by Leigh Witchel
There’s something so forthright but simple about the way José Limón built his work, like a cathedral made out of plywood. The season of the company that he founded in tandem with his teacher Doris Humphrey happened right during election week, and much of the audience was shell-shocked. Artistic Director Dante Puleio thanked us for even coming out. Ironically, the program began with Limón’s response to McCarthyism.
Limón’s 1954 work, The Traitor, used the story of Judas and Jesus as a metaphor for betrayal, and what leads someone to it. Set to a recording of Gunther Schuller’s Symphony for Brass and Percussion, it was touted as being done with mixed-gender casting for the first time. Barbara Erin Delo’s costumes, from 2020, which were tight but opaque flesh-toned tops and loose pants, and adapted easily to whomever danced.
The tallest man in the company, Joey Columbus, backed in running in front of a simple, evocative arch by Paul Trautvetter. A conspiratorial group gathered, doing heavy steps and slow balances with angular arms: contractions as a question, with someone else’s hand giving an angry retort.
MJ Edwards, as Jesus, waited apart from the others before thay were brought in, raised. Nicholas Rusica, who played Judas, entered, then went to the ground, curling and reaching to begin a solo, rotating on his hand and knee before collapsing in the half-light. Interesting that Limón had both Jesus and Judas enter late. It took time to pick the main players out from the crowd.
Limón didn’t set off fireworks; he told the story, with a straightforward narrative and straightforward vocabulary. In both works on the program with religious themes, a lot of people got raised in exaltation. Still, there was one moment of pictorial genius when the group brought out a white rectangular cloth and held it taut lengthwise to form a table for The Last Supper. That was the biggest fireworks of the evening; a great stage picture appearing from nothing. After, the group held the cloth laterally and interlocked arms to morph the stage painting from Rembrandt to Leonardo.
Rusica and Edwards danced together; Rusica then took the cloth, and in its final transformation wrapped it around Edwards’ torso and arms to create a robe. The cast who played disciples now waited in the arches as guards. Rusica kissed Edwards and the guards took Jesus off, raising him once again as another guard handed Judas his rope.
In 1954, Limón was holding to an idea of narrative that Balanchine weaning dance away from, though coincidentally in 1954 Balanchine was working all over the map, from one of his most expressionist works, the now-lost Opus 34, to the Gothic Ivesiana to Western Symphony’s Americana and his most durable narrative ballet, his production of The Nutcracker.
Created by Limón the following year, Scherzo has an episodic history. It started as a study for Limón’s students at Julliard, but wasn’t seen again until a reconstruction made from a film and Hazel Johnson’s score was performed in early 1981. It again slipped out of repertory and was again resurrected by Puleio this year, with music performed live by Douglas Perkins, who played an entr’acte first.
Columbus, Johnson Guo and Eric Parra entered, bare-chested in drawstring pants, smiling. The men were kept very busy this show, which seemed more like the reason for gender-neutral casting than any other. The three danced to the percussion in unison; it gave the sense the piece might have been choreographed on a single dancer.
Every step swept and swirled into the next, more than anything, that organic quality was the hallmark of both Limón and Humphrey. The men did shuffling runs across the stage with the arm curling overhead, before Kieran King entered in shivering steps (something you also saw Limón use frequently) and raising a drum. King danced alone, doing handstands, slapping his chest, then the drum, which brought the other men back in for a playful encounter.
Each man hit the drum in turn, then did a shivering stamp, handing off and tossing the drum. The men clapped, reminiscent of but bigger than flamenco palmas, and King acted almost like a jester or joker, both teasing and instigating. They all clapped as they left to close the brief piece, leaving one man to toss the drum into the wings.
In a program that moved away from casting men, Scherzo was a keyhole into how Limón saw men and male dancing. Masculinity has been suspect for a while now, with both justification and backlash. It was nice to see it playful and innocent.
The company showed a new work, The Quake that Held Them All by Kayla Farrish. Farrish, whose late training was at the University of Arizona and has since worked freelance in New York City, named as inspiration two lost Limón works.
The recorded score by Alex MacKinnon started with percussion. Farrish set a large group, racing around in a dark and smoky environment. The women jumped into the men’s arms; the men spun them. MacKinnon’s score went from a cacophonous jazz riff to a low beat.
Like Limón’s work, there was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality about the performance of Quake, almost as if that were a company style. But you didn’t see Limón’s coherence. A solo at the front happened as the others slowly clumped, then the cast formed communally, making a circle with folks confronting others or entering and leaving. This picked up to a thumping beat. One thing in Quake that marked it as of our time was that pulse.
Two women crawled and carried one another, finally melding into another clump that formed at the side. This moved into a series of entries and freakouts as the score segued into acid rock, then back to a beat for a trio. Both the score and the dance had short attention spans. The music then flipped the channel to Mexican guitar; everyone gathered facing back, stamping their feet, and a slowly growing contingent rolled and surged on the ground.
