Jose Limon.

Excerpts from a forgotten memoir.

In his own words

In the late 1960s, the great American modern dancer Jose Limon began recording his memories of life as a dancer and choreographer--the book that we excerpt below. His story began in Mexico, where he was born in 1908 and spent his early childhood, continued in the Mexican neighborhoods of the American Southwest, and ended in New York City, where he found both a home and his calling as an artist. He wrote on pads of yellow legal paper in pencil with few crossed-out words, as though the act of writing had released a flood of pent-up memories.

Limon's great mentor was Doris Humphrey. He began to study with her and Charles Weidman, her partner and collaborator, in 1929. She taught him to dance, tailored roles to his strengths, molded his personality, guided his earliest efforts as a choreographer, and edited his later ones. He adored her, and in his memoirs evoked her luminous presence again and again, calling her "a goddess, a nymph, a caryatid, a creature enamored of the air." Because the memoir ends in 1942, when Limon choreographed his first mature work, Chaconne, Humphrey, as much as Limon, is the star of this portrait of the artist as a young man.

Rambling through the past, Limon recalls a spellbinding performance by Martha Graham in the early 1930s. He writes of breadlines, happy summers spent at Bennington, and the "hunger" of dance lovers who drove hundreds of miles to see the Humphrey-Weidman company during its groundbreaking tours of the late 1930s. He reflects on Humphrey's debt to Denishawn as well as her struggle to break from it, her belief in "pure dance," and her desire to create an American dance language. He muses about the mask dancers wear in performance, artistic jealousy, the role of women in dance, and much more. Limon died in 1972.

The excerpts below are from Jose Limon: An Unfinished Memoir, published by Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England in the series "Studies in Dance History." Sensitively edited by Lynn Garafola, the volume includes the complete memoir (now a treasure of the New York Public Library's Dance Collection) as well as a charming recollection of the artist Miguel Covarrubias, who designed several of the works Limon choreographed in Mexico in the early 1950s, in addition to notes, a catalog of Limon's dances, and an introduction by Deborah Jowitt.

Birth, for a dancer, is like this. You put on a leotard, and trembling with embarrassment and terrible shyness, you step into the studio. Humphrey, a goddess, a nymph, a caryatid, makes you do things you have never done before. You stretch; you bend and flex your legs, your arches and torso, every muscle, tendon, nerve, vein, and artery--all of you, your whole entire you. You run, jump, and turn; you fall to the floor and rise again. From the piano where sits Pauline [Lawrence, Limon's wife] comes Bach and Chopin, Brahms and Henry Cowell. You pant, sweat, and hurt. You learn that you are. You learn that the past--the jarabes, the bullfights, the painting, the Mexican in you, the fearful passage to the land of the gringos, the wounds, the deaths--have been only a preparation for this new life. In a state of pure bliss I lived (somewhat lame from muscles unaccustomed to the rigors of dance exercises) for the moment I would return to the studio.

Very gradually I learned that [Doris Humphrey,] the radiant creature with the body of Botticelli's Primavera and the mass of red-gold hair flying behind her like a trail of fire as she leapt across the studio, had only recently left [Denishawn, 1917-28] the company of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. There had been some disagreements and unpleasantness. What they were I was to learn later. Just now the dressing room gossip focused on a newly found independence, a quest for new expression in dance. With her low yet commanding voice and coolly serene manner Humphrey would teach us both theory and practice. With tremendous lucidity she would explain the principles on which her technical exercises were based--breath suspension, fall and recovery, tension and relaxation, breath phrase, breath rhythm: always the breath. She moved like a gazelle. She was the wind, a wave rushing to break on a rocky shore, music and poetry, Ariel, Artemis, and Echo, a creature enamored of the air.

It was fortunate for me that her partner, [Charles] Weidman, was a totally different kind of artist. Humphrey was essentially a formalist. He, on the other hand, was an expressionist. In his classes all technical exercises were directed toward a kind of extended pantomime that had a puckish or comic flavor. Weidman himself was a superb mime and Clown, and there was a great deal of fun and laughter in his classes. Still, I found his objectives and methods painfully difficult, contrary to my natural seriousness; always, it seemed, I felt stupid and inept. But in the long run this was fine training for me and a good balance to the "pure dance" that was the basis of Humphrey's teaching.

