sarma

"Wow," said a young choreographer drifting back into the Juilliard Theater, "she really knew her stuff!" "She" was the late Doris Humphrey; we were watching Juilliard students perform revivals of four Humphrey works, The Shakers (1931), Day on Earth (1947), Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejiàs (1946), and Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (1938). Also within the past few weeks, the company of Humphrey's former partner, Charles Weidman, has presented part of her masterwork, New Dance, as well as some of his own important dances. This summer, the American Dance Festival at New London, Connecticut, will offer more Humphrey-Weidman revivals.

Choreographers of the new generation are picking their way through another dance rebellion-collecting those shards of past conventions which they consider still useful, throwing out everything else with the requisite blithe arrogance of revolutionaries. Their tousled choreography would probably appall Humphrey, but it's easy to understand why some of them admire her work-specifically that done during the thirties and earlier.

The same crowd of youngish artists had also flipped over the 1965 revival of Martha Graham's Primitive Mysteries (1931), and it was a crowd one seldom saw lining up to buy tickets for her latest dances. Humphrey's Water Study (1928), with its obstinate simplicity, natural unaccompanied rhythms, and flowing movement based on the cresting and breaking of ocean waves, seems more contemporary than the more complicated works that she made later for José Limón's company and Juilliard Dance Theatre.

The content of some of these early dances is not as exciting now as it must have been when the dances were first performed. During the thirties, Humphrey and Weidman like many other artists, developed huge social consciences. Humphrey was often didactic, even priggish, about what was good for mankind, but her stylishness, her theatricality got her message across with sweet strength to what was in those days a message-hungry audience. Through its many stylistic transformations, her theme remained the perfectability of mankind through the pursuit of noble ambitions. She and Weidman also pointed accusing or mocking fingers at bigotry, prejudice, and the pursuit of such unworthy goals as money, power, position. I'm thinking of her With My Red Fires, Theatre Piece, Life of the Bee; his Atavisms, Traditions. Over and over: down with the old and corrupt, up with the new and idealistic. It was a stirring and appropriate exhortation.

In the new Humphrey-Weidman dance tradition, movement reflected character and theme in a very graphic way, e.g., bigoted people were given rigid repeating patterns and often used their limbs stiffly. The heroic principal couple in New Dance lead the group in flying wedges and flowing processions toward the bright future. Today, we can look at New Dance as a serene and powerful suite of dances for men and women-as many members of the audience at the time may have, too. But if we read Margaret Lloyd's analysis of it in the Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, we learn that its formal patterns represented two leaders demonstrating the way to a Utopian society, gradually drawing the group with them, and then retreating into the democracy they had spawned, in order to show that they didn't aim to be dictators.

But it's not the heavy ideas that make me admire these early dances of Humphrey and Weidman. It's not even the impressive craft or the theatrical impact, it's the wonderfully uncompromising nature of their “new” movement vocabulary. I marvel at how anyone could have contrived to make whole dances in which nothing looked anything like ballet. Sometimes deliberate avoidance was necessary. When the dancers curved their arms overhead, they took care to face the palms of their hands frontward or to clasp their fingers so that no one looking at them would think they were executing ballet's 5th port de bras. When they held their arms out to the side, they spread their fingers as if to grab the brave new world. They pointed the arches of their feet, but let the toes relax and flip upward. When they kicked their legs to the front, they leaned their bodies back as a counterweight, and vice versa.

Unlike ballet dancers, they were interested in making effort a visible and dramatic element, in yielding to the tug of gravity. Following Humphrey's famous "fall and recovery" theory of motion, dancers could perform almost any movement in a precarious state of balance. I've never seen anything quite like this constantly leaning, suspending, failing style. The performers seem to be grasping for balance with an indrawing breath, even as their bodies are arching toward the floor. And in lyrical dances like Passacaglia, the thrusting, softly dangerous dancing is contained by the stately architectural patterns proper to an orderly society. Humphrey must have known everything that could be done in and expressed by - a line, a circle, a triangle, a square of dancers; and by using a set of large platforms, she was able to extend these patterns into vertical space.

Edwin Denby has written that the modern dancers of the thirties made dances that were like "a series of outcries." Every gesture had an emphatic thrust to it. Perhaps this was because, in the fierceness of their creation, they wanted no movement that wasn't vital to the composition. Later, they, and especially their followers, conceded somewhat to ballet and achieved a more fluid phrase shape by the addition of those unimportant-looking linking steps that enable ballet dancers to swoop pleasingly to the next big effect. They lost their infatuation with the ground and even began to work with lifts, which hitherto had been used sparingly-all but unthinkable in a society in which man and woman were to be equal partners. (Graham's art was sexier than Humphrey's right from the start.)

The pioneering work of Humphrey and Weidman exerted strong influence and later blended into that hectically acrobatic balletomodern style in which spectacle and weighty ideas fight for preeminence, in which a just raped woman can whip off a beautifully centered triple pirouette (albeit with a worried expression), or a newly born human being has everything to learn about life, but nothing to learn about high kicks. And so, today dance is into an interesting, often wrong-headed new revolution, in the midst of which some of the early dances of Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman have a desirable aura of integrity. Noble strangers who fought a good fight.