In the 1954 movie White Christmas, an Irving Berlin no-people-like-show-people musical that should be a cult classic but is more often labeled kitsch (it’s that Santa Claus finale complete with pre-teens in tutus doing bourrées under the tree), there’s a send-up of Martha Graham that is one of the best send-ups in dance history. The number, choreographed by the Broadway eminence Robert Alton, is called “Choreography,” and it’s sung by Danny Kaye, hilarious in geeky-beatnik garb: black turtleneck, black floods, black beret—eyeliner!—he’s Cecil Beaton doing Sartre. Kaye doesn’t perform alone. He’s surrounded, swarmed, by a corps of barefoot girls in sackcloth shifts, their ponytails swinging like tribal rites. While he warbles, “Chicks/ Who did kicks/ Aren’t kicking anymore, they’re doin’ choreography,” the girls create tight little fire escapes around him, all knees and elbows, feet flexed and faces fraught. They move to a machine-age theme that’s as angular and percussive as they are, stampeding Kaye who’s doing his absurd, angular best to blend in yet looks like the silly grasshopper amid socialist-realist ants. Never mind that Graham didn’t call herself a choreographer, “a big, wonderful word,” she said in 1989, “that can cover up a lot of sins. I work. That’s what I call what I do when I make dances.” Alton’s point exactly: in Graham the serious stuff, sin for instance, was uncovered, up front.

Martha Graham always called herself “a dancer” because it was