Classes with Doffs and Charles [during the late 1930s] were always an adventure. Each artist would present us, each day, with a new horizon, a new challenge. They were both in full impetus as innovators. They were cutting themselves off from their past and that of all other dancers in history. That this took audacity of a high order there is no question. They were in quest of their identity. As both explained, when they were young they had studied the traditional disciplines. Later, with Denishawn, they had danced as Hindus, Burmese, Balinese, Japanese, Chinese, Spaniards, and other exotics, but never as they were, two young Americans. Now they were determined to find an American language in the dance. What this was they didn't know, but they aimed to find out. If necessary, they would invent one. This was precisely what was happening in their studio and in other studios in New York City. The great traditional orthodoxy was being questioned, challenged, and rejected. Luthers, Calvins, and Knoxes, they were heretics preaching a new freedom. Truth and salvation lay not in academicism but with individual conscience and interpretation. This ferment, this epidemic, this revolt had to have a name. It got stuck with one that was not only unimaginative but also inaccurate--modern dance. Yet no one has been able to find a better one.

At 9 East Fifty-ninth Street the quest consisted, besides the production of dances, of devising a new technique for training dancers. All the dogma of the ballet was either rejected out of hand or transformed or adjusted to new urgencies and concepts. The all-important barre was done away with, much as Protestant reformers did away with altars, statues, and crucifixes. The basic barre exercises were performed in the middle of the studio. Stretches were done standing or sitting on the floor. Nobody pointed his toes. The movements of the torso took on a new and crucial importance. Movements of the arms and legs began to be conceived of as having their source in the torso. Movement was no longer decorative, but functional. Dance was not something "pretty" or "graceful," nor was it composed of "steps." It had to dig beneath the surface to find beauty, even if this meant that it had to be "ugly." The elegant contours of ballet were twisted and distorted. There were no "poses"; instead, there were "patterns," "designs," and movements. Away with the debris of a decadent past: an austere, even stark, simplicity was in order.

To justify their revolutionary fervor and iconoclasm my teachers constantly pointed to the other arts, where an identical revolt had taken place, though much earlier. It was not only illogical but also absurd that dance should remain in the nineteenth century, when Debussy, Cezanne, Schoenberg, Ibsen, and Picasso, to name only a few, had catapulted the other arts into the twentieth. With the firebrand Isadora Duncan as their beacon, American dancers could do no less.

For some time Doris had talked about "pure" dance as a phenomenon to be discovered, invented, or both. The degradation of much of the dance that had moved Duncan to rebellion was due to the triviality and banality of its musical accompaniment. Doris railed at what she called the enslavement of dance not only to bad and stupid music but to any music. Her choreographic upbringing [in Denishawn, primarily with Ted Shawn] had been a conventional one, in which dance "steps" adhered quite literally to the dictates of the music. She was determined to liberate movement from this ancient tyranny. She began by eliminating musical accompaniment altogether. She was not the first dancer to do so. But she was the one to carry out this experiment on works of major proportions. Doris, being who she was, a person of tremendous resolution and determination, produced a formidable succession of works without music, including Color Harmony, Water Study, and Drama of Motion. This predilection for giving movement the freedom necessary to develop on its own terms was applied even to works with music. First, the work was choreographed; then she either found some preexisting music that seemed to suit the idea or invited a composer to view the piece and write a score for it.

Doris and Charles were, each in his own way, artists of genius. They were favored by nature and circumstance, and they were rich in talent. Denishawn had been a unique and magnificent nursery, primary and secondary school, and university in one. Those formidable beings who were Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn had nurtured, instructed, and given them discipline, that priceless ingredient without which there is no artistry. In the theater, when the curtain goes up, you either deliver or you sink into oblivion. For dancers especially, theater is a cruel and merciless discipline, and only the very strong, very talented, and very determined survive it. Doris and Charles went on endless tours with the Denishawn company for more than a decade; they did one-night stands in every state of the Union, in every town that had a railroad stop and a theater; finally, as a climax, they took part in a fabulous tour of the Orient that lasted eighteen months and included China, Japan, Indo-China, Siam, Burma, and India. These experiences molded and tempered them, enriched and readied them for independence.

