About midway through Martha Graham’s powerful Chronicle, performed last Saturday at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, I realized that the elevated platform at center stage was not just a platform but a highly stylized Olympic podium. It’s an important distinction. In 1936, Graham had been invited to participate in the Berlin Olympics, hosted under the aegis of the Third Reich. Rightfully declining, she instead channeled her feelings into a stunning suite of choreography that premiered later that same year. Almost 90 years later, with fascism once again on the rise across the world, that podium both harkens back to the inspiration for the piece and draws a continuous line to its present-day performance. What makes Chronicle so remarkable is the subtlety of its politics. It functions more as an evocation of war than a polemic.

“Spectre — 1914” opens the suite: a solo, unsettling piece performed with rigid movements suggesting a marionette manipulated into increasingly unnatural positions. It leads into my second-favorite work of the evening, the glorious “Steps in the Street,” where a mass of dancers, all attired alike, break apart and reform in different configurations at dizzying speeds while a single dancer in white fights the tide. The effect of collective despair and resistance is striking, further underscored by music that, in near-contrapuntal fashion, doesn’t so much accompany the dancing as march alongside it. The suite concludes with the stirring “Prelude to Action,” a plea for a new world so rousing that I felt myself pulled to my feet at its crescendo, helpless against the forces that drew my hands together to clap and my voice to cheer along with the delighted audience.

GRAHAM100 opens with Diversion of Angels, first performed in 1948—an abstract depiction of three variations on love: romantic, mature, and adolescent, each with distinct tempos and energy. Twisting themselves into impossibly precise geometric patterns, the dancers whirl and crash with exhilarating intensity. “The two in white in the back look like a Kandinsky painting,” I whispered to my friend. Feeling smug, I later discovered that Wassily Kandinsky was indeed the primary inspiration for the piece. Look at a random Kandinsky canvas and you’ll get a sense of the performance’s degree of difficulty.

Lamentation, 95 years after its premiere, remains astonishing. Performed almost entirely seated by a woman encased in a tube of purple fabric, the dancer contorts and twists, pushing against the boundaries of her encasement. A representation of the grieving process—or, to some, the personification of grief—for me it reaches even further, tapping into a primal sorrow constrained and struggling to burst free. It is akin to abstract sculpture that speaks in a private, wordless language.

The program also features En Masse by Hope Boykin, set to a recently uncovered Leonard Bernstein sketch purportedly composed for Graham and expanded with sections of Bernstein’s MASS, along with new arrangements and additional music by Christopher Rountree. Commissioned for the anniversary, the piece turns conceptually on its title: dancers perform both constrained to each other with blue elastic bands and completely unfettered, sometimes shifting between the two within a single vignette. One interpretation sees the bands as psychological impediments and their removal as liberation; another reads them as shackles of conformity yielding to individuality. In either case, despite spirited dancing, the vignettes don’t quite click—individually or en masse. The work leans too heavily on the music to supply emotional weight, and while there are gorgeous passages, the overall impression is of something not fully formed.

Perhaps that’s unfair to Boykin. Sandwiched between Lamentation and Chronicle, En Masse inevitably suffers by comparison. Given the towering stature of those two works—still as powerful and moving now as they were nearly a century ago—Boykin is in a no-win situation. Taken on its own terms, however, it remains an inventive homage to one of the great artists of the 20th century.

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