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Form as the Image of Human Perfectability and Natural Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Deborah Jowitt
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Extract

In 1954, when I was dancing in Harriette Ann Gray's company, Doris Humphrey (with whom Harriette had danced in the 1930s) invited us to see a run-through of the reconstruction of With My Red Fires she had staged with Juilliard students. Karen Kanner was an astounding six-foot-tall Matriarch. I remember sitting in a cramped studio of International House feeling not as if I were watching dance, but as if I were surrounded by forces on the verge of slipping out of control. The following year, Day on Earth was presented on one of the mixed bills Bethsabée de Rothschild sponsored at the ANTA theater. I think I remember (could it have happened?) Day on Earth and Cave of the Heart back to back! José Limón, Letitia Ide, and Ruth Currier performed; I thought it was the best modern dance I had ever seen (although I hadn't seen much and vastly preferred doing to watching).

Humphrey's Dawn in New York in 1956 galvanized me into auditioning for Juilliard Dance Theater—then a semi-professional company under Doris's direction, open to anyone. Accepted, I took Doris's composition course—her last, it would turn out. I had studied Modern Forms with Louis Horst, but I had also been taught to think of composing a dance in terms of locating a great emotional eruption within and running with it. Harriette Ann Gray had shown me the impulsive, ecstatic side of Humphrey-Weidman dancing and its potential for communicating feeling. Doris's guidelines for composing dances were refreshingly objective. I later came to see a slight rigidity in her viewpoint; much 1960s vanguardism would have fallen beyond her pale. At the time, I found it liberating.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Fall 1996 , pp. 22 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1996

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References

NOTES

1. Humphrey, Doris. Draft of a letter to Letitia Ide, 1930. Doris Humphrey Collection (Folder C280), New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York.

2. Langer, Susanne K.Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed front “Philosophy in a New Key” (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 175.Google Scholar

3. Humphrey, Doris. The Art of Making Dances (New York: Rinehart & Company, Ine, 1959), 22.Google Scholar

4. Humphrey, Doris. “What Shall We Dance About,” Trend, A Quarterly of the Seven Arts, (June-July-August 1932).Google Scholar Reprinted in Cohen, Selma Jeanne, Doris Humphrey: An Artist First (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 252.Google Scholar

5. Corbusier, Le. Toward a New Architecture, trans. Etchells, Frederick, from the thirteenth French edition (New York: Brewer and Warren, Inc. 1927), 1.Google Scholar

6. Humphrey, . The Art of Making Dances, 159.Google Scholar

7. Ibid.

8. Hambidge, Jay. The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (1919; reprint, New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1926), XIV.Google Scholar

9. Humphrey, Doris. Letter to her mother, dated August 30, 1927. Doris Humphrey Collection (Folder C267), Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York.

10. Hambidge, , The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry, 34–36.Google Scholar

11. Selden, Elizabeth. The Dancer's Quest: Essays on the Aesthetics of the Contemporary Dance (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1935), between pages 70 and 71.Google Scholar

12. Humphrey Doris. Doris Humphrey Collection (Folder M25). New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City, New York. Reprinted in Cohen, , Doris Humphrey: An Artist First, 240.Google Scholar

13. Cohen, , Doris Humphrey: An Artist First, 239.Google Scholar

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 240.

16. Ibid.