I knew Charles Weidman for a decade, Doris Humphrey for three, and my wife, Pauline Lawrence, for even longer--up to the present [1968]. They never ceased to speak of their Denishawn experiences. The company left an indelible mark on their lives and their art. Even their rejection of its two masters proved ultimately to be a constructive and not a negative act in their emergence and growth as artists.

My first sight of Martha Graham was from the darkened wings of the Craig Theatre. I watched her spellbound dancing a sol(y--a dark woman, standing on a small pedestal, dressed in blood-red, addressing the universe, arms raised to the zenith. At the end of the solo came numerous curtain calls. She passed me breathless on her way to the dressing room. Presently, the stage manager came and told me that Miss Graham would not tolerate being watched from the wings. I slunk away. For years she remained a distant planet, forbidding and forbidden.

In the dance of our day there is no question as to the preponderant genius of women. Men are hard put to match the historic achievements of Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey. This is not to deny the stature of such male luminaries as Nijinsky, Fokine, and Harald Kreutzberg.

The American dance, as we know it, in the second half of the twentieth century, is largely the product of two titanic artists, both women and both completely feminine women. There is no justification whatever for the old bromide of a masculine mentality in the body of a female. For fifteen years the Graham company was composed entirely of women. With these young, superbly trained dancers, Graham created a miraculously expressive, technical vocabulary. This vocabulary was intensely, completely female, deeply rooted in the entrails, organs, and psyche of the female. It was used to compose a body of works unequaled in revelatory power, primordial rituals of mystical intensity celebrating an ancient, but consciously remembered, matriarchy. The male of the species, during this period, was not even remotely alluded to. He simply did not exist.

Early, very early in my life as a dancer, Doris, in one of her classes, in a discussion of art and the artist, mentioned that a dancer's movement was revelatory of the inner man, his nature and his spirit. "In the other arts," she told us, "you can hide behind words and facial expression. But it is impossible to deceive with the dance. The moment you begin to move you stand revealed for what you are." This admonition made a tremendous impression on me. It has followed me as a sort of artistic conscience throughout my long career....

Human movement and gesture can cross oceans and mountains, rivers and deserts, bridge national frontiers and parochialisms. When you consecrate yourself to be a dancer, spend your life sweating in the studio, and live obsessed with the things that bring new dances into the world--concept, costume, musical instrumentation, decor, lighting, accompaniment, rehearsals, and performance--yours is a heavy moral responsibility. If you fail the fellow human sitting in the darkened theater out front, you have failed indeed. You have experienced the true nadir of defeat.

Perhaps this is the reason for the visage, the mask, that dancers acquire and wear. I have seen it over the decades. Painters, musicians, and poets do not have it. Their effort, their artistic travail, is of another sort. The dancer's is that of the total man. The totality of his body, mind, and spirit goes into the crucible and is burned and tempered.

Doris Humphrey wore the mask of the most beautiful woman who ever lived. I saw that mask first when it was still young. But even then it was haunted. It was driven and tormented by furies and angels. Inherited from Puritan ancestors, from Elder Brewster himself, it came with too long and aquiline a nose, and in its proportions violated the conventional standards of beauty. But when Doris the dancer, tired, worried, worn, appeared in the arena, the mask was pure, translucent beauty.

For many years I have wrestled with this melancholy affliction [artistic jealousy]. I have fought it every step of the way with every scrap of rationality and good sense I could muster. But so insidious, so subtle is its attack that, before one is aware, it has undermined and overran the defenses, and one is at the mercy of a resentment--no, worse--a fear of another's excellence, and no jealousy engendered by the wiles of Aphrodite and Eros combined can compare to its abysmal torment. It is a creel and corrosive experience. Woe to him who abandons himself to it!

Our masters, Graham, Humphrey, and Weidman, were on good terms. They had known each other as young people at Denishawn. They were the product of its school. As established artists, leaders of a movement that was to change the art of the dance throughout the Western world, they behaved toward each other with propriety. On occasion, Doris or Charles were critical of Graham's work; always, however, they expressed their criticism with the utmost respect and admiration. Graham always took great pains to tell me of her generous appreciation of the work of my teachers. We, their disciples, not having their background, experience, or maturity, felt free to give vent to our jealousies and hostilities. We reveled in the fetid miasma and spent endless hours ridiculing the rival camp. We were young, passionate, inexperienced, and stupid.

