautious about including too many unassessed, developing artists, the New York-based Anderson may have underestimated the longtime choreographic contributions of outlanders such as San Francisco’s Margaret Jenkins or Santa Cruz dancer-choreographer Tandy Beal. Perhaps he did not find their work innovative enough to include, but his selection process is not clear.

These, however, are minor reservations. One can only be grateful for the research here and the number of forgotten dance makers Anderson has reclaimed. Terpsichore, that elusive, fecund muse of the dance, should be pleased.