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Chronicle, according to the company’s press notes, “is a response to the menace of fascism in Europe.” A year before it was made, Graham refused an invitation to take part in the 1936 Olympic ceremonies held in Germany. In the dance, nine corps dancers and one soloist conquer an all-pervasive menace, becoming an all-female battalion the likes of which would have impressed WWII General George Marshall.

On September 15 and 22, Miki Orihara performed the all-important, silent-moving dancer. Then, like pedestrian foot traffic on a busy intersection, Orihara was joined by eight other identically, black-clad dressed women, whose aimless seeming floor patterns created a silent-struck city of fear. When Wallingford Riegger’s muscular orchestration commenced, however, the dancers’ arrived at their important destination: War, and they danced fearlessly. In 20 intensely lived minutes, Graham’s work builds to a fever pitch. With steps as basic as leaps and runs, the unrelenting buildup is reason why this 71-year-old dance remains timeless and unforgettable.

Chronicle, performed at 6 of the 12 performances at the Joyce Theater, has become a fitting metaphor for the company’s recent battles, which nearly destroyed it. In 2004 a two-week New York season put the company in $1M debt, bringing their overall deficit to $5M. Then long time artistic directors Therese Capucilli and Christine Daikon stepped down. Executive director Marvin Preston also left, after pushing for the overly ambitious season at City Center’s 2,753-seat theater. Now, at the company’s second 80th anniversary event (last year they were celebrating 80 years too), there is new leadership: Artistic director Janet Eilber, a former Graham dancer who lives part time in California, and executive director LaRue Allen, who helped the Trisha Brown Company establish its own center. Allen has almost single handedly brought the company’s debt down to $500,000. She has convinced presenters, whose most recent news about the company concerned their lawsuit with Ron Protas, to take a chance again on Graham. Protas, a sometime photographer who Graham named her heir in a wobbly-termed will upon her death in 1991, has been the company’s greatest nemesis. In the late 1990s, Protas argued that he owned the rights to the majority of Graham’s works and forbade the company from performing them. In 2001, a lawsuit ensued. A year later a New York federal district court judge settled in favor of the company, allowing them to perform almost all of Graham’s works again.

The dancers’ struggle to survive these battles can be seen in the faces of Orihara and other female principles. But this isn’t a tragedy. Graham dancers should resemble hardened and invincible heroines like the characters they play: Medea, Clytamenestra and Jocasta. That said Miki Orihara, Katherine Crockett, Elizabeth Auclair, Jennifer DePalo, Blakely White-McGuire and Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch are ferocious in their dedication to Graham’s work.

Orihara, who joined the company in 1987, is the troupe’s veteran. When she pounded her heel into the floor like a judge with a gavel in Chronicle, her expression was all Graham: Don’t mess with me. Jennifer DePalo, who joined the company in 1999 and who danced the lead in Chronicle, doesn’t have Graham’s dark-featured looks, but she has her power. DePalo stood at the top of Isamu Noguchi’s three-tiered sculpture, resembling an Olympic winner’s platform, and extended her leg like a fist into the sky. With her voluminous skirt, twice the length of her body, she later transformed into an angry butterfly. Pinned by the skirt’s weight, DePalo violently flapped her skirt upwards, revealing its blood-red underside.

Another blond, angelic-looking Graham dancer is Katherine Crockett. In Diversion of Angels, Graham’s 1948 abstract dance piece for three couples and corps, Crockett’s extended adagios didn’t look like anyone else’s dancing. Where Graham’s cubist configurations turn most performers into abstract angles, she undulated the choreography. Crockett, who joined the company in 2003 and who towers in height above the other dancers, is on to something. She is transforming the look of the repertoire with her sinuous long lines.

Elizabeth Auclair approached Graham from an entirely different perspective. Auclair, who joined the company in 1993, has arm muscles that would make a body builder proud. Petite and wiry, Auclair’s portrayal of the heroines in Graham’s 1947 works Night Journey and Errand into the Maze was performed with a physical rigidity that looks dated, but is nonetheless fascinating because no one moves this way anymore. When Auclair pounded her fists against her thighs in Errand, her body became so taut I could see her veins throbbing beneath her skin.

And what about the men? They exist, but Graham’s most interesting works have always been for herself and her female dancers. The men, however, get special attention in the area of their costuming. In Errand, David Zurak danced the role of Minotaur in briefs. In Night Journey, Tadej Brdnik as Oedipus wore black sequined underpants that a Go-Go dancer would covet. In Graham’s 1944 Appalachian Spring, Maurizio Nardi wore material, but he played the role of The Revivalist, a denouncer of earthly pleasures.

The other man on the stage drawing special consideration was choreographer Lar Lubovitch. On September 22, as the evening’s host, he spoke about taking Graham’s class in 1962 at Connecticut College. Then he described Graham’s feet: “Prehistoric utensils,” which were “shocking.” Years later, while reading Graham’s memoir Blood Memory, Lubovitch realized he had witnessed Graham’s “first death.” This death was her retirement from the stage, which occurred that summer.

Fortunately, this fall the Graham Company isn’t on a deathwatch. With new directors it has been given Phoenix-like life. Nonetheless, its future depends on the company’s ability to rekindle Graham’s repertoire. The same unbridled brilliance seen in Sketches from ‘Chronicle’ needs to infuse the rest of Graham’s body of work.