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.