sarma

Looking back through the crazy-quilt dance calendars I make for myself, I see scribbled on the margins of most of them: "Charles: every Sunday, 7:30." In my hand I have a flyer announcing performances by Charles Weidman and his Theatre Dance Company on July 20 and July 27. But Charles, who had always liked surprises in dance, surprised us one more time, by dying - the day after his performance on July 14, Sunday evening, at 7:30.

Charles loved to make people laugh. I felt apologetic about the tears. But I suspect that many of us who wept for him did so, in a sense, because we had taken it for granted that he would always be around gabbling his charming and almost unintelligible spoken program notes to audiences sweating in his tiny (seating maybe 20?) Expression of Two Arts Theatre; performing his wonderful kinetic pantomimes; occasionally dancing, his 73-year-old feet in black ballet slippers, looking light and small and stiff-as if they had regressed to some touching second childhood of footdom.

Sometimes he would telephone me. "Hello," he would say, in a cheerful, newsy voice, "This is Charles." (And, of course, no modern dance person would need to answer, "Charles who?") And he would tell me what he and his loyal young company were going to do next-a revival of one of his important dances, or maybe a new work. And we'd chat for a while, my ear straining to extract historical import from what always sounded like a string of non sequiturs, but was undoubtedly a genuine stream of consciousness: "And Doris (Humphrey) always said she thought it was my best work ... but that was before the Lewisohn Stadium thing ... and Katy (Manning? Litz ? Don't try to stop him now.) I remember, tripped over her, uh, dress, you know those jersey dresses had to be just the right length, or else.... Miss Ruth really knew how to manage drapery. Kids these days don't take the time to figure out that kind of thing. Anyway ... my kids are dancing beautifully, I think, and I hope you'll come because I think you'd be interested. “Everything all right with you?"

Actually, I've been crying - as inconspicuously as possible - for Charles ever since I first saw him. I missed the heyday of the HumphreyWeidman company when Charles was young and noble-looking, his supposedly lean and incisive style a splendid foil to Doris's lyrical one. When I met him in the mid-'50s, he was embattled and not admitting it. A little earlier, he had hit bottom financially, artistically, and spiritually. During the late '40s, Doris's crippling arthritis finally put an end to her career, and she began to function as artistic director of the José Limón Company. Without her to point out the straight-and-narrow of art, Charles gradually skidded downhill-helped by bad friends, unwise decisions, and a very large thirst for alcohol. But by 1955 or 1956, he had successfully passed through AA and was trying in the most humble way possible to keep on working in dance. On weekends in Viola Essen's studio in Carnegie Hall we performed a lecture-demonstration, his The War Between Men and Women, some of his wonderful Thurber fables, Flickers (in which, as a fiercely intent Valentino in a flapping sheik headdress, he tangoed his partner right up the wall). The company, as I remember, consisted of a few old pros, some sardonic young men who had stayed loyal but weren't happy, several sweet-tempered, soft-muscled older women, and a couple of very young girls. Once Doris Humphrey came to see a performance, and he introduced her to the tiny audience (even, I think, remembering to add her last name), asked her if she would sit by the wall so she could man the one little switch that controlled all our lighting, and then took some time trying, as clearly as he could, to tell her when to turn it on and off. Someone must have been sick that night. Someone was always sick.

During the past few years, Charles patiently and unobtrusively resurrected his career, but he seemed always to be taking care to keep it small and manageable. He attracted a company of young, attractive, loyal dancers; he got out-of-town dates; his work received respectful reviews in Toronto and raves in Bergen, Norway. But in New York, the company continued to perform principally in the horribly cramped studio theatre on 29th Street. I think Charles liked it-maybe the coziness reminded him of the good old pioneering days, maybe he never wanted to be in debt again. I wept then for the pathos and dignity of his performing, for his simple perseverence, and for the good-hearted dancers who also switched the lights and the tape recorder on and off, sewed the costumes, and tried not to wince when they crashed into each other while endeavoring to sail around the small room.

Charles made such a muddle of his career that it's hard to say how he'll be remembered. Certainly as an innovative dance comedian, Margaret Lloyd wrote of him in the late '40s, "As dancer and choreographer he was always more limited than Doris. But what he did do he did without waste, with clear-cut, pointed immediacy. He delighted in incongruities, in fragmentary, mercurial movement, ringing abrupt changes of tempo, rhythm, and dynamics in the broken pieces he let the spectator put together as he would. He jested in stroke and curlicue, lampooning right and left with his pencil-slim body, making jokes with his fingers and witty observations with his bare toes." He could tell a story well in dance, but he also found ways to sever pantomime from its usual story-telling function and present literal gestures for their immediate impact. In the lovely, simply patterned, spinning and failing Brahms Waltzes that he choreographed during the '60s in honor of Doris Humphrey ("made out of the kind of movement she loved to do and did so beautifully"), there is one section in which the dancers walk around and peer at the ground, at each other, into the distance. Has one of them lost a contact lens? Have they lost their place in the music? Their angst? Who knows, but the strangeness, the humor, the jarringness of the moment is typical of Weidman.

Charles was a very good choreographer, as far as I can tell. I wish I'd seen his autobiographical dances, Daddy Was a Fireman and On My Mother's Side; I wish I'd seen some of the Broadway shows that he so enjoyed choreographing (to Doris's horror). And I think that a lot more of Charles went into so-called Humphrey-Weidman technique and into some of Doris's dances than we realize. They often collaborated on works. He composed the men's section in New Dance, the movement themes for some of his solos in other dances of hers. It was on his body that many of the vigorous, angular positions, the thrusting gestures we associate with American modern dance of the '30s were built. Together Humphrey and Weidman did things that perhaps neither could have accomplished alone.

I think Doris ran on brilliant brain-power, Charles on intuition. And by hard work. If he hadn't been a good worker, his gentle, humble, charming, rather foolish nature might have gotten him into even more hot water than it did. On stage, he could be profound without even trying. You had the feeling that all he had to do was think about tonight's dinner to make you see King Lear, Priam, Abe Lincoln. His face-big mobile mouth, long upper lip, cavernous cheeks, bristling eyebrows could look magnificently proud or forlorn as easily as it could look harried or gleeful.

I'm glad that at the end of his life Charles became intrigued with his own historicity and reconstructed old works, also mounting what seems to be a creditable version of Humphrey's New Dance. I wish he could have written a book; even his gags could teach you a lot about dance history. And I'm grateful that he died so quickly, between one performance and the next. We may be stunned, but it seems entirely appropriate that death should have come to Charles Weidman as a non sequitur.