NEW YORK, NY.- The return of Martha Graham Dance Company to the Joyce Theater on Tuesday was timed to celebrate a birthday: The company, America’s oldest, turned 97. “We’re feeling frisky for our age,” Janet Eilber, the group’s artistic director, said in remarks before the show. And in the first of several programs distributed across a two-week run, this august institution certainly seemed like it was trying very hard to look younger.

The season’s two premieres are by young choreographers, nearly beginners. These works aren’t bad, but the association with Graham does a lot more for the fledgling dance makers than their efforts do for the company or for Graham’s legacy. Maybe they can attract younger audiences (they had young fans in the packed house Tuesday), but as has often been the case in recent years, the choice of choreographers is baffling. The results aren’t just disappointing; they dissipate any sense of identity. Who is the Graham company trying to be?

In Annie Rigney’s “Get Up, My Daughter,” the strongest feature is the music: mostly Bulgarian folk songs intoned by astonishing female voices in the manner of the famous compilation album “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.” To these powerful sounds — quite Graham-like in their blurring of the ancient and the avant-garde — five women slump around on their knees, rising for solo bursts only to sink back down in rolling, swirling patterns. Even as a vision of debilitating grief, it’s oddly limp.

In the middle, a male dancer (Richard Villaverde) arrives and the music changes to a piece by Marco Rosano, featuring countertenor Andreas Scholl. One of the women, So Young An, slumps on Villaverde. It’s as if she can’t stand on her own, but it also seems like he’s holding her back. The other women reappear, mirroring her, caught in the same eddies: an ambiguous image of female solidarity.

In the end, the Bulgarian voices return, and the man joins the women in jellyfish-like movement. These daughters finally get up, holding hands and rushing forward, but nothing in the dance comes close to matching the intricate yet implacable force of the Bulgarians, much less Graham’s example. It’s more of a pale reflection of “Deo,” the women-grieving piece that Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith made for the company in 2019. (Like Smith, Rigney is trained in Ohad Naharin’s technique, Gaga; she also performed in “Sleep No More,” which Doyle choreographed.)

“Cortege 2023,” by the choreographic duo Baye & Asa, resembles “Deo” in its lighting scheme, a series of images and blackouts (expertly handled by Yi-Chung Chen). But this work has a different theme. A voice-over intones: “In times of extreme violence, not even the most powerful or innocent may escape.” The images that flash are of the wounded, of torture, maybe even of cannibalism.

The title alludes to “Cortege of Eagles,” a 1967 Graham work that focused on the disfiguring grief of Hecuba and the Trojan women after the defeat of Troy. The characters in that piece included Charon, the ferryman to the underworld, and this is the figure that Baye & Asa borrow.




Their work begins with a lumpy sheet, which is pulled away to reveal a procession of bodies, presumably a cortege of the dead. It ends with the cortege re-covered, presumably to show, as Graham did in her way, the vicious cycle of violence.

Graham’s way, even in the minor and dated “Cortege,” was complex. What Baye & Asa present is much simpler, but it looks a lot cooler to contemporary eyes. That must be the appeal. The flashing images resemble the trailer for a film or a news feed scrolled through hastily. The dance sections have an aggressive speed, an up-to-date physicality and a jagged, whip-around attack that are exciting — like flashes in a pan.

On Tuesday’s program, these premieres were sandwiched by meatier Graham works. Although “Dark Meadow” came in the form of “Dark Meadow Suite,” a selection of highlights that strip away the work’s structure and meaning, the movement invention still pops, even in an underpowered performance.

And “Cave of the Heart,” Graham’s take on Medea, is still a thriller of inexorable force. Xin Ying is an excellent Medea, icy in her murderous rage, and Anne Souder is even better in the crucial role of the one-woman Chorus, aware of what’s coming yet powerless to stop it. There is nothing like that role — its challenging theatricality, its sense of tragedy — in this season’s premieres. The absence isn’t tragic, but it is telling.

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Martha Graham Dance Company

Through April 30 at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.