No matter how formidable your talent and achievement, there are inevitably those who will dislike what you do, resent your success, and envy you. At the height of Doris's powers as a dancer and choreographer, when she was creating works of an artistic magnitude, formal integrity, and dramatic power never before seen in this country, a commentator in the New Masses denounced her as "a dancer having only the remnants of a once good technique" and her works as being those of a "decayed bourgeois." I, her staunch and dedicated partisan, found this a galling outrage, and was dumbfounded when my indignation was met by her cool and dispassionate rationality. "Anger is not the best response to criticism," she said. "One must examine it carefully and try to discover where that criticism may be justified. One must, and can, learn from one's enemies."

The Bennington summers [at Bennington College, in a modern dance festival that has continued to this day in Durham, North Carolina, as the American Dance Festival] became a way of life. It was accepted among us that we would be participants in one way or another. The Graham company would be in residence, then the Humphrey-Weidman company, and then the Hanya Holm company. It was a fine plan. Those of us not "in residence" would be teaching classes. The weeks in July and August were intensely busy. The vernal landscape and the humid heat did not intrude. They were only a background, seen and felt dimly. The sweat, the sore muscles, the violent exertion, the almost fanatic dedication were the only reality. Only on rare occasions would we venture into the outer world, and then with a feeling of guilt. There were expeditions into remote, enchanting valleys walled in by verdant hills, to towns and villages belonging to another century. I have never forgotten the breathtaking beauty of these places, the austere grace and simple elegance of cottage, mansion, church, barn, or bridge.

Doris and Charles knew the territory into which they ventured. Years of touring with Denishawn had given them an intimate acquaintance with it. Both had sprang from the inner core of the continent, Doris from Oak Park, Illinois, Charles from Lincoln, Nebraska. They knew that the cultural desolation was only a matter of surface, that there was a substratum of receptivity, appreciation, and even enthusiasm that awaited the artist.

To my amazement, I saw that dance lovers would drive hundreds of miles, sometimes in snowstorms, to attend a concert and afterward present themselves backstage to express their appreciation. There was a hunger in these people. Very often, in some college or university, a lecture-demonstration was held on the day or afternoon before a performance. Doris conducted this with masterful ease. She had a superb command of language and a presence of great simplicity and distinction. With utmost lucidity, she would discuss the origins and the essence of the modern dance, its principles and technique, its content and form.

The rest of us, in handsome costumes designed by Pauline for such occasions, would demonstrate. Both masters had devised ingenious studies intended to give the spectator unfamiliar with the dance a fairly good understanding of what we were all about. There were studies in physical technique, movement dynamics, spatial design, rhythm, and the great reservoir of dance gesture inherent in the human muscular system and in such familiar actions as walks, runs, leaps, falls, and turns. Doris would introduce and explain.

I used to enjoy these lecture-demonstrations and found them exciting to perform. They were infinitely instructive as well. Here was an intelligence of a very high order revealing its motives and processes. Listening to Doris I completed, so to speak, my higher education, something I had abandoned a decade earlier at the University of California. I was constantly impressed by the depth and breadth of her culture and the rationality and discipline of her thinking. She seemed to encompass so much not only with the mind but also with intuition and instinct.

There are things that one not only remembers but also cherishes with all fervor, for they are indispensable allies in the cruel yet splendid battle that artists must wage for their survival both as human beings and as artists. One of these is the moral support and regard of certain persons. For me Doris' regard was the "magnum desideratum." When my dance was ready, I showed it to her privately at the Studio Theatre. It was a long and demanding work. Performing a new dance is always exhausting, for one usually pushes too hard, and one's endurance is not ready to bear the double strain on the nervous system and the muscles. On concluding, I stood totally spent, and Doris was silent for a long time. Then, she left her seat, came to me, and said in her quiet voice, "This is one of the most magnificent dances I have ever seen. It is that for a number of reasons, but chiefly because it is a man dancing." I memorized these words, for I was to need them.