GOINGS ON

The Martha Graham Dance Company won’t officially turn a hundred until 2026, but it’s starting the party early with multiple centennial seasons. The theme of the first, at City Center, is “American Legacies.”

The program includes two classics of nineteen-forties Americana: “Appalachian Spring,” Graham’s modernist masterpiece with its sound-of-America Aaron Copland score, and a revival of “Rodeo,” Agnes de Mille’s more conventional Western-themed breakthrough, with its Copland score rearranged for a bluegrass band. These are answered with a première by Jamar Roberts, formerly with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and now freelance. His “We the People” is a protest dance, alternating between struggles in silence and frontal assaults, with fists raised, propelled by the banjo and fiddle music of Rhiannon Giddens, who is known for reclaiming the legacy of Black string bands. It includes much of the America that the other works left out.—Brian Seibert (New York City Center; April 17-20.)

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