There wasn’t much in the way of logic up to this point, so why not have the dancers start talking? Again, there was a cacophony, this time of mostly incoherent ranting, in which a few statements could be picked out. “Can anybody see that?” The speaking amplified to screaming. “It’s not my fault!” A drum roll became a solo for Columbus, while everyone else freaked out. Quake pulled into a final coherent tableau almost out of nowhere with the cast gathering, pulling one another and pulsing.
Farrish’s notes name as inspiration the works Limón did in Mexico City, migrants and revolution. Except for the snippets of Mexican music, none of that made it across the footlights. Limón’s work may seem almost naively straightforward, but it was also comprehensible. Quake was a patchwork of a dance that felt as if Farrish were throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck.
Doris Humphrey’s Two Ecstatic Themes, first done in 1931, was a short solo that felt in its brevity and compactness like a salon work. It was done to two piano pieces, played live by Michael Scales: the first, by Nikolai Karolovich Medtner, the second, Gian Francesco Malipiero. The solo clearly illustrated the movement theory of fall and recovery that gave both Humphrey’s and Limón’s work its look.
Even without consulting the program, the titles of the two short sections, Circular Descent and Pointed Ascent, would have made perfect sense. Jessica Sgambelluri began standing, arching back with her arms rounded, moving as if water flowing on a natural path. Everything felt as if you could trace imaginary circles or loops. She stopped before hinging to the floor, which began the next, brief theme, heading in the opposite direction for one last sudden reach skywards as the abrupt and surprising finish.
Humphrey and Martha Graham were both in the Denishawn company, and the short solo was a look back at a point when modern dance began to develop theories of movement. There was a hint of a contraction in Humphrey’s work as well.
The evening ended with Limón’s Missa Brevis, made in 1958 after Limón had toured to Poland under the auspices of the State Department. He was moved by their resilience even as the country was still showing the scars of war more than a decade after World War II. It’s likely why he chose Zoltán Kodály’s Missa Brevis in Tempore Belli as the score despite it being Hungarian, not Polish. The mass was first performed in Budapest in 1945 in a bombed-out church. Ming Cho Lee’s set, which referenced that, wasn’t used, instead the production opted to remove the soft goods at The Joyce, exposing the brick walls and alcoves, making them glow through lighting in a site-specific design.
The organ on the recording rumbled to start, and in smoke and haze, a clump of dancers stared upwards. Bloodlines: Limón’s opening tableau was very similar to Alvin Ailey’s at the opening of Revelations. A similar subject matter, a similar hope of a better future.
Eric Parra, called The Outsider, watched the crowd, augmented by dancers from Limón2, as the company swayed and bent. This casting was also gender-neutral, as Lauren Twomley alternated as The Outsider, and some women danced with or were clothed like the men. Again, that felt less like a comment on gender and more like stretching resources.
Using a mass gives a clear, straightforward structure, something that seemed very natural in what we saw of Limón. Still, Lord help you if you weren’t Catholic and didn’t know by the order of a mass by heart. There were at least three fakeouts where the lights dimmed in what could have been an ending.
Like Revelations, Missa Brevis divided into smaller groups. Three women danced the Kyrie. The Outsider returned for Qui Tollis. As in The Traitor – or Revelations – there was something satisfying in how clear and user-friendly Limón’s work was. At first Missa Brevis was straight-up exaltation. There was nothing that would throw you off, but Limón, again, also set off very few fireworks. In purpose the dance seemed like church paintings or stained glass, which are similarly didactic, but with more dazzle.
Parra exited at the opening of the Credo, ceding the stage to a female trio. A woman shivering in prayer entered from the back for Cum Sancto Spiritu and was raised supine by the men into darkness. Continuing in exaltation, Limón had the dancers hold their fists arced above their heads like Gothic arches. The mass continued through the Hosanna and Benedictus (Missa Brevis was only brief if you’re Catholic) with women lifted and the lights dimming. In the Agnus Dei, Parra flagellated himself in front of group holding hands in semi circle. At “dona nobis pacem” Limón created another trio. A difference from Revelations, Limón less illustrated the lyrics than the overarching mood: Prayer or Spirituality. The lights went out on Parra pleading in a contraction. The work closed with the large cast assembling, racing, falling, reaching into a circle before coming to the opening pose on a slow silence before the curtain fell.
The simple openness of Missa Brevis, and even The Traitor, which was more explicit in its message, seemed mild. Still, if Limón wasn’t radical, he was politically and historically aware, and that provides important context for his work.
We’re firmly in a custodial era in dance, having to decide what we do with the legacy of the 20th century as well as creating a legacy for the 21st. Looking at Graham, Paul Taylor and also Limón, to say nothing of Ailey and Balanchine, the toughest questions are how to keep their companies alive. What portion should be the founder’s work, how much should be new? We’ve gotten to see a range of answers in different situations, but only time will determine the right ones.
copyright © 2024 by Leigh Witchel
The Traitor, Scherzo, The Quake that Held Them All, Two Ecstatic Themes, Missa Brevis – Limón Dance Company
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
November 8, 2024
Cover: Limón Dance Company in The Traitor. Photo © Kelly Puleio.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
