Catherine Cabeen, Lisa Kron, Richard Move, and PeiJu Chien-Pott in Martha@BAM: The 1963 Interview for BAM. Photo: Steven Pisano

In 1963, American modern dance legend Martha Graham, nearly seventy at the time and still performing, was interviewed by dance critic Walter Terry for his Dance Laboratory series at the 92nd Street Y. Almost fifty years later, choreographer / professor / filmmaker / curator Richard Move, who’d been playing Graham in a series at a nightclub in the Meatpacking District for some time already, created Martha@…–The 1963 Interview: part homage to Graham the artist and the woman, part investigation of her creative process, part living archive. Combining the text of the interview (with Move playing Graham and writer/performer Lisa Kron playing Terry) with snippets of Graham’s work, both live (performed by Catherine Cabeen and PeiJu Chien-Pott) and projected, the hourlong show works on the simplest level as a piece of documentary theater. True, the imposingly statuesque Move would tower over the petite Graham, but he captures the specifics of her diction, the uprightness of her posture, and the deliberateness of her gesture marvelously. As a creative approach to archival material, a way to hear Graham talk about some of her most famous work, it’s a fascinating way to spend an hour.

It’s also a keen reminder, as we see Cabeen and Chien-Pott perform movements and sequences as Move talks, of how utterly foundational Graham’s work was to the corpus of American modern dance, and how instantly, distinctly recognizable it remains. The core contractions, the precisely curved arms, the tilted arabesques, the deep pliés that make it seem as if the dancers’ long skirts have weighted hems pulling them toward the ground–it’s all a vocabulary so structurally essential that it’s easy to forget one person created it.

But Martha@BAM is also a fascinating exploration of process, of the work of making art, and it’s here that it really shines. Kron’s Terry is a bit of a pedant, obsessed with a few key themes, particularly the way Graham conceives and constructs characters. Graham is obviously the focus here, but Kron’s performance should not be underestimated; you can see Terry’s need for intimacy with Graham shine through. (Pilar Limosner and Karen Young’s costumes, too, paint the characters: Terry’s brown suit and Graham’s red cape and stretch black velvet dress.)  But Graham’s answers are rich, wide-ranging, full of tales from her world travels and insight into the way she thinks as both choreographer and performer. Graham speaks almost as much as an actor as she does a dancer, discussing how she dives into her source material, how she finds characters through their desires and their animating ideas, and how she transmutes those into movement.

Another of Terry’s issues is how Graham’s characteristic movement vocabulary can be repurposed into the different modes of her work: comedy, Greek tragedy, American pastoral. Graham appears to find that question quizzical–like asking how the alphabet can be turned into so many different genres. This is her language, and it will serve however she chooses to deploy it. And to her, the genres aren’t really that different; she’s delving into womanhood–the different tragic heroines and her grandmother in Appalachian Spring. The gender-bending in the casting is never remarked on, but subtly underscores the points Graham makes about female ambition, rage, and desire.

Terry and Graham sit in a realistic island of chairs and end table dropped in the center of the BAM Fisher stage; around the margins, in pools of light picked out from the shadows, Cabeen and Chien-Pott perform. The most theatrical physical element is overhead: Donalee Katz’s lighting is a series of globes over Graham and Terry that start by subtly shifting color, then pulsing with plasma effects and becoming projection surfaces (designed by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo and Robert Montenegro) for additional dance sequences. I would have happily seen even more live dance, especially in interplay with the projections, which are more fragmented and partial and don’t give as clear a view of the movement.

At the end, Move gets up from the chair and begins to dance, just a little, moving slowly and with magisterial poise across the stage. In this moment, you feel both Graham’s innate skill and her aging body–and you’re reminded, once more, of her centrality to American dance. Move’s Martha series was at one point sued by the Martha Graham Entities, and the performances must carry a legal notice stating that “this event is in no way connected to or sponsored by” Graham’s heirs. It feels short-sighted–Move is keeping Graham present and vital. It’s a fitting tribute to the hundredth anniversary of the Martha Graham company.