The Martha Graham Company is back. But it’s been away long before the legal dispute that shut the doors. “In fact, this famous troupe, the oldest dance company in America, had been in trouble long before [heir Ron] Protas took over. Graham, who was born in 1894, choreographed for sixty-five years, but she was in top form for only the first half of that run. In the nineteen-fifties she slipped into despair and alcoholism. Eventually, she stopped going to the studio. The dancers ran the company. Later she dried out, and came back, but on the arm of Protas, whom many of the dancers and staff found impossible to work with. Some quit; others were fired. Year by year, the company consisted of increasingly young people facing, without the old-timers’ guidance, increasingly serious problems: debt, dissension, cold reviews, defecting funders.”