Stature? Yes. Stasis? No Way.

Martha Graham was lauded as the “Dancer of the Century” and the “Icon of the Century.” The dancer and choreographer, who died in 1991 at 96, received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the then newly minted National Medal of Arts. And this is the most abridged of her accolades.  

When it launched “Graham100,” the Martha Graham Dance Company got a head start on a three-season celebration of its 100th anniversary. That it is the oldest dance company in the United States and still going strong is thrilling. But let’s be honest. There’s nothing quite like a centenary to demonstrate staying power, yet also threaten a decline or a kind of settling. And what would run more counter to a dance company’s raison d’etre than to cease moving?

So, how does a vaunted institution stay true to its iconic founder and expand upon her vision? Commission new work and bring choreographers influenced by Graham’s technique into its repertory is the creative answer artistic director Janet Eilber and the company offer. 

CU Boulder Professor of Dance (and Interim Dean of Undergraduate Education) Erika Randall has another answer that’s as reckoning as it is celebratory. “What I’m so interested in about Graham is that you can give her trouble. You don’t have to just worship her and say she was the most iconic pioneer of modern dance,” says Randall.

“I love giving her trouble,” she adds. “And she can take it. Because she still holds up, because of how she gave trouble to the patriarchy.” Randall will be presenting what promises to be a spirited and spiky pre-concert talk when the Martha Graham Dance Company returns to Boulder with “Cave,” “Immediate Tragedy” and “We the People” on April 26. 

For “We the People,” Jamar Roberts set his protest piece to the music of Rhiannon Giddens (arranged by Gabe Witcher). If Giddens’ pluck and twang seem contrapuntal to the face-off energy of the piece—which made The New York Times’ 2024 Best Dance Performances—it’s supposed to. What wasn’t at odds was Alvin Ailey veteran Roberts’ feelings about Martha Graham. “The Graham vocabulary has always been in my body,” he told The New York Times. “It’s always been in my work.”

Devotees who find “Graham to be their jam”—to quote Randall—should be intrigued by “Immediate Tragedy.” The work thought lost has been reimagined by Eilber and composer Christopher Rountree. Eilber built upon a sequence of photographs shot in 1937 of Graham’s solo lamenting the Spanish Civil War. The piece premiered virtually in the differently fraught shadow of the pandemic in 2020.  

With this trio of the new, the newer and the old made new, the company honors its century by embodying one of Graham’s observations, “Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.”

The Martha Graham Dance Company performs on the Artist Series at Macky Auditorium on April 26, 2025.