Tim Wengerd; Premier Graham Dancer

Tim Wengerd, a devotee of Martha Graham, a leading interpreter of her works and a dancer who spent much of the last five years choreographing performances aimed at calling attention to the scourge of AIDS, has died of that illness at his Albuquerque, N.M., home.

The New York Times reported in its Friday editions that he had died Sept. 12 at age 44.

Called by celebrated dance critic Walter Terry the “most valuable and versatile” dancer in the Graham company, Wengerd more recently had been conducting workshops throughout the country, including several in San Diego, where he had become the West Coast guru of the Graham movement.

“I guess I can’t get away from Martha,” he said half-seriously in one recent interview, even as he was preparing a concert of his own solo works at San Diego State University.

From 1973 until he left her company in 1982, Wengerd danced virtually every leading male role in that repertory, enchanting audiences with his technique, intensity and physical attractiveness.

In 1985, Los Angeles Times dance writer Eileen Sondak said Wengerd’s own work showed touches of Graham, “but it also reflects a quiet rebellion from the brand of angst-filled psychodrama he learned from the acknowledged goddess of modern dance.”

The inspiration for Wengerd’s own stark works--some of which utilized bones and sparse body coverings--came from his roots in New Mexico, where he first studied dance with Elizabeth Waters. He combined the elements of mountains and deserts with African dress “to connect with the past.”

The music for those movements came from taping “the sound of clacking rocks and wind inside the (New Mexico) cave.”

He coupled such avant-garde phenomena as “The Bone Cantata” with tranquil interpretations of Brahms, balancing that with John Cage’s “Four Sonatas for Prepared Piano.”

Wengerd came to national attention when he toured in the late 1960s with the Repertory Dance Theater of Utah, a group he helped found in 1966, three years before graduating from the University of Utah.

He was born in Massachusetts and raised in Albuquerque, where his father was a geologist. After studying with Waters, he danced in Utah while attending college and at the same time pursued an interest in choreography that had surfaced in high school. In 1982, Wengerd went to Europe, where he taught and performed his own works and became an assistant director of the Paris Opera Ballet’s modern dance troupe. He then went to Tanzania for the State Department and returned to the United States to appear in solo concerts, rare in the ballet world, and in Martha Clarke’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Last fall he appeared in San Diego in his “Free Among the Dead,” which he called a response to the AIDS epidemic.

“People I’ve danced with have died from AIDS,” he said in an interview in connection with the four-concert series. “I’m more alive when I’m dancing than any other time, and it’s easy to translate my experience with AIDS into dance.”

He observed at that time, however, that he didn’t have the disease.