dance

Joy Prior
Dance 240R
Section 002
Professor Andrea McAllister
12 April, 2010
José Limón

José Limón was born in 1908 in Culiacán, Mexico. He moved to Arizona State with his family at the age of seven. While attending Catholic School he developed a love for painting. In 1928 he moved to New York City as an art major at UCLA. This is where he saw his first dance performance. He later said, “What I saw simply and irrevocably changed my life. I saw the dance as a vision of ineffable power. A man could, with dignity and towering majesty, dance... dance as Michelangelo's visions dance and as the music of Bach dances.” The performance made a lasting impression on him and He felt that, “Suddenly, onto the stage, born on the impetus of the heroic rhapsody, bounded an ineffable creature and his partner. Instantly and irrevocably, I was transformed. I knew with shocking suddenness that until then I had not been alive or, rather, that I had yet been unborn…now I did not want to remain on this earth unless I learned to do what this man was doing.” Immediately after he began to train under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman at the Humphrey-Weidman School.
His dance studies were interrupted when Limón was drafted in the United States Army in April 1943. Although he was not able to professionally train, Limón continued to choreograph and dance works of art. Until his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945 he worked with composer Frank Loesser and Alex North to choreograph routines for the United States Army Special Services.
Then in 1946 José Limón attained his American citizenship and was able to form the José Limón Dance Company. He asked his teacher and mentor Doris Humphrey to be the artistic director, making the José Limón Dance Company the first dance company to have the artistic director not be the founder. The company made its New York début in 1947 at the Belasco Theatre. The spring of 1950 the José Limón Company preformed with Ruth Page in Paris and they became the first modern dance company to appear in Europe. His company was the first to survive the founders death and today José Limón Dance Company continues to dances with Limon technique and repertory. Posthumous wrote, “The fact that that The Limón Company survived after Jose Limon’s death is not merely a marvel; it is a living example of the perseverance and passion for dance that Limon passed onto the members of his company.”
José Limón influence on modern dance is still felt today. His focus was on body and breath connection. He believed in flowing movements that connected on to another, and muscle isolation which includes such warm-ups as finger twists, head circles, and weighted torso movements. Twelve years after José Limón death in 1972 Harper and Row published The Illustrated Dance Technique of José Limón. Daniel Lewis a former José Limón Dance Company member recorded Limón’s moves onto a video divided into 36 separate sections including warm-up isolations, body springs, center work, across-the-floor with arms held high, transitions, and full body spirals. José Limón challenged and changed the perspective of modern dance, and helped to mold it into the form of dance we recognize today.

soc final book report

Joy Marie Prior 5 April 2010 Sociology 112 Section 4 Article Essay

In the book Outliers: The Story of Success the author Malcolm Gladwell argues that it is not simply intellect and ambition that makes people successful but they are influenced by their surroundings and circumstances. A few key concepts Gladwell uses include accumulative advantage: someone starts off with a small advantage over his peers, which leads the individual to another opportunity that gives them an additional advantage over their peers, and that helps him or her to another advantage. Another concept is divergence test: a test that is formed to measure an individual’s imagination. He also uses Intelligence Quotient or IQ used to define someone’s intelligence from a series of standardized tests. Most of the research is taken from surveys of professional athletes birthdates, historical methods of immigrant occupation, and qualitative interviewing. Part one describes Opportunity and focuses on how situations determine the opportunities given to people. One of the lead examples in this section is the majority of professional Hockey players in Canada are born from January to March. Gladwell argues this is because peewee hockey is grouped according to year and they players born in January were twelve months larger than their peers born in December, and this gave through accumulative advantage these players were able to rise to the top because of their opportunity advantages. The second part is entitled Legacy, and focuses on how family and culture can be advantages. He uses the ideal example of Jewish immigrants being educated and trained in Europe unlike Irish immigrants prior to their arrival in the United States. The conclusion is that it is not having a high IQ that makes people successful in the world, but that if someone is given a chance to learn and the right opportunities they too can be successful.
I agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s particular explanation of accumulate advantage used in the Outliers: The Story of Success because of my own personal experiences with scholarships and the continues focus on scholarships. I am an ideal example of accumulated advantage because I was able to enroll in Brigham Young University (to receive an education, giving me advantages in the competitive global market) because I received a few local scholarships. In my freshman introduction class we had server quest speakers who were recipients of prestigious scholarships each speaker emphasized obtaining “small” scholarships before applying to prestigious scholarships. Their logic was that members of the board on prestigious scholarship feel more inclined that you deserve to be a recipient of their scholarship if another board gave you a scholarship also. I know that I am not the smartest person in the world. More significant is that I know that there are many students not attending college in my graduating high school class who are smarter than I am, but because I was given a chance I received a scholarship I was able to attend Brigham Young University. I now feel responsible to give other people a chance, and help provided them with opportunities they cannot obtain themselves.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2008. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.