Dancer and choreographer Martha Graham held her first-ever performance April 18, 1926, in New York City, and as her groundbreaking work reshaped the world of dance in the decades that followed, she and her dance company became known as a cherished part of that city’s art scene.

A quarter-century after her death, the Martha Graham Dance Company remains an acclaimed institution even as the early origins of its founder in Southern California grow faint.

“People don’t realize Los Angeles is the birthplace of American modern dance,” says Janet Eilber, the artistic director of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance since 2005, on a recent call. “They really don’t realize that.”

But Graham, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1894, spent her teen years in Santa Barbara, where her family had moved when she was 14. She saw her first dance performance in Los Angeles in 1911, by Ruth St. Denis, and soon after started studies with St. Denis.

All of which makes the return of Graham’s dance company to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa on Saturday, as part of the troupe’s centenary celebration, a homecoming of sorts.

“She moved to Santa Barbara from Pittsburgh and it really was such an elemental change in terms of space and light,” says Eilber, who danced in Graham’s company for most of the ’70s. “She talked about how intoxicating the light in Santa Barbara was to her, and she would just run and run and spin.

“We see this throughout her career,” she says. “This contrast, if you think of Pittsburgh as the dark coal town that it was, and the repression of society. She’s often doing ballets about repression and the freedom of the individual. I think that the move in her early teens just spurred that whole belief that she carried through her entire life.”

At the Denishawn School of Dancing in Los Angeles, formed by St. Denis and dancer Ted Shawn, Graham learned an early style of American dance, one that still embraced the influences of dance culture from around the world.

“That’s what Martha broke away from finally,” Eilber says. “She wanted us to have our own form of movement. In that first concert in 1926, about half that program is very derivative of Denishawn. But there are several of her works on that program. One’s called ‘Revolt’; one is called ‘Immigrant Steerage Strike.’

“You can see her getting her head around the social, political, what was happening in America and how it might be physicalized,” she says. “Then you get a few years later a couple of her masterpieces, ‘Heretic’ in 1929, and ‘Lamentation,’ the famous solo, in 1930.

“I would say that was really the shot heard around the world that modernism had arrived in dance, and she had stripped away all sorts of decoration, all fantasy entertainment, and gotten down to what she called ‘the thing itself.’ ”

Mixing old and new

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Graham’s first performance, the dance company programmed three seasons of performances, titled Graham100, that feature works choreographed by Graham during her lifetime and new commissioned pieces by younger choreographers.

In Costa Mesa, the classic works will include “Appalachian Spring,” one of Graham’s best-known works, and “Immediate Tragedy,” a solo piece from 1937 that until a few years ago was thought to have been lost.

“Appalachian Spring,” which premiered in 1944, is a signature work for Graham in part because of the strength of her creative partners on the ballet, Eilber says.

“I think the combination of the collaborators — Aaron Copeland creating the music, Martha sending him a scenario, and then the artist and designer Isamu Noguchi contributing in his way” to the production design, she says. “These were all leaders in the revolution of the arts in America, and so they all had a particular desire to create uniquely American forms of expression.

“All that came together, each of them having a very particular and unique relationship with World War II,” Eilber says, noting that Noguchi had only recently been released from an internment camp. “They wanted to create a work about American optimism, determination, hope for the future. And I think they succeeded with that urgency of need for the country to believe in a better future.”

“Immediate Tragedy,” which Graham had created for herself to dance, was inspired the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish women fighting fascism alongside men. Its choreography, music and costume design were thought lost.

“We’re always looking for that film that’s in somebody’s attic, and throughout our years that has happened,” Eilber says. “We brought back ‘Steps in the Street’ by a film that just emerged, so we’re always keeping an eye open. ‘Immediate Tragedy’ was on that list but we just didn’t feel like we had enough material.”

Then, six or seven years ago a man contacted the dance company to ask if it wanted several rolls of still photographs of a Graham performance he’d found in his late father’s personal effects. “We said, ‘We sure would!’ ” Eilber says. “His father, Robert Frazier, was dating one of Martha’s dancers, and they allowed him to sit in the front row of a theater in 1937 and photograph the performance. So we suddenly had contact sheets of 25 or 30 photos of ‘Immediate Tragedy,’ which meant we not only had the poses, but they were in the correct order.

“For those of us who have the Graham technique in our body, they’re fluent in this language,” she says. “Our guesses at where those poses were leading, what the next move was, or what the move was to get into the pose — it’s not just intellectual; you have a physical feeling.”

Two newer pieces include the 2024 dance “We the People,” which was choreographed by Jamar Roberts to music by Rhiannon Giddons, and the 2022 dance “Cave,” created by choreographer Hofesh Shechter.

Meeting Martha

Graham died in 1991 at age 96, and as the years pass, fewer and fewer people who knew her remain. Eilber, though, was a high school student in 1969 when a teacher at Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan suggested she go to New York City and audition for Graham.

“I didn’t really know who she was,” Eilber says. “I mean, I knew she was a famous dancer. I came and I danced this solo I’d prepared for her. And she was incredibly kind. Told me that if I came to her school I’d be in the advanced class.”

Graham also sensed that Eilber’s parents wanted her to go to college, and she suggested Eilber enroll at the Juilliard School in New York, where many of her best dancers also taught. “I went to Juilliard the next year and was required to take the Martha Graham technique,” she says. “And really didn’t get it. Skipped all my Graham classes my freshman year. I had to discover New York. I had a lot of other things to do. I had to cram for my juries.”

But in her sophomore year she was cast in Graham’s “Diversion of Angels,” and “the light bulb went off,” Eilier says. “I realized that this physical vocabulary would allow me to be anything and do anything. It was a total physical form of expression. Emotional expression, power, individualism, self-expression, all those things.

“And in the next year I was taken into the company, my junior year.”

From 1972 through 1980 she had a full-time contract with the company, and though she left around then to pursue acting, she returned often as a guest artist.

“Martha was totally engaging, 100% engaging at all times,” Eilber says. “It was like you had your antenna up at all times because you felt her focus was so deliberate and so intentional. And she expected you to be delivering 100% at all time. She could tell when you were faking it.

“One of the first things she said to me, at one of the early rehearsals with her, she literally told me I had to get my head on straight,” she says. “Because I had a nice tip to my head that I thought was a beautiful position. And she recognized it as a default position. That I wasn’t putting any intention into it. It was just like a beautiful placeholder.

“And she called me out and wanted my head on my spine connected to the core of my body, my emotions. That was just the beginning.”

An American form

The kind of physicality Graham demanded of herself and her dancers is a key part of what changed modern dance into what it remains today, though her concept of dance was much larger than that, too.

“She said she wanted to reveal the inner landscape,” Eilier says of Graham’s intent as a young dancer and choreographer. “She was looking for a way of moving that would reveal the human condition. What you were thinking, what you were feeling.

“Before Martha was escapist, fantasy, vaudevillian. Imaginary swans, princes, queens, kings. Imaginary gods and goddesses from other culture,” she says. “She wanted to find a true American form of expression.”

The Graham technique that confused Eilber as a Juilliard freshman was built around the idea of contraction and release. “The contraction is an exhale and a great coiling into your interior,” she says. “The release is an inhale and explosion of energy from the core, opening up and sending power through the arms and legs and head. It’s literally a very gutsy way of moving.

“It’s the opposite of classical ballet,” Eilber says. “If you think of classical ballet, they want to defy gravity. They’ve always wanted that illusion of being lighter than air, up on their toes. Impossible.

“She wanted dancers to leverage themselves against the earth to show effort. To show the effort of being a conscious human being.”